About this title: Rendering with warmth the endless human capacity to persevere, this Pulitzer Prize-winning work is the long-awaited first novel from the unmistakable voice behind the short story collection "Drown."
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Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 2008-09-08
ISBN-13:9780679776697ISBN:0679776699
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780679776697. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780679776697ISBN:0679776699
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780679776697ISBN:0679776699
Description: New. No dust jacket as issued. Text in Spanish. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 347 p. Vintage Espanol. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Spanish
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780679776697ISBN:0679776699
Description: New. Rendering with warmth the endless human capacity to persevere, this Pulitzer Prize-winning work is the long-awaited first novel from the unmistakable voice behind the short story collection "Drown. " read more
"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."
"This book falls just shy of exceptional - which is not to write that it doesn't have exceptional parts. It has plenty of exceptional parts, actually. Trouble is, very few of them concern the book's protagonist and namesake; and despite being called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao few of the book's wondrous parts have anything to do with Oscar Wao.
This book won most of last year's literary awards. That may or may not be overstating its worth. Ever since "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" appeared as a short story in The New Yorker eight years ago - and, actually, a few years before that even - critics and Lit professors have been waiting desperately for a chance to give Junot Diaz the full brunt of their praise. This obviously has more to do with culture and that lame wing of English departments called "cultural criticism" than it has to do with Diaz's talent, but there we are.
Don't doubt Diaz's talent, though. When he is telling stories about the protagonist's family and its struggles in the Dominican Republic, he is at his best. He takes a number of Dominican history books - and a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa - and spins them into a compelling, insightful short history of 1930-1980. The book has no better parts than when it treats a deep character, like Oscar's maternal grandfather, and a deep history, like the reign of Rafael Trujillo, and has so much storytelling to get done that it doesn't bother being amazed by itself, y con cuantas palabras el escritor puede incluir en espanol.
But too much of the rest of the time, there are Diaz's twists on what are becoming lamentable literary staples. There's the comic book and Sci-Fi collection, of course, and a hundred or so allusions to its characters. There's the "distinctive voice" of the narrator - UrbanDictionary.com meets "Blood In, Blood Out". And there's the author's own inability to distinguish what is dominicano from what is latino, and what is latino from what is universal.
In other words, for writing about Dominicans, Diaz gets an unfairly wide berth. Unfair to him, that is. There are plenty of moments in this book when, as the reader, you think, What a writer! But then there are other times when the author is speeding through a lesson on what it means to be Dominican, and you are thinking, Hold on, he's describing Mexicans I know. Or when the writer is explaining that Latin men are obsessed with sex, and you are thinking, Yup, along with white men, and black men, and Asian men, and even, I assume, Eskimo men. This lack of perspective on Diaz's part, one suspects, comes not from a lack of talent or intellect but from being coddled - first by professors, and later by critics, who are either too anxious to recognize a talented latino writer or scared to death of being called (horror of all horrors) "racist" by one of their peers.
How unfortunate. What Diaz needed at some point during the seven years he enhanced his short story was to have someone say: "Not good enough! Good enough, probably, to win a Pulitzer and a pile of other awards, yes, but not good enough to justify your gifts. Look, Junot, you can go deeper than this. You can take this nerdy cardboard guy named Oscar Wao and do more with him. But in order to do that, you've got to get past the fact that he's a Dominican. 'Porque el es un dominicano' can only take a character so far. And you have the ability to go further. Put him on that island, with a million other Dominicans, and then figure out what, aside from a weight problem and science fiction and a curse, drives him to make such a maniacal choice in the end."
But there's lots of hope. In the next few years, Diaz is going to revisit this novel and realize he could have done more. Then he's going to realize that his critics - the very people who should have demanded more - are too easily fooled. He's going to eschew their praise and go deeper. When that happens, what results will be genuinely wondrous."
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