I searched for a thread on this book, but did not see one.
A little background: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Junot Díaz’s debut novel. You might know Díaz from his short story collection Drown. Many of the stories in the collection were first published in The New Yorker. TBWLOW won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Oscar Wao is a fat, lonely Dominican-American who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy, but, despite the title, the story is really that of Oscar’s family (and his one true friend) and their assimilation into American life. Díaz uses the history of the Dominican Republic and the diaspora that occurred under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo as the backdrop of the novel. Díaz connects Oscar’s obsession and the history by seeing the Dominican Republic as the prefect representation of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. As Oscar puts it, “What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” The book is full of sci-fi and fantasy reference. My favorite is the description of Trujillo as Sauron.
The most impressive element of the novel is the language. Díaz has a crisp, snappy style. His prose is full of slang and Spanglish that creates what sounds like, at least to this suburban white man, an authentic reproduction of the way inner city Dominican-Americans speak, without ever being loose and unfocused as so often happens when writers try to write in a conversational tone. Díaz is always focused.
I cannot say enough good things about this book. I might add some more later, but I really don’t want to give anything away.
Has anyone else read this book? What did you think? Did you like it?