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

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.

Junot Diaz stretches our understanding of what it is to be an American. He helps us view our heritage through the lives of his characters and their ancestors, fully realized figures who experience the governmental and social turmoil of the Dominican Republic's past. The Revolutionary War is not the entire story of America's violent beginnings. The destructive history of the Dominican Republic born in the days when Christopher Columbus first stepped onto its shores impacts the current lives of Oscar Wao and his family.

Another major force working in this book is the quest of Oscar Wao simply to love and be loved for and as himself, intimately and completely. Why is this so hard for someone so sweet of temperament with such intelligence and depths of perception? Oscar is, after all, a gifted and talented writer. What is it to be a man, especially as defined by Hispanic culture? What does it take to get someone to overcome a lifetime of inertia and help himself to experience all that each and every human being has a basic human need, desire, and a right to enjoy?

These are just a few of the many and varied themes that Diaz explores in depth in this outstanding novel. The writing is fresh, original, and thoroughly enjoyable. Nicely paced.

This novel was a book group selection here at our local library. Some members of our group gave up reading the novel part way through mostly, I think, because of their reading experiences being limited to particular genres. After hearing the group's lively discussion, one person expressed the wish that she had seen it through.

One can be daunted by the Spanish phrases (and occasional references to literary, movie, or TV heroes) used by the characters and narrator to varying degrees throughout the text. They occur naturally and it would have been a great injustice to the work not to have employed them.

There are two easy solutions to this. One is to just go on reading and simply gain meaning through context. I found this functioned well with very little lost in overall plot and meaning.

Secondly, there are also some great online resources for the reading of this book which will conveniently translate, define, and otherwise explain references to Tolkien's works, etc. chapter by chapter. The meanings of individual sentences are thereby enhanced, but if one stops for each and every unknown Spanish term or literary reference, the enjoyment of the very act of reading and "listening" to the narrator as he shares his story becomes somewhat burdensome. For this reason, I suggest finding a middle ground between the two methods of reading. Use mostly context, and refer to a guide only when feeling really stumped.

Do not let that little caveat to reading keep you from enjoying this wonderful book.

Junot Diaz has so much to offer us In "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" that it may well change for the better the way you view your family, your neighbors, and the little daily interactions that become the sum total of our lives.