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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoby Junot Díaz |
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 I don't speak Spanish, November 23, 2008 |
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A good read but I kept thinking I was missing quite a bit due to the fact that there is a lot of Spanish, DR phrases and slang that I couldn't understand. In parts, it is very heavy on footnotes that are interesting on their own but were distracting. It is also very funny and at the same time tragic. |
 Really?, November 22, 2008 |
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Don't read this. Apparently the Pulitzer is no better than the Oprah sticker when it comes to choosing a book. Not worth your time. Dr. Seuss has more realistic characters...Read the other reviews for a broader opinion. This is only mine. |
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"Out out brief candle", November 22, 2008 |
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Many stereotypes from our urban landscape fail to make it into the contemporary novel, especially a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The overweight guy who sweats his way through marathon sessions of Dungeons and Dragons and has about as much social grace as he has girlfriends is surely one of them. To be able to mold an entire narrative around such character, so that by the end the reader is interested in this character's fate, is not easy. But in the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz seizes the reader through the hybrid muscularity of his prose (think ghetto slang married to an Ivy league sensibility) and buffets them along through three different eras, two different countries, and three narrative voices, without ever losing focus on Oscar Wao, and his family, the de Leons.
Oscar is the hapless geek, morbidly overweight yet unafraid to approach any random girl and start talking about the last fantasy world he is creating. And while he does spend much of his time trying to be the Dominican J.R. Tolkien, he also spends a lot of time obsessing over any female who may just happen to look his way. When his feelings go unrequited, as is invariably the case, he implodes into a self-loathing funk. But we never hear from Oscar directly, nor do we even enter his head by way of an omniscient narrator. Díaz chooses to tell his story through three interlacing narrative voices: the hip scholar, who serves as the chronicler of the Leon family; Oscar's flighty sister Lola; and Oscar's one-time roommate, the impenitent Casanova, Yuníor. The chronicler, who goes unnamed through much of the novel, dissects the Leon family under the lens of Fukú--or an unshakable curse, that he believes, leads to the disastrous fate of almost every Leon. Fukú of course hangs over Oscar's head like the sword of some D&D warlock. And Oscar's luck with women--even his intention to approach a woman, results in the scattering of the XX chromosome over a hurricane-wide radius--is all the result of, you guessed it, Fukú. The chronicler never completely subscribes to supernatural bogeys but keeps the reader guessing as to what can explain the blighted luck of the Leon family, and by extension, that of 20th Century Dominican Republic. Yes, Junot Diaz is able to keep the multi-generational, multi-geographical act going, but it is in balancing the voices that he loses his touch. The character Yunior, who makes his first appearance in Chapter 3, is Oscar's new roommate, and Lola's bane. Not, it seems safe to assume, the erudite chronicler of the family's history in the Dominican Republic (yes, he of the copious footnotes and the gut-busting prose that intermingles wit, profanity, and erudition with seamless panache.) Even if one concedes that a "player" can be reformed into a ghetto Nabakov, the prose of the first Yunior section is so sparse and amateur that the reader would have to assume that it was written many years before the rest of the book. But then what of the Yunior of later on the novel, who starts thinking and speaking like the chronicler? Ultimately, The Brief Life of Oscar Wao is a juggling act, and if Yunot drops one ball (we may argue that the denouement, rambling on Return of the King style, represent another dropped ball), the other moving balls still captivate us wholly. Not so much a misstep on Díaz's part, but I would have liked to hear Oscar's voice. And I disagree with those reviewers who say Oscar is as memorable as Randall Patrick McMurphy or Holden Caulfeld (the former, the irrepressible phallic icon of the repressed pre-hippie 60's; Holden, an unrelenting first person voice that singed itself on the cortex of many a disgruntled an adolescent.) Oscar mainly hovers about in second-hand quotes, i.e. the narrator recounting what Oscar said. In this way, Oscar is often confined to the stereotype of an overweight geek who takes refuge in fantasy worlds, be they D&D, Tolkien, or Magic. Oscar perhaps become most palpable at his most extreme, when his desperation is greatest--jumping off a 70-foot high bridge; stalking, between his grandmother's curtains, a curvy ex-prostitute in Santo Domingo; confiding his greatest dread to Yuníor, that of dying a virgin. I wonder what would have been added (and maybe detracted) had an installment been in Oscar's voice. Still, even if Oscar is at times vague, we nevertheless feel intensely for him, a feat all the more amazing when we've most likely spent most of our life gawking and pointing at the real life Oscars. And that perhaps is the miracle and majesty of this novel--the skill to make readers care about an unseemly character, told through the eyes of an unseemly narrator, with a heavy emphasis on the history of a country that many, I'm assuming, have no initial interest in. By the end of the novel, I'm wiki-ing "Dominican Republic history", itching to pick up Watchmen and, most importantly, out in the cane fields with Oscar as he screams to the thud of each punch, the bullets bringing his saga to a poignant, Fukú-fulfilled end. |
 New classic, November 19, 2008 |
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I picked it up based on the hype and while my Spanish is weak I still could follow the flow. The audio version is great as you can hear the sound of the Spanglish.
BTW if you ever doubted that Spanglish is the next hot Vernacular of the street, this book will cure you of that doubt. If you have not been to the Mex border, Fla, or spent time in an NJ city this book will leave you confused by its mix of Spanish and English. A bigger warning is if you have no background in comics, LTR, and other fanasty classic this will not be an easy read as they are the context for this novel. Anyone who knows what it was like to discover that books can help you deal with life and was an outsider because you did not run with the street boys this book will touch you deeply as we all are Oscar, some of us just hide it better. |
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Not So Brief, But Just As Wondrous, November 16, 2008 |
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Junot Diaz hammered the nail right on the Dominican head in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. A curse that was born out of love and fear, that follows a family for generations, and ends with tragedy kept me glued to this book (and away from my homework unfortunately). For those who don't like to read subtext (as there are a lot in this book) I'd recommend that you read through it anyways, as the author adds a lot to the background story. Overall, it was well worth the 3 days of reading. |
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