Junot Díaz

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

faye

Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness. A first novel by the author of the collection, Drown. 100,000 first printing.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot combined so many issues and topics—generational trauma, superstition, mental health, latine culture, tragedy, dictatorship, belonging vs fitting in, friendship, family love and hate—in one book, added several foot notes, and it worked so good.

Ani Velasquez

Patrick Book

3.75 stars! Very good and interesting, a lot of stuff and styles all jammed together. 

What’s up with books with heavy comic book content winning Pulitzers?

Oscar, an overweight Dominican from a New Jersey ghetto, dreams of becoming a writer and finding love, but Fuku, the curse has haunted his family for generations, may well prevent him from attaining his desires.

sash.

After reading 'This Is How You Lose Her', I decided to finally pick up the copy of 'Oscar Wao' that's been sitting on my bookshelf for near 2 years and has been through different cases of I-started-reading-and-wasn't able-to-finish. A lot of people seem to either really love or really hate this book; I haven't found an in-between just yet.

This books is a treasure. Depending on your sensibilities, you might be:

a) disturbed
b) disturbed, but wholly infatuated
c) complete infatuated with this book, its author and the characters, or
d) since the humans and their feelings cannot be simply put into boxes and labeled as one pleases_________________________________________________________________________________.

I was all of these and more. Here is a beautiful story, beautifully composed, written and full of more than one could ever believe about who we are as a people regardless of where we come from and how we got to be there. 

There are a lot of similarities between the Dominicanos and my own people; I'm from Jamaica and I'm based here. It was really interesting to find the commonalities and most of all, relate to Yunior and Oscar.

I was Oscar, knew very many Oscars and I still am. He's as much endearing as he is frustrating and though I wasn't pleased with the way he his brief, wondrous life ended, I loved this book.

You know those books that touch you deeply and stay with you forever? The ones that change your views on things, redefines things for you and put things in perspective and somehow manages to give you peace? This is one of those books.

I'd hate to think someone would dismiss it simply based on the language.

One of my favourites.

JoAnna

Junot Diaz has wonderful voice, and is greatly skilled at manipulating the emotions of the reader. It's hard not to love his characters, no matter how flawed. I'm not sure how I feel about the story at times, though. It feels like he talks about the same themes over and over again, and I couldn't draw a clear message out of this one.

Kyle Curry

I feel like I'm not going to do this review justice as I only finished the book moments ago. The guardian recently called this the best book of the century so far, a rather lofty claim. Upon immediatly finishing and at points throughout I thought they were indeed a bit premature in that claim. Yet, the longer I sit here in the the after glow of the book, the more I find it resonating in my soul. 

This book sneaks into you. The voice is like your average friend, who seems like a decent storyteller, but not amazing. Then, days later, I find I am enraptured with the tail. The geeky references are treated with the elegance of quoting Shakespeare and Freud. Nothing is a gimick, that in another authors hands might be. There is a heartbreaking truth to every moment. Diaz elgantly moves us into each characters story, for whom we are able to both identify with emotionally and judge as a disapproving relative of. This feels like the story of your own family- a cautionary fable and history lesson woven into one.

I am equally impressed with how skillfully the spanish is woven in. I never once felt like I was missing out on lines or words that I didn't know the translation of. The context of the passage made it feel like the spanish words were the only way to explain whatever it was they were explaining. It's like the english translation wouldn't have done it justice. 

I am a quick reader. I enjoy blowing through books and just letting them devour me and transport me. This is the thrid book in memory that I have just felt the need to remind myself to read slower and bask in their world. I think this is the only one I have felt that way about because of the whole package. With other's it's the prose work or the ideas put forth. Here it's the whole thing. A book to bask in, because it's going to stick with you long after it's gone.

Junot Daz

Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness. A first novel by the author of the collection, Drown. Reprint.

Lara Engle

I can appreciate this book, and parts of it are truly gorgeous, but I can't say I really enjoyed reading it. Some devices, like the clever footnotes, seemed too manufactured and cutesy (despite the horrifying information they often shared). The flashbacks to the life of Oscar's ancestors were too prolonged, in my opinion. The story really shone when it focused on Oscar. I was frustrated by the mystery narrator through the first half of the book, but ironically, the portions that were most strikingly in his voice throughout the rest of the book were some of my favorites. In the end, this book was saved by the beauty that is Oscar through all of his tragedy.

A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, Oscar's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.'The Best Novel of the 21st Century to Date' - BBC Culture.

Great book! Though I will say(and based on the reviews here) it’s not for everyone. Some familiarity with Dominican culture definitely will help contextualize. Otherwise I’m not really sure if it'll hit home. It’s not necessarily about the immigrant experience although there are moments of it. It’s more so a case study of a Dominican family and how trauma is inherited in that cultural context. 

Ana Ramirez Lee

Colleen

1 Star

**My #2 worst read of 2018**


This was my second read of 2018 and a terrible way to start the year. I have NO IDEA how this won a Pulitzer. Maybe because it was controversial? But this book was painful to read! And not in an empathetic, soul-wrenching way. In an I want to throw this book across the room kind of way. I did not like the characters or the plot. I hated the writing style. And the content was stuffed to bursting with gratuitous sexual crudeness. I only finished this because there was so much damn hype about the [alledged] heartbreaking ending. 

The title (certain other elements) are a ripoff of Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. The impact that Hemingway masterfully accomplished in that short story was nowhere to be found in the chaotic, rambling mess of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The "story" of Wao is drawn out and padded with needless details. This book felt more like vaguely connected short stories at first. Because of the way the storyline spazzed through time, jumping from person to person and timeline to timeline in a non-chronological MESS, it was so hard to tell what was going on. Add to that the poorly drawn characters that relied heavily on stereotypes (more on that later), and I could not bring myself to care about any of the characters or anything that happened to them. 

Not only did the storyline flop around through time, it also never stuck to any one method of narration. First person, third person, omnipresent, past tense, present tense, stream of consciousness... it was, well... sloppy. And characters were also inconsistent depending on who was narrating. Díaz showed a complete inability to focus his narrative in any direction, and it crippled the story. 

There were also some random parts that I think were supposed to be magical realism. But it was just some haphazard mentions of family curses and some sort of magical spirit guide animal. It never tied in well with the rest of the story, and I'm not sure I would even classify this as Magical Realism. 

Then there is the content of the story. The author squeezes in every possible cultural stereotype of the Dominican Republic possible. How are people not more appalled by this? All Dominican men are portrayed at best as "Casanovas" who have to spread their loverboy ways to as many women as possible. But mostly they are portrayed as sexual predators that particularly target girls so young they're hardly in the same time zone as puberty. These men are also portrayed as violent and abusive. The women are never more than sexual objects. They can embrace their rolls as "whores" willingly. Or they will be forced into to it by as many rapes as it takes to break them. All of this generalization and stereotyping made steam come out my ears. And then, at one point, the narrators stops to apologize for portraying a stereotype - outright says sorry for stereotyping. But was it for things I just mentioned? NO. HE APOLOGIZED FOR DESCRIBING THE WOMEN AS SITTING AROUND THE HOUSE WEARING CURLERS IN THEIR HAIR. It made it so, so much worse that the author (via the narrator of the moment) apologized for something like that but let all of the other pigeonholing slide without comment. 

This was one of the most vulgar, sexually crude books I have ever read. It was probably the most I've ever seen the N word in one place. It massively supports rape culture. By the THIRD time barely teenage girls were in sexual relationships with much, much older men, I was DONE. And it was all stated nonchalantly as commonplace. Shrugged off as acceptable. Parents in this book should be glad that that their thirteen-year-old is having sex with a man old enough to be her father. This book says little girls being sexually assaulted should shut up because that's just the way it is. Pretty girls in particular are doomed, because this book exclaims that it is the Dominican man's right and expectation to have sex with them one way or another. The GRAPHIC descriptions of men having sex with barely teenage girls were so disturbing I literally felt sick. This book needs just about every trigger warning imaginable. And it NEVER felt like the author was raising awareness of those issues. It felt like glorification of violence, particularly of sexual assault. And for that reason more than anything, I cannot give this book more than one star, and I will never recommend it to anyone.

The thought I kept thinking over and over and OVER while reading this book was, "What is the point?" I wish I had never read this book. And I hope to never read anything by Junot Díaz ever again. This may seem over the top, but there was not a single thing about this book that I could stand; literally not a word. Life is too short to waste on books like this.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 1 Star
Writing Style: 1 Star
Characters and Character Development: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 1 Star
Level of Captivation: 1 Star
Originality: 1 Star

Rachel Kanyid

I... Really, really did not like this book...

tiff

I rarely give a book five stars but as a writer I just had to. I loved the narrator's voice. Yunior had a distinct, urban Spanglish, of today's generation that just absolutely blew me away. Oscar was a lovably morose character and his nerdiness appealed to me because in junior high I had a thing for science fiction novels, I was a habitual writer, and I played video games like non-stop. So Oscar appealed to me on many levels.

Beli's story really resonated with me as well. When she was young...gosh, her struggle just...WOW.

I appreciated the down to earth personalities of each of the characters in this book (except the older Beli) and their honesty as well. The only bad thing about this book for me were the constant foot notes Diaz used. They were necessary but distracting. As a writer, I would have probably done the same thing but then again I would have struggled to pull this kind of novel off. Great piece of lit fic. Do read, if you have the patience.

Justin Ferrell

I can’t think of the last time I finished a book on the verge of tears. I read this book with no information or context whatsoever, just grabbed the copy that my wife had been given by a teacher in high school and started reading. Incredible. This story is on another level entirely. Truly unlike anything else you will read this year.

Alyson Norris 

Wonderful book with a complex and addictive plot. A sense of humor is skillfully entwined with the seriousness of the events, regardless of the occaisional odd part. Overall enjoyed the read.

Jayme Bosio

"Oscar" was written by a fellow Demarite so pardon me if I'm a bit biased in my review. Diaz weaves the tale of a family curse--a fuku--which leaves poor Oscar to suffer the loveless life of a typical nerd. I thought the writing was really amazing and I can certainly understand why this book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Diaz brings his characters to life through his descriptive language and his humor made me laugh out loud several times. The ending leaves you hanging which is a bit frustrating, and the background story seems to lead nowhere at times, but still I found this to be a very enjoyable tale of a young man's unending faith in the power of love.

Despite being the title of the book, we don’t get much of the life of Oscar Wao. We see how the curse truly broke the family in different ways. Ending what possibilities of a happy life any of them could have had. The sisters’ sections were the most heart wrenching for me, but the whole book is just depressing.

brendaa

Dewan Shehran

One of my all time favorite books. Its a coming of age story with a heavy dose of magical realism. Shifting from what its like growing up as a Dominican immigrant in New Jersey to how life was like under dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. It's a story that deals with growing up , sadness, loneliness, love and even curses. It's amazing how it is shrouded in mysticism yet did keeps the story grounded. Reading the book is a journey but it's a journey worth taking.

Patty Pforte

The writing was wonderful, fun, funny, inventive, and surprisingly easy to read despite the intermix of languages and lingo. I really felt for Oscar and the history of his family.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

This is how you tell a generational story! With copious amounts of sci-fi references not only I could keep up with (love how Magic was too nerdy for our nerds in this), family trauma with so many outputs, and, dare I say, women written in an appropriate manner. This book really tested my Spanish skills, in that I had to look up at least one phrase on each page. If only I had read this in middle school I could have terrorized my Spanish classes. The end didn’t drag on per se, but with the transparency of the plot I did find myself speeding through for the juicy bits. Really excellent writing in a laid-back style. Right what I needed as senioritis sinks in.

Holy shit. This book is magic. 10/10 and the writing is indescribable. Please do yourselves a favor and read this

Caroline Mao

(Matthew Lehmann, if you're reading this, I still stand by what I said u lil shit.)

4.75 stars [updated May 6, 2018 because i really can't look at diaz's writing the same way anymore after the accusations of sexual assault. further explanation in my review of this is how you lose her.]

Okay so I have...a lot of feelings about this. And a lot of ???? and a lot of !!!!! and also a lot of ????!!!! But basically, this book was really good and I loved it a lot and I totally would recommend it.

-A really important book about what it's like to be Dominican + an immigrant, the struggles and the difficulties and the experience—just being able to read about that was interesting and something important that needed to be said, I think. Also, obligatory "yay, diversity!" but like, in a way that is significant and eye-opening.
-Definitely one of the most interesting narrators I have read about in a long time. Yunior is interesting, although not exactly the most likeable person (warning to those considering reading this: there's a lot of sexism/homophobia/etc., deliberately so), but I did like him as a character. He's not very reliable, though, and I feel like a lot of the narrative was probably distorted, left out, etc., without that ever being resolved. Which I actually sort of like, it's interesting to contemplate because even though the book seems to center around Oscar on the surface, there's a lot more than that. I'm really tired of the "SURPRISE! And then they just made up a bunch of stuff all along to cope with trauma" or whatever shit, a la Vanishing Girls, We Were Liars, etc.
-THERE IS SO MUCH LEFT UNSAID. I know it's Too Much to expect that everything is tied up all neatly at the end, but like? I would really like some more? What about Yunior and Oscar's relationship (we really got to see so little of it)? (view spoiler)[What happened to Lola that she ditched Japan and got married and had a kid? The remaining years of Belicia's life? (hide spoiler)] I have a lot of questions that are unanswered and it's just like...come on, I want more.
-Nonlinear narrative structure which was a bit hard to follow, although to be fair, I have the memory of a goldfish. I simultaneously like it and don't—it has a lot of those elements of several-generations-of-a-family type novels like The House of the Spirits and One Hundred Years of Solitude (The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral is an A+ chapter), while also trying to follow a singular protagonist who in the end I felt like I didn't really know that well, while...also not doing any of that. Kinda like "whoa, would totally read more of that, that's so cool," but also "this is effective the first time but not as a consistent repeated thing," but also "what."
-All the characters were just really good? LOLA IS MY FAVOURITE, I WOULD DIE FOR HER, I actually had a dream about her where she helped rescue me from an angry badger trying to show me angsty poetry because I love Lola so much I even think about her when I'm asleep, I guess. Beli is such a cool character because there's that Lola-narrated chapter and I'm like "wow, Belicia is such an asshole," and succeeding it immediately is The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral (again, A+ chapter), and after that I just couldn't be that angry anymore. Also I always love well-written family dynamics and this book is really fucking good at it. Characters like Ana, Jenni, etc. were pretty flat (that's fair, flat characters have their place in the narrative too, just personally not my thing) but still interesting for the limited amount of time they had on the page.
-Yunior is also a really good character (still can't figure him out though). In the end, the character I felt like I understood the least about was......Oscar, I guess, because he's all set up for this hero's journey where despite the terrible circumstances he is trapped in, he finds his strength and makes good friends who support him and finally has confidence like Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and then nope. (view spoiler)[Not even close. His ending, on a surface level, seems like it could have been a hero's ending but it's sort of twisted in on itself and didn't even really seem to have a whole lot of meaning, much like everything else about him that had been noted in the book. I feel like I kinda got where Diaz was going with there—the difficulties of the immigrant experience and the utter lack of romanticisation evident in pretty much every element of the narrative—and so I acknowledge to an extent, my incomprehension is my fault, because I'm a young privileged kid who can't relate to that very well, but it's...tragic. (hide spoiler)] I will say I admire that Diaz steered really, really hard away from inspiration porn with a fairy tale-type narrative, or even tragedy porn, and managed to present things both as they are but also made a lot of it seem oddly fantastical/magical, which made the story really interesting as well.

tl:dr; it's a good book very much recommend, also I initially rated this 4 stars but I was typing out this review and I realised "dude, in your heart this is not a 4-star book ok, 5 stars it is"

jiaqi kang

magic...

also oscar would totally be the star of Black Mirror: USS Callister

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

The ridiculous sexual objectification of the female characters got to be too grating by the third chapter and I gave up. Sure, you can tell me it's the narrator and not the author, but Díaz still follows the same mysoginist route of writers like Phillip Roth and Norman Mailer without much to redeem it.

Chiara Malaspina di Orezzoli

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.”

Fernando Andrade

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

Melody Izard

We get a history lesson of the underbelly of the Dominican Republic with a particular distasteful emphasis on the cane fields close to the border of Haiti and with more than you want to know about El Jefe: or Rafael Trujillo Moleno and his reign of terror and insatiable sexual appetite during the Trujillo Era in the DR. 
And then there’s Oscar, the 300 pound Dominican clone of Ignatius J. Reilly. He is a misfit, and outcast, a nerd, a loser. And we may not be the ones tormenting him, but we’re made to feel that we’re sitting right next to him on the bus and we’re pretending not to notice or electing to do nothing to interfere with those who heckle and tease and malign him. But Oscar tries to shield his feelings by inhabiting his own world; A world where good does triumph and super heroes ultimately show up in the nick of time to make things right with the world. And in the end Oscar sacrifices himself for love and to help stop the faceless man’s pursuit of his family. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is gritty, sexy, funny and disturbing – sometimes within the same paragraph.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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