The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
SynopsisPlot
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. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Story
About this book
Oscar is an overweight Dominican-American teenager living in New Jersey with his mother and sister. He loves science fiction, fantasy novels, and role-playing games. He wants to become a great writer in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien, and he wants, above all else, to fall in love. Neither goal comes easily. His family carries what they call a fukú, a curse stretching back generations to the Dominican Republic, and it shadows every attempt Oscar makes to change his life.
Junot Díaz sets the novel across two landscapes: the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship and the Dominican-American neighborhoods of New Jersey. The story moves between time periods, tracing Oscar's family history from Santo Domingo to the United States. Díaz writes in a voice that mixes street slang, Spanish, and the language of comic books and fantasy literature. The fukú is both a supernatural idea and a way of framing the historical violence and displacement that shaped the family long before Oscar was born.
The book was recognized as one of the best of 2007 by several publications, including The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and New York Magazine. Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel in 2008.
