The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is very good. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Morning News Tournament of Books, and the Pulitzer.
Oscar is a pudgy social outcast whose family came from the Dominican Republic. In short segments, we learn about him, his sister Lola, his mother, and finally, about the narrator Yunior and his relationship to the family. Theirs is an immigrant story, about the old world and the new, told in a unique snappy, geeky, Spanish-slang-filled patois. Is the family’s string of tragedies a curse, “fuku”, or is their survival good fortune? Is it just life?
The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.
That’s Yunior’s take at one point, though he wavers. What the reader thinks is left open. There are passages of magical realism, of unbelievable survival, of astonishing love. This book reminded me of Middlesex because of its old/new world ancestral histories, and of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because of its brazen comic-book and sci-fi/fantasy geek love. My only regret is that I was whisked out of each character’s life just as I got deeply into their story.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Thanks for your great review of this book. Since it won the Pulitzer, I’ll be reading it as part of he Pulitzer Project challenge…so it’s good to know you liked it! This wouldn’t have been a book I’d have picked up to read normally … yet, most people seem to be loving it!
April 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I had no idea what this one was about although I’ve seen the title everywhere. Thanks for the review.