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| The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | 
 enlarge | Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $7.94
You Save: $17.01 (68%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  235 reviews
Sales Rank: 1456
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.8 x 2.1
ISBN: 1594489580
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594489587
ASIN: 1594489580
Publication Date: September 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 This won a Pulitzer? October 30, 2008
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
Just finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and here are some quick thoughts:
- Diaz's writing gives one a sense that he is more concerned about what other writers think of his work than what readers think. Every sentence and turn of phrase feels over-work shopped and over-edited as Diaz tries way too hard to be clever. When he is unable to decide on a single pop culture reference, he rattles off five. This makes for choppy narration and a story without flow.
- In addition to the multitude of pop-culture and science fiction references Diaz also includes as "gadgets" extensive footnotes and lots of Spanish/Spanglish. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but overall it's too much distraction. I often found myself having to reread chunks of the actual story because a page long footnote made me forget what was happening. And while I've read Tolkien, Watchmen and have seen the movie Akira, there were many references I did not get or did not find all that additive to the book. I also speak a decent amount of Spanish and yet found myself wondering if I was missing something important because I did not understand ~20% of the Spanish in the book. If you're going to include huge footnotes, consider throwing some translation in there, too.
- Putting my issues with style aside, the story itself presents some problems for me. The characters tend towards caricatures and Oscar in particular lacks depth. He's basically a Dominican version of the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons. The narrative is choppy (intentionally in some respects) but Diaz does not do enough to give us a sense of magnitude or structure at the beginning of the book. Not knowing where you're going in a story can be fine sometimes, but the problem here was I also did not care.
- Diaz's presence is also too strong at the end, where it is clear he had a hard time. Instead of choosing an ending, he basically gives us four, resulting in the dilution of all of them.
Maybe I'm too insular in my tastes just as the Nobel committee thinks many Americans are in their writing. But to think of this book and last year's winner, The Road, as being remotely on par with each other makes me cringe.
Book Review October 30, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
I wonder what made the Pulitizer Committee give it their prize. It is disjointed and the Spanish mixed in with the English, makes it difficult to read.
 Great Story - but requires Multi-Lingual ability October 28, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
One of the worst books ever October 27, 2008
6 out of 15 found this review helpful
I bought this to read because it won the Pulitzer Prize. This must have been awarded for political correctness since it deals with a latino subject. I found it's language confusing and the book somewhat meaningless. Frequent sentences in Spanish simply send one to a translation dictionary. Author seems to be more interested in snappy prose than a good story. Footnotes digress into more meaningless background. Sorry I bought it.
 Interesting but difficult to understand October 27, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I only read the first chapter on my Kindle. Despite being very interested in the characters, I decided not to buy it because so much of it was in Spanish. It was very frustrating to read. Other reviewers had mentioned the same thing and I had thought to myself, that they were just not being flexible and not getting the words from context. But it is not just the occasional Spanish word, it is whole sentences. Seemingly very pertinent sentences. If they had another edition where the Spanish was translated, perhaps I would buy that.
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