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.
eMusic Review 0
03.17.08
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2008 | Label: Penguin Audio
Wao, Indeed.
Even if it hadn’t won the Pulitzer Prize, Junot Diaz’s first novel, the follow-up to his acclaimed short story collection Drown, would still read like the most entertaining form of Great Literature. Its transcendent prose illuminates the big issues — love, death, the immigrant experience — with the brisk, unfaltering pace of a comic book.
Ostensibly, Diaz tells the coming-of-age story of the titular Oscar de Leon, a geek extraordinaire growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar is fat and unhappy, master of the role-playing game but loser in all things love-related. But the novel is alternately narrated by his sister Lola and family friend/Lola’s sometime boyfriend Yunior, and as it traces the de Leon family’s catastrophically bad luck (attributed to the Dominican evil spirit fuku) back through the decades, weaving in the real history of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, it becomes a wider and more fragmented mosaic, its own sci-fi/magical realist/postmodern genre.
The audio version is helmed by the smooth-voiced Jonathan Davis, who relates the story as told through Yunior, along with the convincingly earnest Staci Snell, who takes on the role of rebel teen Lola. Studded with Spanish and hip-hop colloquialisms, pop culture shout-outs and enough literary references to please an English major, The Brief Wondrous Life is as joyful a listen as a tragedy can be.
Write a Review 3 Member Reviews
AWESOME
First of all, it's a book that reaches the hearts of thousands who came over to America from childhood. It reminds us of oppressive governments in third world countries that were actually backed by our government during the cold war, the same oppression given by the majority to the minority even present in childhood, and the seeming oppression from daughter to mother and the want of escape. Junot Diaz uses humor with the narrator's constant jokes, bad language, Spanish words mixed in with English, and footnotes. I completely recommend this book as a good read with a lot of beautiful themes.
Awful
If you like swearing and gratuitous use of the N word as much as possible you will absolutely love this book. And as the previous reviewer I could pick up some of the spanish, but not enough. Skip this one if you can.
Stick This One In Your Ear!
This is an exceptional listening experience coming through your headphones, don't miss it; it didn't win a Pulitzer for nothing! The characters are drawn with such realism that you'll see in them at least a part of yourself. The narrators do a superb job of fleshing out the text and bringing the characters to life. I really like that the book is all in the first person, with very little passive descriptive. Too much nuance and color was lost in the Spanish. I speak some Spanish but didn’t understand everything, and not always able to get a translation online because the words were spoken quickly and either I just couldn't identify them, or spell them well enough to get them translated. To be sure, the book can be read and understood without understanding every Spanish word. However, a section offering translations that could be referenced as needed would have left me feeling that I had read the entire book, not just most of it.
