The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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| The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | |
 First edition hardcover |
|
| Author | Junot Díaz |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Riverhead |
| Publication date | September 6, 2007 |
| Media type | print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 352 pp |
| ISBN | 1594489580 |
| Preceded by | Drown |
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a best-selling novel written by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo.[1] It has received numerous positive reviews from critics and went on to win numerous prestigious awards in 2008, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] The title is a nod to Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"[3] and to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The novel is an epic love story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the protagonist of Díaz's first book "Drown" and chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels, with comic books and role-playing games and with falling in love, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean (and perhaps the entire world) since colonization and slavery.
The middle sections of the novel center on the lives of Oscar's runaway sister Lola and his mother Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral and his grandfather Abelard under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, various Spanish dialects and hip-hop inflected urban English, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World. The book also, though controversially, makes frequent use of the word Nigger in the form consistent with its urban vernacular usage.
[edit] Book Format
The novel is divided up into different sections that center around specific relatives of the Oscar Wao's family:
GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987/Oscar Wao
Wildwood 1982-1985/Lola
The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral 1955-1962/Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral
Sentimental Education 1988-1992/Oscar Wao
Poor Abelard 1944-1946/Abelard Luis Cabral
Land of the Lost 1992-1995/Oscar Wao
The Final Voyage/Oscar Wao
The End of the Story/Oscar Wao and Yunior
[edit] Critical reception
The novel was an overwhelming critical success, appearing in over thirty-five best-of-the-year book lists [4] and winning the John Sargent Senior First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Book Prize, the Dayton Peace Prize in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. New York named it the Best Novel of the Year and Time magazine's Lev Grossman named it #1 of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, praising it as "a massive, heaving, sparking tragicomedy".[5]
[edit] External links
- Podcast: Junot Díaz reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with commentary. From the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.
- The Annotated Oscar Wao: Notes and translations for the book
[edit] References
- ^ Stetler, Carrie (2008-04-07). "Pulitzer winner stays true to Jersey roots". The Star Ledger. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/pulitzer_winner_stays_true_to.html. Retrieved on 2008-04-07.
- ^ Muchnick, Laurie (2008-04-07). "Junot Diaz's Novel, 'Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,' Wins Pulitzer". Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aXI0RJH84G7Y&refer=muse. Retrieved on 2008-04-08.
- ^ http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/junot-diaz-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao/
- ^ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/08/sunday/main4162364.shtml
- ^ Grossman, Lev. "Top 10 Fiction Books". Time Magazine Online. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1691840,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-04-08.
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by The Road by Cormac McCarthy |
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2008 |
Succeeded by Incumbent |
