Holy crow, y'all. Junot Diaz is the real deal. ( )

Quirky and honest, the story of an unexpected hero. ( )

The undoubtedly brief, yet questionably wondrous life of Oscar de León is one of an overweight nerd, who is impossible to hate. Oscar, our hero, is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey. He is not like your stereotypical "Dominican cat." Oscar is no playboy and certainly no ballplayer. In fact, he is rather nerdy and socially awkward.

While Oscar is clearly the novel's main character and protagonist, he is certainly not the only loveable, relatable character. The novel is multifaceted, enhanced by its many layers.

The book looks back on Oscar's family history, reaching all the way back to his grandparent's struggles living in the Dominican during the reign of Trujillo. On the way, we see the story of Oscar's mother and sister as well, each as complicated as the next. Oscar attributes the crazy happenings of his family to a Dominican curse- fukú. He is certain this is the reason why he cannot get a girlfriend, his sister ran away, and his grandfather was tortured and murdered.

The book is written in an easy to follow blend of English and Spanish. The text is riddled with Spanish colloquialisms that even the most novice speaker can easily understand. The text also contains many footnotes which, oftentimes, is where the author, Diaz's, wit truly shows. While these footnotes and "Spanglish" could be considered distracting, I found them both to be extremely informative and interesting. ( )

I am sad that I could not get past the language barrier, both Spanish and street language, to hear the messages in this book. I read about 100 pages and was growing to love Oscar, appreciate Lola, and understand (somewhat) their mother, but I felt I was missing too much of the meaning of the book by not understanding the Spanish and by my repulsion at some of the cruder language. ( )

I really couldn't get into this book...so much family drama and not really a good story.

My book club read it....some liked it, but most didn't. It was pointless if you ask me.

I did like translating the Spanish since I do speak Spanish, but other than that I did not like it at all. ( )

I'd give this good 3.5 stars if I could. I read Oscar Wao right after Middlesex (which I didn't like much) so I was a little wary of another immigrant-family saga. I have to admit I was frustrated at times by the amount of untranslated Spanish throughout the book and definitely recommend www.annotated-oscar-wao.com for notes & translations. By the end of the book, though, I was enjoying the read & had fallen in love with Oscar, that poor, hopelessly dorky, eloquent, beautiful boy. Zafa. ( )

Reading this book was an interesting experience.
Imagine living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. You're really excited about a movie coming out and finally it does, and you go to see it in a VO theatre, so that it will be in English and just subtitled in the foreign language. Well, it turns out that 1/4 of the movie is actually in that foreign language, and, of course, since you're in a country where the language is spoken, there are no English subtitles for you.
The movie is awesome and you totally love it, but at the same time you know that you definitely missed something since there was a good 1/4 of the movie that you didn't understand. You could just see what was happening.
Well, that's how I felt reading this book. I absolutely loved it; the narrator was hilarious and interesting and exciting. He had an absolutely depressing and devestating story to tell, and he just jumped right in as if it was any other normal ole everyday happy story.
Oscar Wao himself was a totally likable character that you couldn't help but love but for whom you also couldn't help but feel sorry. Sometimes I wished I could be there with the narrator, pushing him in the right direction, urging him to do things just slightly differently.
His sister and his mother, while slightly less developed characters, were also exciting to follow. They were both just a little bit more than the average Dominican woman. They both had just a little something extra to add to the table, and, in their own way, their stories were just as fascinating as that of Oscar.
But still, this said, I couldn't help but feel that I was missing some basic elementary knowledge needed to really fully understand everything going on.
First of all, there was a lot of Spanish used - phrases and words that I just didn't understand. I'm learning Spanish, but I'm not quite there yet. And massive amounts of Dominican history were referenced without ever actually being explain. Maybe it's just me, but I never took a class on Dominican history. I also never took a history class in which we learned about Dominican history. So did I know that the United States had occupied the Dominican Replublic more than once? No. Did I know who Trujillo was before starting this book? No. Did I have any clue why Trujillo was constantly referred to as the Failed Cattle Thief? No. (Do I now? No.)
Do I feel that knowledge on these subjects (and many more) would have contributed vastly to my enjoyment and understanding of this book?
The answer to this question is a whole hearted YES!!!!
I mean, I really feel like I should go take a class on the Dominican Republic (where I have actually been) and its history and then read the book all over again.
None of this changes the fact that this book was beautifully written and heart-warming and heart-wrenching.

Overall, I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the book, but I believe that was due to all of the hype surrounding it.

Some things I didn’t really like about it: There were points where I was confused by who the narrator was, just when I thought I had figured it out there would be a passage that made it seem unclear. The chapter that gave the background of Oscar’s grandparents I found a bit slow and drawn out, though it was a necessary part of the story and couldn’t be skipped over. While I enjoyed the footnotes because of their added information and unique style, I found some of them to be a bit long and tedious.

Things I did like about it: Oscar. Lola. The interaction between Lola and their mother, I hated Beli, but I loved her at the same time. The fact that it won the Pulitzer, it shows how America today is much different than the America thirty years ago. I learned a lot about the Dominican Republic, and am thinking about picking up a history book. (Weird!) The Spanish, M is fluent, so whenever I couldn’t figure something out, I referred to him. ( )

Reviewed by Mr. Kirkpatrick (Language Arts)
This book is about the immigrant experience, about shaking off curses, about the ability of love and self-determination to conquer all obstacles, especially Dominican Gangsters. It's about a Dominican kid who doesn't know how to get with the girls. He's a brilliant comic book geek who lives inside his head. This book has the best voice (more than one narrator) that I've ever heard. The voices are fresh, they're street, they're compassionate and complex. My boy, Oscar Wao, will school you in the ways of love and Star Trek. He'll teach you about Santo Domingo. You'll marvel at his wondrous life and wish it weren't so brief. ( )

There were parts of this book that almost made me want to cry- the description of the treatment of Oscar, the relationships inside his family. Everything was written in the kind of language that makes you feel like both squirming in your seat and passing the book on to your best friend.

This is an author to keep watching. The writing style is exactly perfect for the urban location, and the addition of spanish makes the diction flow more easily than I expected.

gritty, vivid. I got really into it for the first 3/4 and did not want to put it down. I feel that things got predictable at the end. Also, I began to ask, What is so wondrous about Oscar's life? Not much. But Diaz captures the working-class and the Dominican Republic quite well (at least for someone like me who has never been there nor ever intends to travel there). The only drawback: too many footnotes on dictator Trujillo, tons of Spanish slang, and geeky cultural references. A few pop references are cool but five or six in a row is overkill. ( )

Something about the cover caught my attention. This was before I read the inflated reviews (including those on the back cover). I located the book at a local library and dug into it - an adrenaline read! The characters and quick talking keep you on edge. Something about Oscar struck a nerve with me - a lumbering, over-sized nerd hellbent on falling in love - it's fantastic! And, of course, there's the traveling between the US and the Dominican Republic (with relevant footnotes). The text mixes multiple narratives, folktales, Dominican history, and nerdology into a read deserving of all its inflated reviews! Recommended. ( )

Masterful, colorful, humorous, large.

Oscar Wao is named after Oscar Wilde. The novel has many pop culture references straight from the zeitgeist of the Geek, reminiscent of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, similarly loaded up with references to the current art of its day (now obscure except to the literary geek). Just as Gray leads a secret obsessed fantasy life, Oscar Wao does too, and they both perish for the love of their art and erotic obsessions, blind to its consequences.

Oscar Wao has achieved his dream of being famous, except instead of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar ended up Francis Macomber. Francis Macomber is the character in Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", which is the other story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is named for. In Hemmingway's story Macomber's head is blown off by his wife, ironically after he acts with bravery, when he had previously acted a coward. It's an ambiguous story but there are connections with Oscar Wao's final days.

The audiobook adds a new dimension to the work that reading alone, silent, may not capture. This is a swaggering, colloquial, emotionally toned novel that rewards reading out loud in character. ( )

Wonderful

This story was fuku-ing amazing. I am in tears and I don't know if it is because of the piles of sadness, heartbreak, and beatdown hitting me all at once or if I feel like this is a family I became a part of and I had to say goodbye. The DeLeon'a are the family down the block and There are so many layers to the ache; this book was SO real to me and I cannot believe JD's superhuman ability to capture so much in this one book. Life is filled with hate, iniquity, pain, and suffering and Oscar is the innocent in all of us searching for one not so simple thing. Love. ( )

I'd already heard so much about this multiple award-winner that I probably had impossibly high standards for it, but it won me over anyway. The novel is energetic, inventive, surprising and ambitious, and manages to be emotional as well, an achievement that can be hard to pull off with postmodern narrative. Along the way, the reader is treated to a short, violent history of the Dominican Republic and that country's spooky grip on its emigrants, a love/hate curse which fuels the characters' electric and often outrageous behavior. ( )

A novel about a Dominican-American overweight nerd who searches for love in vain. His socail awkwardness is both funny and heartbreaking. ( )

“They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú–generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.”

Thus begins Oscar Wao, a book that is not easy to read. The narrative voice — an observer of the novel’s events named Yunior — is often difficult to follow. A lot of Spanish is mixed in with the text, and since I don’t speak Spanish, it was sometimes frustrating trying to figure out what was being said (although I did pick up some choice Spanish insults by context). There are also numerous references to fantasy and science fiction, comics and role-playing games — Yunior is a closet geek — so numerous that they could get tiresome, and many are not immediately understandable to a reader who isn’t also a total nerd. (I am only 50% nerd, comparatively; I got the Lord of the Rings references and sci-fi shout-outs, but not the numerous comic book allusions.) And then there is a total lack of quotation marks, which important contemporary writers have apparently declared extinct, much to my dismay.

Despite all this, I grew to love the tragic story that unfolds in Oscar Wao. The plot revolves around a curse that afflicts Oscar’s family, which reflects the curse that afflicts their home country, the Dominican Republic. The family’s history and the country’s history are interwoven in a tangle of broken dreams, disasterous love affairs and brutal violence, seasoned with a bizarre mix of fatalism and unwarranted hope that there may be change, despite all evidence to the contrary. My only major criticism was the brief section where point of view shifted to Oscar’s sister, Lola, which threw off the narrative rhythms, in my opinion. But following that section, when Yunior enters the story as an actual character, the book takes on life and took hold of me.

This book surprised me, too, by teaching me quite a lot about the bloody history of the Dominican Republic, particularly its capricious, long-standing dictator Trujillo, which I knew next to nothing about. The historical details are mainly relayed in footnotes, which aren’t as jarring as you might imagine, and since they are written in the same lively narrative voice, are fun to read.

Oscar Wao is different, and it’s not easy. But it sucks you in, if you let it. It creates a world and shoves you right into it. As Oscar says at the end: “Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” ( )

This looked really promising at first. An epic drawing bridges from the oppressed pueblo of the Dominican Republic to a non-existing love life in New Jersey, written in a funny, fast, smartmouthed kind of way, peppered with references to role playing games, super hero comics and sci-fi. And on top of that providing fascinating insight about life under the überdictatorship of "Caribbean Sauron" Trujillo.

But this tale of a fukú, a curse affecting a family for several generations, is just too thematically loose to work as a novel. About two thirds in I felt my interest with the people in the story's present crumbling. I was still drawn into the stories of the earlier generations, set in Dominican Republic, but Oscar as a character for me became vaguer and vaguer. His sister Lola even more so. And most of all Yunior, the book's ever present narrator, whom we learn so little about he becomes an irritation.

As Oscar finally bets all on his deathbound love, to remedy the fukú, I'm already a tad bored and don't really get affected. Which is a shame, because there's so much good stuff here. With just a little more attention paid to arcs and orchestration, this could have been a much better book. As it is now, it's merely alright. ( )

An amazingly well-written book . . . but why was this our first-year reading? What messages are we trying to send to our first-year students? Oscar's triumph at finally losing his virginity I suppose is not the main message, nor the fact that the final narrator is a philanderer, but possibly more that the book is filled with tragedy and curses, and racial/social class/political tensions or the search for self-identity in a country where there are very few actual "natives" . . . I am flummoxed at this reading selection. It is incredible writing, if at times, annoyingly pushy in terms of ramming points home with the reader. 5 or more stars for the writing, an unknown number of stars for the messages presented . . . ( )

When I first heard of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it was accompanied with substantial acclaim and rave reviews. I've become accustomed over time to taking such wildly enthusiastic reviews with a grain of salt (see, for instance, my experience with the critically acclaimed, and also Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Road), but I'm here to say, unequivocally, that this book is the real deal. Junot Díaz has crafted a marvelous, affecting tale that is complex, compulsively readable, and utterly unforgettable.

The structure of the story is perhaps the most surprising, as it progresses roughly backwards through the generations of the de Leon family, beginning with the overweight sci-fi dork Oscar and his punky runaway sister Lola, then examining the lives of his mother Hypatia and grandfather Abelard. Each section is an engaging and isolated tale in its own right, a nod to Díaz's training as a short story writer, but they are interconnected by the "fukú," a curse that has plagued the family for generations. The more Oscar learns about the fukú, the more convinced he becomes that he must be the one to rid the family of the curse.

The novel is unquestionably driven by its characters, figures that feel as complex and engaging as their multidimensional (and multicultural) backgrounds. Oscar is as much the fat kid as he is the prototypical Dominican, as much a part of the Caribbean as he is a part of Paterson and of New Jersey at large. Lola and Hypatia too become increasingly fascinating because we first see them through the eyes of Oscar and the occasional narrator Yunior, who dates Lola and befriends Oscar at Rutgers, but get an intense taste of their own histories in their own words. Though the main cast is relatively small, each member makes a huge impact.

Díaz's style too is as remarkable as his characterization. He proves himself as adept and comfortable riffing on history as he does talking science fiction. His voice fluctuates with his narrators effortlessly, giving each an even more distinct personality. But at the core of the novel, hidden away deftly in the copious footnotes, is the voice of Díaz himself, who casually and abrasively dismisses the actions of the horrid Dominican dictator Trujillo as if he were a common Paterson street thug. It is a dangerous but calculated move, executed brilliantly and resulting in a novel that is easily readable due to its casual tone, but never once leaves you in doubt of the author's vast intellect.

What is truly put on display here is a voice that is exceedingly confident and ready to tell a story that he knows you're going to love. And sure enough, Díaz has us laughing and crying at the precise moments he wants us to, leaving us with a closing set of chapters that are utterly haunting, as beautifully brilliant as the start of the novel is hysterical. Junot Díaz has proven that he is a force to be reckoned with in contemporary fiction, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is proof that his next work cannot come soon enough.

Full review at http://lisally.wordpress.com

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a very unique book. It is certainly not a light read, as it focuses on a multigenerational tragedy, but it is still a very enjoyable story.

Part coming of age, part Dominican Republic historical fiction, Oscar's life story is told as intertwined with those of his mother, sister, college roommate, and abuela. A knowledge of the Spanish language and a familiarity with the Lord of the Rings trilogy will help readers to understand what is happening in this book. I kept reading to see what would be so wondrous about the life of this nerd who realizes he's so hopeless even his nerdy friends are ashamed of him.
This book isn't so much a story as a discourse on fuku ( the Dominican version of a curse and bad karma rolled into one. This book will appeal to those who enjoy Lord of the Rings allusions (there are lots) and stories of corruption and senseless violence. CKL

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a story about a teenager living in New Jersey, trying to escape the pull of his family's native Dominican Republic. While the plot runs out of steam and the novel doesn't quite fulfill its billing as a story about the American immigrant experience, it is still a good book and a fast, entertaining read.

The characters, with their rough Spanish-peppered vernacular, jump out at you. I like narrator a lot. He is a jock who tries to hide his sensitive side. I like his description of Oscar's sister: she seems so alive, bold, and determined not to take crap from anyone. The history of the Dominican Republic, which is meant to revolve around and anchor Oscar's family in history, is absorbing on its own right.

For anyone who grew up watching Akira or reading Watchmen, it is fun to tease out the many references.

A family saga that shows the lives of members of a Dominican family from various perspectives. Painful at times, but compelling.