The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz (2007)
“A Dominican-American geek tries to get laid and find love while an ancient family curse, a brutal dictatorship, and the entire weight of diaspora history conspire to destroy him.”
At a Glance
Oscar de León is an overweight Dominican-American nerd from New Jersey — obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy, and love — who cannot, for the life of him, get a girlfriend. His story spirals outward to reveal three generations of his family living under the shadow of fukú, a New World curse tied to the Trujillo dictatorship that ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty years. The novel moves between Oscar's suburban New Jersey present, his mother Hypatia 'Beli' Cabral's terrifying youth in the DR, and their grandfather Abelard's destruction at Trujillo's hands. Oscar travels twice to the Dominican Republic seeking himself and love; on his second trip, he is beaten nearly to death, recovers, finds love with a prostitute named Yvón, and is murdered by her police-captain boyfriend's henchmen. Before he dies, he reports seeing something. We never learn what.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is credited with transforming the literary landscape for Latino/Caribbean-American literature — demonstrating that a novel could be simultaneously about Dominican history, nerd culture, intergenerational trauma, and the immigrant experience, written in Spanglish with footnotes, and be recognized as a major American literary achievement. It brought Trujillo's regime to wide American awareness through the side door of a love story.
Diction Profile
Deliberately mixed — street vernacular, academic prose, sci-fi/fantasy jargon, and Caribbean Spanish occupy the same sentences without apology
Very high