The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

This is one of my go-to books for when I feel down and depressed (the other being The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). I am enamoured with the plot and the narrative, the beauty of the prose and the language. The words just fly off the pen (or processor) and into the kind of the reader. There is love in the book, it is about love, and once we are done with it, we are bound to be in love.

good

Faber classics has only few books in its kitty, yet they all are so nicely done. I also have their DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, which is another classic. The cover may not be the best in market, though the printing and binding work is very good. Ans this cheap, it is every reader's paradise.

The language was difficult to get used to - but then I guess that was due to cultural alienation (in my case), something which I had experienced while reading Stockett's 'The Help' too. Once you start getting a hang of the backdrop (the fine prints at the bottom of pages help) the characters engross you and don't leave you alone even if you ain't reading. The chapters labeled by time periods make it easier to go back n forth to understand the characters better. The book has Very relatable, strong characters that surely will stay with me for a long time.

Awesome book. It's engaging right from the start to the end and it's friggin hilarious! I won't go into the technical details of the writing as many people have done that, but I'd definitely recommend it.

An interesting book for all the magic realism fans with a sneak peek into the lives of commoners in Dominican Republic was under the monarchy of a ruthless tyrant - Trujillo.

A must read.... Absolute brilliance... Be patient, read about the allusions n pay attention... Very intelligent writing... Enjoy the Book....

Crap book.

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.

A great book

I read this book accidentally. It was a new book in my library. I read it about six months ago and am writing this review because I finally decided that I need to own this book. I want to look at it often and I don't have it anymore. I didn't know it won a Pulizer when I read it. But I finished it with an excitement that made me want someone close to me to read it immediately so that I could talk about it with them. I loved it. I feel sorry for people who read it based on the hype. Junot spent 10 years writing this book. It was a story he had to tell. He made a Dominican - American life really come to life for me. It was tragic for many reasons but so real. I loved all the Spanish, even though I don't speak it. Like a 19th Century Russian novel littered with French. It is an established motif. I revisited the book while reading O,Ophra's magazine from November. Please don't roll your eyes. It is a surprising magazine and quite feminist and inclusive. Well, she has an interview with Diaz where he describes his journey writing this book. Maybe you can find it on line Nov 2009. It added another dimension to the book.

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!

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.