Product Description

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

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.

D’az immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot D’az as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2007: It's been 11 years since Junot Díaz's critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf--you won't be disappointed. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly
SignatureReviewed by Matthew SharpeAreader might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather. However, Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. Even the presumed reader shape-shifts in the estimation of its in-your-face narrator, who addresses us variously as folks, you folks, conspiracy-minded-fools, Negro, Nigger and plataneros. So while Diaz assumes in his reader the same considerable degree of multicultural erudition he himself possesses—offering no gloss on his many un-italicized Spanish words and expressions (thus beautifully dramatizing how linguistic borders, like national ones, are porous), or on his plethora of genre and canonical literary allusions—he does helpfully footnote aspects of Dominican history, especially those concerning the bloody 30-year reign of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The later Oscar chapters lack the linguistic brio of the others, and there are exposition-clogged passages that read like summaries of a longer narrative, but mostly this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown and The Sleeping Father. He teaches at Wesleyan University.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Jabari Asim

Nowadays, there may be Hmong in Madison and Somalis in St. Paul, but some of us still have trouble keeping up with all the intense cultural mixing and melting going on amid our purple-mountained majesty. For example, mention the Dominicans among us to the average Tom, Dick or Andy Rooney, and he's liable to speak of a mythical Shortstop Island from which wing-footed infielders plot their takeover of America's pastime. As for the Dominican Republic's history, imports, exports, that sort of thing? Well, its national baseball team is one of the best in the world, right? Or is that Venezuela?

Junot Díaz has the cure for such woeful myopia. The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander -- a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as "the anguished diaspora."

Thus, that nation's bloody history, often detailed in Díaz's irreverent footnotes, intrudes periodically in Oscar Wao, as if to remind Dominicans that tragedy is never far from one's doorstep. Or maybe it emerges simply to instruct the rest of us, because Díaz's characters are already painfully certain that they are destined for misfortune. Or, more precisely, cursed.

Fukú americanus, Díaz explains, is "generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World." It seems especially contagious and deadly in the Dominican Republic, where "it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world." How exotic. How ominous-sounding. How very similar to the pet profanity of New Yorkers from Staten Island to the Bronx. But the tale begins in Santo Domingo, where "a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow." It revolves around several generations of one Dominican family, of which young Oscar de León, a depressed, overweight substitute teacher, is among the youngest descendants. The clan's patriarch, a brilliant doctor named Abelard Luis Cabral, came down with an ultimately fatal case of fukú back in 1946, having run afoul of the malady's high priest.

That would be Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the tyrannical sadist who bedeviled his fellow Dominicans for more than three blood-drenched decades. Naturally, his terror-mongering casts a large, threatening shadow over much of the novel's action.

Abelard's fukú apparently becomes part of his family's DNA, traveling through time and blood cells to infect his grandson. ("Oscar Wao" is how one of the tormentors of his college years charmingly mutilated "Oscar Wilde," a derisive nickname young de Leon accepted without protest). In no rush to spill the details of his hero's short, star-crossed adventures, Díaz maneuvers his plot through various time shifts, settings and narrators. From Santo Domingo to Washington Heights, N.Y., to Paterson, N.J., various generations of de Leons wrestle with fate and lose. Along the way, Díaz liberally sprinkles his pages with allusions to authors, books and especially stories from the science-fiction and fantasy genres to which Oscar is devoted. So don't be surprised when a discussion of Caesar and Ovid morphs into the Fantastic Four versus Galactus, and Mario Vargas Llosa gets short shrift compared to Jack Kirby, the late, lamented genius of Marvel Comics's glory years.

Adding to our reading pleasure, Díaz excels at making fun of despots. At the mercy of the author's machete-sharp wit, Trujillo becomes the Failed Cattle Thief, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated, the man who was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu. Of Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's successor, he writes, "Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs." And it's hard to resist his clever nickname for François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the madman whose pillaging made a wreck of Haiti: P. Daddy. Clearly a believer that membership has its privileges, Díaz makes cracks about Dominicans that the average Andy Rooney could never get away with. Reflecting on the ebony skin that keeps bubbling up in the de Leon bloodline, Díaz writes, "That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen." Another character observes, "That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon." There's also the distressing but all-too-credible spectacle of so many dark-skinned Dominicans spitting the word "nigger" more often than Timbaland at a freestyle battle or Harriett Beecher Stowe at her abolitionist best. "No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed," Díaz explains.

But enough about that. As Yunior (one of Díaz's narrators and a welcome holdover from Drown, his acclaimed story collection) reminds us, "This is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

Obese and socially awkward, Oscar is obsessed with food, girls, role-playing games, girls, anime, girls -- you get the picture. Trouble is, female companions remain tantalizingly beyond his grasp, as do all other kinds of companions, who eventually abandon him to his habitual depression. Oscar couldn't find a pal on the Island of Lost Toys. "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto," Díaz writes. "Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest." Does Oscar ever overcome his ungainliness and find romance or a sense of belonging? The brevity of his tale prevents me from telling you much. Although I found the big guy totally sympathetic, he's often way too stubborn for his own good. In addition, it's not his fault that nearly every other character holds our interest just as easily -- more of a reflection of Díaz's broad palette than Oscar's lack of dimension. But Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Is he meant primarily to symbolize the tangled significance of desire, exile and homecoming? Or is he a 307-lb. warning that only slim guys get the girls? Are we to wring from his ample flesh more of that anguished diaspora stuff? Could be, but I find sufficient meaning in the sheer joy of absorbing Díaz's sentences, each rolled out with all the nerdy, wordy flair of an audacious imagination and a vocabulary to match. It's easy to imagine Díaz smiling as he uncorked a description of a woman with "breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin" or writing of Trujillo, "Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor."

Díaz pulls it off with the same kind of eggheaded urban eloquence found in the work of Paul Beatty (The White Boy Shuffle), Victor LaValle (Slapboxing with Jesus), Mat Johnson (Drop) and his very own Drown. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. Notwithstanding his neological dazzle, he's anything but longwinded. And he's patient -- maddeningly so. Díaz made us wait 11 years for this first novel and boom! -- it's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Funny, Poignant, DELIGHTFUL, and Real
Just read it -- that is all there is to say. This is the best of contemporary fiction, a justification for compulsive reading -- you keep exploring until you find something like this! The prose is honest, down-to-earth, and refreshing -- I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. (And I tend to read at my lunch hour, so I know there were a lot of people staring as I laughed and gasped in delight.) I am still absolutely capitivated by Oscar, and I have ordered extra copies of the book, but I know I will be giving them out as gifts for some time to come. Truly "wondrous." -- Una Morena

Disappointing...how did this rate 4 stars?
I chose this book based on the rave-reviews it received on Amazon.com. I couldn't finish the book. It was difficult to read, difficult to follow and I felt nothing for the main character. I'm losing faith in Amazon's rating system. I read this book a few months ago and at that time it had a 5 star rating. How did that happen? I'm not surprised to see it's dropped a star. Needs to lose a couple more in my opinion!

Derogative Spanish words
A reader with knowledge of Spanish will find this book more enjoyable then I. The Spanish sentences, terms & descriptions were foreign and distracted my reading pleasure. Spanish words were on every page. I did not know what an Abeula was so did not understand with whom Lola was staying with until pages later. I'm not sure if La Inka is a term or proper name. Why was there so much Spanish? I did not understand parting words, what was said to the burned girl etc. Furthermore many were slang Spanish so even a dictionary will not give a full meaning to a non Spanish reader. The author certainly has an excellent English vocabulary. I can accept some Spanish words for effect or because they fit well but many times they were an annoying chore to deal with that interrupted the story and did not add to my reading enjoyment. As our country becomes more Hispanic will I come to understand more? But keep reading, the book gets better.
The author's forays into Dominion Republic history left me wanting more facts and details, without which my understanding was very incomplete. But hated the small footnotes as they left me still confused. Jerald Diamond in Collapse writes a short summary of Haiti and Dominion Republic so at least I understood the Haitians were considered a lower class & migrated for work.. I did get a feel for the culture by the books end.
The story is good. The time periods jump around a bit but the story comes together. It was a fun enjoyable story with good characters. A little crazy on the beating up but maybe that is part of the character of the people living in the Dominican republic. I certainly would not want to be a woman in this culture. Not much respect, with limited male selection of any value. But there is seldom time for pity, the story moves.