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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books

Pros: For me, this book somehow manages to embody that elusive “magical realism” genre that so many authors have attempted to capture since Gabriel Garcia Marquez coined the category with “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The characters are real and flawed and complex, the history is rich, and the story sucked me in immediately. This is honestly one of the best books I have read in the past few years. I have given it as a gift to multiple people, and they have had nothing but good things to say about it.

Cons: Don’t buy the Kindle edition. You need the hard-copy with the footnotes right on the page for you to read right as they come up in the book. There are a lot of footnotes, and they’re 100% needed to fully enjoy/understand the book.


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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz 9781594489587 Books Reviews

More than the story of Oscar --an obese, bullied, comic book-loving, fantasy role-playing nerd on a desperate mission to lose his virginity-- this is the story of a Dominican family's fukú a potent curse said to have been cast on Oscar's grandfather Abelard by the Dominican dictator himself, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. A fukú may affect generations, until someone along the line manages to find the right zafa to break the spell.

In a combination of Spanglish, slang, and the occasional made-up expression, Junot Díaz effectively captures the spirit and evolved identity of a transplanted Latin American family onto U.S. culture. It touches upon the struggle of a society affected by oppressive power, and the resilience and determination needed in their diaspora. As a native Hispanic, I wonder if and how non-Spanish speakers get to fully understand this book, because it's written not only in Spanish but in Spanish (untranslateable) slang. Also, as a native Hispanic, I was annoyed at the multiple grammatical and spelling errors in Spanish. Couldn't Diaz have found a bilingual editor?

The book's chapters alternatively tell the story of Oscar and his immediate family members. Narrated by Yunior, Lola's on-again, off-again boyfriend, we learn of the De León clan's woes and how fukú, inevitably, catches up with Oscar. From the title we are aware that Oscar will die, but that news does not lessen our sorrow because by then we are despairingly rooting for his success. Oscar's unquenchable thirst for love is heart-wrenching because it is snubbed by every female he encounters. "His affection --that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity without regard to looks, age, or availability-- broke his heart [and ours] each and every day". His family members and their struggles also break our hearts in their own struggles to survive their personal hell.

As for the dose of Dominican history included in the book, I am so curious about Trujillo now that I will follow with Julia Alvarez's "In the time of the butterflies" and Mario Vargas Llosa's "La fiesta del chivo". Intense!
This book was easily one of the best I read this year. Its blend of cultural history, 80's nerdery, mystical curses, and romanticism create a relatable family history. My family is Cuban and this family history was so reminiscent of my own. It is hard not to sympathize with Oscar and his family. Oscar is the perfect pure soul who's goal is something we all strive for love and acceptance.

If you are a fan of magical realism and cultural diverse stories definitely give this a try. If you have ever felt like an outcast please give this a try.
Another book which, but for my office's book club, I'd never have even heard of, let alone read and which I'm terribly glad I did. (I'm also terribly glad I bought a used copy, but that's another issue.)

What we have here, is the story of a nerd - a fat (incredibly fat), ugly, intellectual, verbose nerd whose parents (Dad left when Oscar was but a wee thing) came from the Dominican Republic but who grows up in Paterson, New Jersey, and who dreams of just two things love (ideally including the physical sort) and becoming the Dominican Tolkien.

He is, as you might expect, a rather frustrated young man.

Whole sections of the book, though, are not directly about Oscar, but about his family his mama, Belicia De Leon (nee Cabral), the child of a cursed family; his sister Lola; Beli's father Abelard, who fell afoul of Trujillo and met the end that tended to meet such afoul-fallers. Perhaps a third of the book is directly about Oscar de Leon (who acquires the nickname Wao when some Domincan homies apparently have never heard of, and cannot correctly pronounce, Wilde).

It's written, mostly, in a brilliant English, but with large quantities of Spanish, Dominican Spanish slang, and I don't know what-all else. (I learned a number of Spanish words during the course of the book, some of which are not for use in polite company. Also the N-word pops up far more often than a gringo blanco like myself is comfortable with.)

Most of the story is narrated by Díaz's stand-in, a Dominico called Yunior, which raises questions of how he knows some of the things he seems to know. Indeed, the final chapter reads to me as something tacked on by Yunior to give Oscar a bit of a happy ending. Your take on this may vary.

Anyway, a lot of the book takes place in the Dominican Republic of Trujillo and his successors; the climax occurs during the unacknowledged occupation of the DR by America in the '80s; and it would be incredibly grim if it were not also incredibly funny. I can't decide whether it's a funny book that happens to be sad, or a sad book that happens to be funny. It's funny that way.

What propels the story more than Yunior's voice is the characters. They sparkle with life even when terrible things are happening to them, and they change, both as time passes, and as we get to know them better. (Mama Beli, as we first see her through Oscar's then Lola's eyes, seems like a terrible person; then we learn her story and everything just shifts.)

It is a terrible, a tragic story with the inevitability that makes a tragedy tragic and not merely bathetic. You won't go far wrong picking it up - from a library, or a used book emporium, or some such, please.
Pros For me, this book somehow manages to embody that elusive “magical realism” genre that so many authors have attempted to capture since Gabriel Garcia Marquez coined the category with “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The characters are real and flawed and complex, the history is rich, and the story sucked me in immediately. This is honestly one of the best books I have read in the past few years. I have given it as a gift to multiple people, and they have had nothing but good things to say about it.

Cons Don’t buy the edition. You need the hard-copy with the footnotes right on the page for you to read right as they come up in the book. There are a lot of footnotes, and they’re 100% needed to fully enjoy/understand the book.