About this title: Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the most talked about--and praised--smash hit of 2007 follows the adventures of a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd plagued by a family curse.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781594483295ISBN:1594483299
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. 2051-Price sticker on the front. In great shape. Very small flaws to cover, otherwise pretty much like new. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Octavo, softcover, white wraps. Winner of Pulitzer prize. Díaz's gutsy short story collection Drown (1996) made the young Dominican American a literary star. Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, he has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Díaz's besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fukú, the curse ... read more
Description: Very Good. 1594483299 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781594483295ISBN:1594483299
Description: New. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. Buy from a reliable seller for 30% off retail price. Prompt shipping. read more
Edition: Later Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Riverhead Books / Penguin Group (USA) Inc., New York
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781594489587ISBN:1594489580
Description: Very Good Plus. Very Good Plus Dust Jacket. Currently in print for $24.95. NO marks or underlining. This item is IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Riverhead Books,, NY:
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781594489587ISBN:1594489580
Description: Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 9781594489587. Pulitzer Prize winner. The author's second book. Third printing. Very near fine in like dust jacket. read more
"'Oscar Wao' is indeed a very good book, but it has gotten such praise, awards and - frankly - hype, that for me it slightly failed to live up to expectations. It is a wonderful story - a small story wrapped inside what amounts to a recent history of the Dominican Republic - about a loner 'dweeb' named Oscar. (Wao is not his real last name, but I'll let the story tell you how it became his nickname since it's pretty funny.)
The book is quite stylized in the way the story is told, and the changing narrative, the use of Dominican slang (without translation) and the pop culture references to Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien may turn off as many readers as it engages. It's not a novel that has true mass appeal. But Junot Diaz is a talented storyteller, and the book is a solid, often spectacular piece of evidence of this. It just might be QUITE as wonderful as everyone is telling you - buyer beware. Still, I enjoyed it very much and do recommend it."
"If bad language and graphic (not hot) sexual descriptions throw you into a moral tizzy, don't read this book, even though it did win the Pullitzer. But for people who can look past that and reach the conclusion that foul language and a course description of life doesn't have to be gratuitous, read it. There's an excellent chance this book will be unlike anything else you've ever read.
In one sentence, this book is about Oscar de Leon, an ultra nerd who can't get laid but really, really wants to do it. Past that, the book is also about a Dominican curse, a fuku, that can plague a family for generations.
Oscar believes the fuku has manifested itself in his life by making him the least desirable Dominican ever born. He is overweight, unattractive and is a science fiction and fantasy obsessed loser who would rather write his own bad sci-fi than exercise. Oscar spends most of his young life falling deeply in love with girl after girl and in every instance, drawing the dreaded "friend" card, not even getting his first kiss until well after he's graduated from college.
The first section of this book floored me in a good way. It captured my attention on several levels-I like dirty words, I like nerds, I've never read anything quite like Diaz before and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the DR, thanks to several anthropology courses I took in college that focused on Diaspora and the African experience/influence in the Caribbean. From that context, 10 years later and you find me desperately wishing I was still in contact with the other people in that class so we could have discussed the ramifications of the Trujillo-era on the characters in this book (yeah, yeah, nerd alert).
But then it lost my attention when the viewpoint shifted from Oscar to other members of his family. Despite his name in the title, very little of this book is about Oscar. A very large portion of the book is dedicated to his sister, his mother, his grandfather... At first this was a disappointment but before long, Diaz's ability to tell a good story captured my interest all over again and by the end of the story, I had taken a personal interest in all the characters and what it could mean when a multi-generational curse kept taking potshots at every misstep throughout a person's life.
I couldn't help but think about "the curse" from a more practical viewpoint as well. What impact do our family's social and demographic statistics play on our life experiences? Would Oscar's life have been different if his mother and her sisters had been born boys? What if her father was never imprisoned? What if her mother never met the Gangster? What if his mother had never moved to New York? Would Oscar have gotten laid any sooner if any of these things would have been different? Do any of those things matter if your family is under a curse?
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would have no qualms about picking up novels this author publishes in the future and am thinking it's high time I picked up his book of short stories."
""The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" really gets 4-1/2 stars from me. However, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who likes a linear story, a well-defined plot, and easily comprehensible English. Probably the hardest thing to do when reading this book is not trying to translate all the Spanish in it. Trying to translate just slows you down and keeps you from really feeling the rhythm of the text. Fortunately, I have lived in Southern California my whole life and have studied a little Spanish. As a result, I'm always hearing bits and pieces of the language that I only half understand. To me, the melange of language that I'm exposed to regularly is music and this book captures that mix very well.
This book has a lot of big ideas, but they're kind of buried in a terrific, creative narrative. It was very well done."
By Marie,
The United States Minor Outlying Islands
"I want to know all about your family, your childhood, your grandparents, their childhood, etc, etc, I want to know where you lived, what food you ate, what games you played or didn't play. I want to know why this is important to you or that is not. Which is why I LOVED this book! Junot Diaz takes 300+ pages to tell a story about a boy that wants to be kissed and the kiss MATTERS because we know his family, we know his friends, we know their superstitions and their pains, and their loses and their survivals and by the time we get to page 339 we know why the kiss is so important.
Oscar goes on the short list of book characters that will stay with me forever."
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