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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

by Junot Díaz

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
12,528471454 (3.84)1 / 654
Publisher description: Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.… (more)
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 Club Read 2013: *** February - What are you reading?99 unread / 99cbaw1957, April 2013

» See also 654 mentions

English (458)  French (4)  Catalan (2)  Dutch (1)  Danish (1)  Portuguese (Brazil) (1)  Spanish (1)  Swedish (1)  All languages (469)
Showing 1-5 of 458 (next | show all)
My feelings on this book are complicated but also super easy to explain: I think it's probably brilliant for a lot of readers, I think Diaz is a fantastic writer, and I completely understand all of his techniques, and I think they are used masterfully... but I didn't enjoy it at all.

Which is just to say, this book and I are not compatible. I think it is very good if it suits. ( )
  therebelprince | May 1, 2023 |
It was…I don’t know…pretty good. It was enjoyable, but didn’t suck me in like a great book does. The story was good, the characters interesting but the Spanglish without enough context clues to figure out was frustrating as were the footnotes. Again, good, not great. ( )
  MrMet | Apr 28, 2023 |
Oh Mr. Días... I wanted to like this...

It wasn't a bad book, let's get that out of the way. The way the author played with the multiple narratives and somewhat stream of consciousnesses to elaborate on characters was interesting and illustrated his message perfectly. The seamlessness of the 4?5? narratives to bring to life one family was interesting and fresh, and I respect that. I wanted to like this book, desperately, but on a level of personal preference, it's definitely something I will not be rereading.

I genuinely feel the title is misleading. Call it marketing, call it a theme that brushed me by– I wasn't convinced Oscar had lived a "wondrous" life. In fact, the passages that described his overeating and compliant in gluttony made me want to throttle him, and I know depression, but if that was a cause, why wasn't that explored more?

The namedropping of science-fiction and "nerd" media grated on me. I've never been a fan of that in any work (I like my stuff a bit more timeless), and this wasn't an exception. At a certain point it didn't aide the plot; it just showed to me how much Mr. Días knows about old sci-fi/fantasy pop culture, and I couldn't give a shit about that.

I was most drawn into the world of narrator and Oscar. The moments they shared together really sucker punched me into caring a lot about them, and a part of me almost thought they'd end up together (I blame the gratuitously welcome Oscar Wilde nicknaming and the forever haunting line "But then Oscar, the dumb-ass, decided to fall in love. And instead of getting him for a year, I got the motherfucker for the rest of my life".) What can I say, I'm used to having to survive on subtext. The idea of a man spending every waking second trying to get a girl, only to end up with a boy was hilarious and fitting to me.

But alas that was not the case, and I could take that. Really, there were some moments I genuinely felt connected to the characters, but they were few and far between to care to look up much of the translations or read any of the footnotes after 20 pages.


The treatment of Oscar's suicide attempt was fine. Of course, I'd want more on that, but it almost felt wrong not to, and exactly why things went so bad for him. Depression is sprinkled in like a second ingredient to his life that's that. I don't know, I'm probably overthinking the damn story, but between his disinterest to better himself in any way or address the deeper issues made him such a stagnant character to me, and it truly infuriated me not having a hero to root for.

And maybe it's just me (actually, it's most likely, definitely me), but having the main character practically go on some kamikaze mission to woo a girl before dying horribly neither seemed worth it nor make me feel anything. I have a huge heart, inside texts and out, but the little we seemed to get of Oscar to begin with just made me feel like I'd wasted the last two days reading it.


I'm not going to mention the storyline of his mother or grandfather because if I'm being honest, I checked out of those real quick. I understand it's part of the family curse theme, but I just didn't have enough in me to care at that point.

I don't know, this book has something, and I can see why it's so loved, but it just wasn't for me. I think I'm drawn to more formal writings and texts I can relate to more, and it's a literary fault I need to work on. I won't bash on it besides that; if you've written a book that wins a Pulitzer Prize, you're obviously doing something right. It's just going to be one of those things I shelve, unfortunately. ( )
  Eavans | Feb 17, 2023 |
This book inexplicably won a ton of awards, including the Pulitzer. I don't know why. I found the book sloppily executed with lazy characterizations that bordered on the stereotypical. My main annoyance were the characters seemed to be caricatures of themselves. The men were machismo to the nth degree, the women were sexpots who were the men's playthings and had no real agency of their own, and Oscar was the socially inept guy giving off the creepy vibe that I avoid at science fiction conventions. Their goal in life was to get laid. The only character that I actually liked and sympathized with was Abelard.

I was glad I read this on my Sony Reader, which had a built in Spanish dictionary, or the random Spanish words, phrases, and sentences the book was peppered with for flavor would have been lost on me. As it were, they didn't provide so much flavor as frustration when my dictionary failed to translate some slang because sometimes, that word was pretty vital to the meaning of the sentence and context clues don't always work.

Lastly, I just found it a slog to get through. Maybe it was the copious footnotes which I felt compelled to read. Maybe it was the shifting timelines which only served to disconnect me from the story. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't have a clue what was the point of the entire book while reading it, and honestly, I still don't. I didn't hate it. I didn't like it. I was completely and utterly ambivalent. There were several points where I almost put it down but persevered because it had to get better, right? After all, it won all those awards! Nope. ( )
1 vote wisemetis | Dec 27, 2022 |
Do you all know that entitled kid that expresses their sexist and discriminatory opinions by phrasing them as if they were the beliefs of other people and they were just *mentioning* them and commenting on them with disdain? Yeah, this is how Junot Diaz writes; but imagine it embellished with nerd culture. As if that's not torture enough.....

This cheap shot would not fly in 2020: "Diaz said he wrote the book, in part, to acknowledge the deep sexism that pervades our culture but frequently remains unaddressed. He admits that, by tackling the topic head-on, he risks writing a book that is perceived as sexist (or is sexist)." ( )
1 vote womanwoanswers | Dec 23, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 458 (next | show all)
Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar’s coming-of-age is in some ways the book’s thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus.
 
It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves. In doing so, he’s written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.
 

» Add other authors (31 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Junot Díazprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bragg, BillCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Corral, RodrigoCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kemper, EvaÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pareschi, SilviaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Snell, StaciNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?? (Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol. 1, No. 49, April 1966)
Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, bit-time hbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival--
I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
(Derek Walcott)
Dedication
Elizabeth de Leon
First words
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.
Quotations
You wanna smoke?
I might partake. Just a little though. I would not want to cloud my faculties.
“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.”
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Some editions contain the short story "Drown," narrated by Jonathan Davis
Publisher's editors
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Canonical DDC/MDS
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Wikipedia in English (4)

Publisher description: Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

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