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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | 
| Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.05
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Avg. Customer Rating:  118 reviews
Sales Rank: 42
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.8 x 2.1
ISBN: 1594489580
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594489587
ASIN: 1594489580
Publication Date: September 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: ALL BOOKS ARE BRAND NEW
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2007: It's been 11 years since Junot Diaz'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
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 Fukoe-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.
Daz 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 Daz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 113 more reviews...
 Learned a lot about the DR, but disliked this book overall May 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Perhaps if I were a depressed twentysomething who thinks that life is meaningless I might have liked this book.
I stuck with it to the end, though I wanted to quit reading it several times. I was hoping that there would be a really good payoff at the end that would bring some meaning to the whole thing, but there wasn't.
The Lord of the Rings references get boring after awhile also.
The constant use of Spanish phrases, without translation, also become annoying. The little Spanish that I do know let me know that they had relevance to the story and to the character development, but without knowing what the hell is being said you lose a lot.
I've read nihilistic lit, which is what the author wants this book to be and makes several references to. But the end of this book just pissed me off. I will move on quickly to something else to read and try to forget that I ever read this.
 Best book read in 5 years May 10, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is excellent, refreshing and historical in a completely entrancing sort of way. I also enjoyed the language terms sprinkled throughout and not always translated.
I made myself wait 3 weeks to read this, I was so excited; couldn't put it down.
Keep em' comin'!
 worst book I ever read. May 9, 2008
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
Not only do I have no idea how this pathetic story, pathetic protagonist(s), and pathetic story line, (if one exsists at all) ever got published let alone won any award, let alone won the Pulitzer. Were there all South Americans on the Pulitzer board? Oscar is not only pathetic but uninteresting in the highest degree, boring is too nice word to describe this individual. The author bores me with this character and his sister who is equally pathetic. This is just one long lamentation (woe is me, woe is my brother, woe is my mother) and has not one even miniscule positive aspect to enable one to recommend it as reading. As far as the writing which so many have labeled "sparkling and wondrous", come on, you must be kidding. So many Spanish phrases and words mixed in, half the book is unreadable and incomphrehensible. The footnotes are actually the best part of this book and I found myself turning pages while hoping and praying for a footnote just so I could escape the mundanacity of the writting. Heck, everybody in America had a bad childhood unless your last name was Bush or Cheney, my own childhood made Oscar's look like a romp through Disneyland. Not only is his childhood unimpressive and uninteresting, who cares anyway? So what, he was fat. Wowwwww lets write about about a fat guy and win a Pulitzer. Get real. I would have been better off reading one of Oscar's fantasies.
 Great, but a little slow May 8, 2008
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz uses an exciting writing style teeming with asides, anecdotes, and changes in narration that imbues the novel with an admirable speed, even as the plot struggles to maintain interest. Ultimately, the novel's strengths in deft construction and sympathetic portraiture outweigh its plot's weaknesses.
The writing style, in many ways, occupies the center of the reader's focus, since it ties the novel's primary narrator, and perhaps its author, to its title character, Oscar Wao. Wao is a science fiction nerd of stereotypical proportions, but with enough humanizing details to rescue him from complete anonymity as a character. The asides throughout the narration--not Wao's--reference important scenes and characters from Oscar's favorite fictional universes, giving the reader a sense that Oscar's internal world has significance, at least to those dedicated to preserving his story. The respect paid to such obsessions of his fills the novel with a sense of personal admiration and love, and also with sadness. The asides point out an emptiness suffered by its titular hero that must be filled with bizarre, otherworldly concepts, and assert the importance and power of such concepts even to non-nerds who have, nonetheless, shared his national history.
The plot, I get the feeling, is not really the point in a book so concerned with history and with the characterization of its heroes. But the reader cannot avoid the plot, either, and it exhibits some problematic qualities. The only unity to be found in the novel's plot comes from its characters' Dominicanness. Since the novel relies on a shared national history to explain its characters' sympathetic and emotional attachments to one another and to Oscar, it leaves their other connections underdeveloped. We never really know why the narrator likes Oscar so much, or even why he likes Oscar's sister, except that somehow, we see, they connect through a shared national suffering.
Ultimately, this absence of explicable connection between the characters somewhat deadens the plot's sense of progression and final resolution. Without knowing why the characters care about one another, we do not really know what happens in a novel that depends entirely on its characters' relationships to structure itself. The events of the novel come across as disjointed or even mangled into unrecognizable form: twisted here to provide a neat delay of the novel's end, supplemented there to give the reader something to grab onto. Oscar's fate, especially, has no logical basis in the novel.
Nonetheless, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao provides enough interest that these flaws, while they detract from the book's punch, do not hobble it. The novel comes across finally as a beautiful portrait, but with perhaps a bit too much artistic interference.
Lives up to the hype May 8, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Diaz can hit every emotion in a single page. You feel his characters. This is a must read.
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