The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I just read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The book was this year's Pulitzer fiction winner. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book starts by introducing the title character Oscar de Leon ("Oscar Wao" was a nickname he picked up, a reworking of "Oscar Wild'). Oscar was a very nerdy kid--overweight, into science fiction, very into girls but so awkward around them. From there the book works backwards, telling the stories of all of Oscar's family, including his sister, mother and grandfather. I didn't expect this, and I liked it quite a bit, for the narrative unfolds as a history of an immigrant family's past. Once a great family in the Dominican Trujillo dictatorship, the family suffered quite a fall, theorized as the result of a curse--or fuku--placed on the family. The narrator at first seems like third person, although we later learn he is Oscar's college roommate and his sister's boyfriend. There is one deviation of this though--the sister gets to tell her story from first person, which is interesting. Reflecting back it's like the author wanted us to know that the boyfriend didn't ever know her well enough to tell her story, which is fitting.

The book has a lot of Spanish in it, particularly for the profanity and sexual descriptions (of which there is quite a bit). There are numerous footnotes, most of which serve to fill in factual details of Dominican culture and history--through the narrator's very opinionated viewpoint of course. Science fiction/fantasy references abound, particularly to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Trek. Here's a great line from one footnote, the components of which you may or may not recognize depending on your Sci-Fi/Fantasy lit: "Outer Azua is one of the pporest areas in the DR....the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine." The only ones I got were the last two--Star Trek II, and Star Wars.

(Spoiler, maybe) The ending gets a bit tedious. Given the title and the cover picture, I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that Oscar is destined to meet his maker early. The process of getting us there--once it's obvious how it will happen--involves Oscar stalking an old Dominican prostitute he's fallen in love with, who happens to be married to a mean-tempered policeman. Yikes.