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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Publisher
Riverhead Books
Date
Award Winners
Fantasy
Fiction
Literary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants.

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Based on 8 reviews

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What The Reviewers Say
Rave
Bookforum
Díaz sings straight to the heart of urban Spanglish, and he’s not waiting for outsiders to catch up. His Spanish is untranslated, as is his freestyle hip-hop slang. Clearly, he’s writing for his people—Dominicans on the island and around New York City—and as far as he’s concerned, everyone else is just listening in … One of the most perceptive things about Díaz’s novel is the way it shows how machismo can crush both the men who don’t conform and those who do … Díaz combines heartbreaking realism with the wildest sort of comic-book fantasy, moving beyond the surrealism of Borges and Cortázar and the magical realism of Márquez and Allende to break new ground. Call it comix realism— it gives Díaz a tremendous verbal and emotional range.
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Rave
The Washington Post
The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich...a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as ‘the anguished diaspora’ … In no rush to spill the details of his hero's short, star-crossed adventures, Díaz maneuvers his plot through various time shifts, settings and narrators. From Santo Domingo to Washington Heights, N.Y., to Paterson, N.J., various generations of de Leons wrestle with fate and lose … I find sufficient meaning in the sheer joy of absorbing Díaz's sentences, each rolled out with all the nerdy, wordy flair of an audacious imagination and a vocabulary to match.
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Positive
The New York Times Sunday Review
Díaz shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache … Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres...Holding all this together — just barely, but in the end effectively — is a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality … This is a novel of assimilation, a fractured chronicle of the ambivalent, inexorable movement of the children of immigrants toward the American middle class, where the terrible, incredible stories of what parents and grandparents endured in the old country have become a genre in their own right.
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