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Editorial Reviews
Review
"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose. . . A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." —New York Magazine
"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest." —Time
"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all." —The Boston Globe
"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself." —Los Angeles Times
"Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . . In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak." —Esquire
"The Dominican Republic [Díaz] 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. Díaz made us wait eleven 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." —The Washington Post Book World
"Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread." —Entertainment Weekly
"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we are—might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two." —Newsweek
"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories." —USA Today
"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz." —Publishers Weekly
"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." —New York Magazine
"Genius. . . a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Astoundingly great. . . Díaz has written. . . a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . . In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest." —Time
"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . . The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and Díaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all." —The Boston Globe
"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . . His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself." —Los Angeles Times
"Díaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . . In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak." —Esquire
"The Dominican Republic [Díaz] 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. Díaz made us wait eleven 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." —The Washington Post Book World
"Terrific. . . High-energy. . . It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread." —Entertainment Weekly
"Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers—we know who we are—might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two." —Newsweek
"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories." —USA Today
"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz." —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, Islandborn. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Review:
4.9 out of 5
97.14% of customers are satisfied
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Story - but requires Multi-Lingual ability
The most important thing to know about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is that it is a MULTI language book. Large portions of it are written in Spanish. There are also numerous other phrases and situations lifted from a number of sci-fi books, anime, manga, which form a language in and of themselves. You either need to know all of these worlds thoroughly to understand the book, or you need to have a "cliff notes" guide next to you and go back and forth between the book you're reading and the explanation of what the chapter actually meant.The book is told from a number of points of view - Oscar, his sister Lola, his mother, even his grandmother and more. Each person tells a portion of the story from their own point of view and fills in more of the storyline. Oscar is an obese man of Dominican descent who takes refuge in a world of sci-fi and fantasy. He is picked on for his size and his depression and retreat make up the majority of this story. What makes up the other part is the history of the Dominican Republic. With many books you read the story and at the end all you've learned is about those fake characters and their lives. With this book, you really learn a lot about the Dominican Republic - something that most of us probably know nothing at all about. I give the book a lot of credit for all of the research and information it presents in a fun, enjoyable way. The use of footnotes to do it is a bit stilting at time, but it still is enriching to learn the history.I really did enjoy the book greatly - but I also took six years of Spanish. I could understand what it was saying. I think the average non-Spanish speaker who is reading along about Beli working in a restaurant and hitting the phrase, "Oye, paraguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre?" are going to be sort of lost. I could see if they tossed in one-word in context words such as "Adios, see you later my friend!" However, the book goes FAR beyond that and often you need to know what the words mean to understand what is going on. There really should have been footnotes with translations - there are certainly enough footnotes with less important things story-wise.In the same way, you miss a lot of the storyline if you haven't read certain books. For example, Oscar often speaks in Dune-language. He says at one point his grandmother "tried to use the Voice" on him. This is a power of the Bene Gesserit in Dune, where they could subtly control someone's actions by speaking in a certain way to them. In another part he is afraid, and starts quoting "Fear is the mind killer" which is the Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear". The whole litany gives a mental environment for handling fear, which the reader is expected to know and understand.More people might get the Lord of the Rings references which are scattered around quite a lot, given the recent popularity of those movies. One woman is "ageless, the family's very own Galadriel," i.e. the Elven beauty from Lothlorien. Speaking of Lothlorien, another section of the book talks about how a woman "who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Bani her own personal Lothlorien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye." There's a lot of Lord of the Rings mythology wrapped up in that sentence that a non-LOTR reader would miss. Even more meaningful, when Oscar first read Lord of the Rings he choked at the line "and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls" which represents an entire area of sociological discussion about how Tolkien handled dark skinned people.This type of situation is everywhere. There are lines from Akira. Commentary from Star Wars. Lots of quick one-line references that bring with them a wealth of meaning, but if you don't have that background of literature in your history, you will miss what he's trying to say. I was lucky in that I am a huge sci-fi buff and also love anime, so I got a lot of those references, but it really makes me wonder 1) what I still might have missed and 2) how much others who have not read all these things are going to miss. Again, the book really needs a CliffNotes to go with it, so you can see what all the references meant in the chapter you just finished.I didn't find any websites that do this type of breakdown, so maybe I should start one up! It really is needed, to get the full understanding of the plot and subtle meaning in what is being said.Well recommended if you have that Spanish language background and sci-fi fantasy understanding. If you go into this without understanding Spanish and not having read any sci-fi, you're going to run into a *lot* you are confused by. You can either just accept that is going to happen or have a web browser nearby to help you translate.
4.0 out of 5 stars If you were in my game, I would give you an 18 charisma!!
If you are looking for a formal, elegant, or pretty book, Oscar Wao is not for you. I am not saying that Junot Diaz is not a great writer, but Diaz has a way of writing this book, as one would tell someone else a story, very informally and up close and personal. He brings the lives of the characters into full view, regardless of the things they are doing. (Some things you may not want to hear about! AKA the hormonal impulses of teenagers...) Diaz has created characters that many people will not be able to relate to, but you will want to see these characters succeed, and when they do not, you will feel sorry for them.Diaz has written a gateway into a world many people have never experienced, the dark side of life full of beatings and life-threatening situations, but also a world of heavy nerd-dom with references to The Lord of the Rings, and The Fantastic Four. Many readers have labeled this book as deeply depressing, but I feel that Diaz succeeds in writing depressive situations, yet having a small ray of hope at the end. Without giving away the ending, the main character's lives are shrouded with torment yet Diaz still brings happiness and love into their lives. The foul language used and the slang terms in Spanish disgust other people. The truth is, the use of this language does not detract from the book at all, but really, it helps the readers gain insight into the story, and in turn become closer the setting and the characters through these colloquialisms.Having someone around who is fluent in Spanish is not necessary, as many words could easily be understood through the context in which they are used. Rarely does Diaz write a whole sentence in Spanish. Even then, a couple seconds on the internet could easily enlighten anyone. Foot notes can be extremely long, but they are also extremely funny and give good background information to the history of the Dominican Republic.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a great book in my opinion, and I feel it was worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. Not only formal, elegant books who sound pretty and are devoid of all things disgusting and/or repulsive, should win the Pulitzer Prize. Diaz's book is truly a tragicomedy about the life of an uber-nerd, his family, and their unfortunate curse. This book treads where many dare not, yet Diaz's book borders real world conflicts, and left me with a feeling of amazement at the life of Oscar. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who can handle a few instances of bad language.
Important literature. Brutal sometimes but entertaining and great characters.
Bought as a gift for friend who loves great literature. Brilliant brilliant book based in the reality of D.R. Deserved the Pulitzer! Some heavy stuff but that’s life. Amazing characters that you get to know well and empathize with.
Greatest book in recent years.
Now, here is at last a good book, a great book! Latin American realismo magico with a strong historical background and such a rich, rich wording. Real literature, words, not images. An author with his own voice, like no one else. I loved this book!
Pra quem prefere romances
Apesar de ser um bom livro, e tendo lido os outros dois do autor, acho que o Junot Diaz se sai melhor no formato stories. Quatro estrelas para o conteúdo, e cinco pelo produto, arte da capa e leveza.
Brutal
Una interesante mezcla de culturas, lugares, creencias religiosas/supersticiosas, actitudes e idiomas, así como traer a colación esas referencias bastante nerds de cómics y libros de Tolkien.
Amazing book
One of the best books i read last year... it has everything, it's funny, dramatical, with some really interesseting history backround from from the Dominican Republic... and specially very well written
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
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