A fantástica vida breve de Oscar Wao

De Junot Diaz

Vencedor do Prêmio Pulitzer de ficção e de outros prêmios literários de destaque mundial em 2008 e aclamado por renomadas publicações como um dos melhores livros do ano, A fantástica vida breve de Oscar Wao é o aguardado primeiro romance de Junot Díaz, um dos mais originais e memoráveis escritores da atualidade. Mais de dez anos após a publicação de seu primeiro livro – a coletânea de contos Afogado, considerado um marco da literatura contemporânea e lançado no Brasil pela Record – o romance, sucesso absoluto de público e crítica nos Estados Unidos, ocupando por mais de 20 semanas na lista dos mais vendidos do New York Times, chega agora ao Brasil.
A vida nunca foi fácil para Oscar, um nerd dócil, porém desastrosamente obeso, de origem dominicana, que vive com a mãe e a irmã em um gueto em Nova Jersey. Humilhado pelos colegas e isolado do mundo, ele passa as horas na companhia de livros e filmes de ficção científica e fantasia, sonhando em se tornar o J.R.R. Tolkien latino e, sobretudo, em encontrar um grande amor.
No entanto, é possível que nunca realize seus desejos, em virtude de um fukú — uma antiga maldição que assola a família de Oscar há gerações, condenando seus parentes a prisões, torturas, acidentes trágicos e, acima de tudo, a paixões malfadadas. Oscar, que ainda anseia pelo primeiro beijo, é sua vítima mais recente — até o verão fatídico que ele decide tornar o seu último.
Com magnífica percepção e energia, Junot Díaz nos apresenta as vidas cativantes e tumultuadas de nosso herói, Oscar, de sua irmã Lola e da bela e arisca mãe dos dois, Belicia, descrevendo a jornada épica da família, de Santo Domingo a Nova Jersey, e o retorno deles à terra natal. Ao mesmo tempo, um retrato das lástimas da ditadura dominicana e da luta da família de Oscar pela sobrevivência em momentos históricos cruéis.

• Idioma: Português
• Editora: Record
• Data de lançamento: 22 de dez. de 2015
• ISBN: 9788501107374

Avaliações de A fantástica vida breve de Oscar Wao

[ecataldi-1 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

LOVED this! I definitely recommend the audio (it was narrated by Lin-Manual Miranda!) as I would have had a HARD time reading this. There are lots of Spanish phrases, songs, and conversations that I would have tripped over but having Lin-Manuel read it to me... was beautiful. His cadence and bi-lingual ease pushed the story forward and kept it interesting and engaging. Told through multiple perspectives and generations of one family it all ties together to tell the story of Oscar, a nerdy, overweight Dominican living in New Jersey with his mom and sister Lola. He believes he's destined to die a virgin, but that doesn't stop him from checking out and falling in love with, every pretty lady he sees. There is so much more to this story then that, take my word for it and just dive in. It's complex and beautifully tied together with witty dialogue, family curses and Dominican history. Enlightening, unique, and wonderful. Junot Diaz is a world class author.

[imbookingit · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

The blurb only represents about half of this book.` That's the book I sat down to read, and the book I enjoyed. There was another half of the book that dealt with the family's history and tie to the Dominican Republic. This is the most powerful part of the book. It was fascinating and well written. It wasn't the book I set out to read.The way the characters were handled in the book was odd. The narrator is a character in the book that wasn't introduced until quite a ways into the book. As the book skips through time and locations, we are introduced to a variety of characters, and I had a hard time keeping track of them at time.I found the character of Oscar interesting, as I expected. There was a lot about his life I could identify with. I didn't have that with any of the other characters, which also made the Dominican sections harder for me to enjoy.I wish I'd tracked the history of the Dominican Republic better as I was reading. The descriptions started out in the footnotes, which I read but didn't hold on to. They then infiltrated the main story.This book is really sticking with me, and really needs a second read-- one where I know what is coming. I don't think it is likely I will do so unless we read it for one of my book clubs. I'll have to decide whether I'll nominate it.

[berthirsch · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

A fabulous fresh voice in literature. This is a marvelous tale of an American immigrant family with strong ties to its Dominican Republic roots cemented by what is termed a fuku which is a family curse that follows from generation to generation.It starts with the grandparents, Abelard a sucessful physician and businessman in the 30's and 40's whose offhand remark, a joke about the dictator Trujillo, sets off the curse that transmits to his youngest daughter, Beli, and her son, Osacr. Also effected is Oscar's sister Lola but she manages to escape the torture and horror that befell her maternal grandfather, mother and brother.Tragic yet funny - Junot Diaz, exceptionally balances both genres. A strong sensuality pervades this book and another major character is Yunior, the not so hidden author of the tale, who is also an attractive strong figure and the on again-off again lover of the voluptuous and rebellious Lola.A major backdrop for the tale is the fascistic Trujillo regime of thugs and syncophants that ruled this poor yet proud island nation for decades. It is an unfortrunate chapter of American history that needs retelling and is brought to life in the failed love affair that Beli has with "the gangster", a Trujillo henchman and close associate.THe tale takes place in flashbacks and current time between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. Others have compared it to [The Confederacy of Dunces] and [Catcher in the Rye] and it belongs in such great company.

[pstotts_2 · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

In contrast with last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” which is a novel of intense despair and lack of hope, Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, this year’s Pulitzer winner, is brimming with life and hope. It is a special novel, heartbreaking sweet and touching and filled with an overwhelming sense of human warmth. This is literature as a form of magic, a wonderful spell that entrances and makes us feel better about the human experience. It is a novel that filled my heart with hope. The novel follows the life and times of a Dominican-American family: the beautiful and fierce mother, Belicia, the smart, intensely-driven daughter, Lola, and Oscar, an obese sci-fi/fantasy-loving nerd who is unlucky in love. A history of family misfortunes and tragedies leads the family to believe they are haunted by an ancient curse or fukú. As one may expect from the title, Oscar is the main focus of the story, but each of the three main characters, as well as other members of the family, have chapters detailing their own story. We watch as each character struggles to find their own answer to the fukú, all of them seemingly unsuccessful and doomed to misfortune. The question eventually arises, though, in the novel: can love overcome tragedy? Does embracing love so intensely in the face of peril speak only of the tragedy or of something else transcendent? We only have to envision the Christian crucifix to comprehend the import of this question. But this is also what makes “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” so human and transcendent.Díaz writes with a manic energy that imbues the story with a vast amount of life and heart. Passion flows from the pages like happy waves lapping against the reader. The characterizations, particularly of Oscar, are vivid and brilliant. Díaz lays his characters out fully open in front of us with all their flaws exposed, and eventually, this honesty charmed me, leading me to embrace these wonderful characters. I loved them for their honesty, love and passion.Last Word:It is a rare thing when a novel can truly capture a transcendent emotion like love, lay it out, and enrich everyone who reads about it. Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is such a novel, and deserves to be celebrated and recognized as a great American literary treasure.

[benjaminhahn · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

I have heard so many good things about this book over the past few years. I ran across a nice first edition at a good price in San Francisco this summer so I picked it up. It wasn't until late October that I cracked it open and started reading it. I really liked the book but its hard to describe. It reads a little like Love in the Time of Cholera with some Michael Chabon nerdiness mixed in. I pretty much know nothing about the Dominican Republic but now I feel like I'm at least nominally familiar with the general history and culture. In general, I don't normally have my laptop open and next to me while I read fiction, but this time it couldn't be helped. Diaz drops so many obscure fantasy and sci-fi crumbs that I was constantly looking up odd superheros and lost planets. At the same time, I was also looking up prominent Dominican Republicans just to stay on top of the plot. Writing like this seems like its done in a special language laid out just for me. Diaz is writing to the literary geeks who read Marquez and Bolano but also play DnD. We are few and far between so its a pleasant surprise that this book did so well. It gives me hope.

[kristysp · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

Worth every accolade it has received. I freaking loved it.

[apartmentcarpet · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

Just as fabulous as everyone says.

[jasonlf · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

I don't have much to add to the general praise this book has gotten. The writing was sparkling from beginning to end, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't understand every tenth word. The first third or so seemed to meander but then it took off and all came together in the end. The book was as much about the horrors of Trujillo as it was about outsiders in America, of which being an immigrant was only part, together with other ingredients from Tolkien, role playing games, obesity, and an unrequited romantic. Ultimately, the novel lived up to its grandiose billing.

[georg0miggel · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

Maybe Dan is right when he says: “Along with that, you have many circles that seem to want to claim that unless reading is difficult or a challenge, then it wasn't really worth reading at all”, but like many deductions (“every chinese is a human being”) you cannot reverse it (“every human being is chinese”). For me this book was as difficult to read as a report of a baseball game in Russian in white font on white paper without my glasses on. I don’t know the Tolkien books, don’t speak a single word of Spanish and know nothing about Carribean history. The best I can say about this book is that I finished it all the same which I normally don’t do if I understand nada. And it has its good parts and some really gripping stories. But in the end there were many loose ends and riddles unsolved. What is the role of the narrator, what is his problem with Lola, why do the victims (the big majority of the books’ staff) never do the obviously right thing and run away? Who is Clive, why did Jackie commit suicide and who is this Oscar Wilde who is mentioned several times?

[amelish · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

So energetic, Yunior dropping sci-fi like he’s dropping knowledge/science and knowingly, familiarly, invitingly blasting off on flights of fancy and pure terror. Such a tender book, bravura writing/talking like skin grown shiny over deep wounds, tender in the painful and the gentle, compassionate senses alike.

[othemts · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

This novel tells the story of Oscar De Leon (I'll let you read the novel to learn how he gets the nickname Wao), a Dominican-American growing up in 1980's New Jersey. He's no ordinary boy as he's overweight, enamored with science fiction and role-playing games, and a talented writer determined to become the "Dominican Tolkien." The references comic books and gaming terms are about the same level of confusing as the colloquial Spanish sprinkled through the book. He's also terminally lovelorn, unable to find a girl who will return his affection and devotion.Despite such a compelling title character, much of this novel is about his family with sections devoted to his attractive and popular sister, Oscar and Lola's mother Belicia who was also tragically naive in matters of love, and Belicia's father Abelard a successful doctor who meets a grizzly fate. The overarching theme of the book is the fuku - or curse - that lies upon the De Leon family, and the menacing, omnipresence of Trujillo, the dictator whose cruel reign bloodied the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The novel is full of lengthy footnotes about the Trujillo Era that are almost as compelling as the main textMuch of the novel is narrated by Yunior, Oscar's college roommate, who attempts to befriend Oscar out of love for Lola but comes to respect Oscar for himself. Other portions are narrated by Lola and perhaps a third-person narrator. I think I would have liked the book even better if Oscar played more of a role in the story and the reader could hear his voice more directly. The structure of the novel does work well though, unfolding different portions of the De Leon family curse in a non-linear form.

[debra_armbruster · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

I LOVED this book!The thing that is so strange is that I have no idea how to describe or classify this novel. sadder still is that I seek at all to categorize, and, in the end, no review can do _The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao_ justice.Oscar is a sad and complex character - frankly, everyone in the story is - and Junot Diaz writes with such a familiar and distinctive voice that you feel as though you know this family intimately, as if you yourself snickered at Oscar's nerdiness in his travels through your own hood. The mix of Spanish, English and SciFi/Fantasy (Hey, it's the language of us geeks!)added to the familiarity and allowed for the perfect choices of words and images. Additionally, the plot, mythic settings (Jersey and the DR), devices (fuku), and the intense back-stories highlighting the motivations and quirks of the characters, reads like a fantasy novel in itself. My nerd-heart sung! No shame in looking up words and references, folks. They only strengthen the read and give you vocabulary to try out in your day-to-day. I read the paper novel, but my parents, who told me to "READ THIS BOOK!" thought the audio-book was wonderful as well.

[periodista_1 · Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas]

I feel like a heretic saying this. Or maybe it’s the emperor’s new clothes and I’m helping someone out who feels the same: ultimately, this doesn’t work. Maybe Diaz’s forte isn’t the novel, but the short story. I had looked forward to anything by Diaz, ever since I read a short story in the New Yorker years ago. It was a character sketch of a dumb girl in the hood, now buried somewhere in the beginning of the novel.I tore out the story and I think I even know where I filed it.Sure, he’s got the language, the word play, the gift of tongues. But I think I'd try out a book of Diaz's short stories before I attempted another novel by him.Think of a camera image where the focus is out of whack. Even tho the book is ostensibly about Oscar, we see the minor, transient, characters more vividly. Ditto the family history and the story of Oscar’s mother in particular. If most characters are depicted in a sort of hyper-real style, Oscar is a crude cartoon that gets fuzzier as we go along.In short; the novel as a smooth beginning, but it's a long slog to the end. Maybe it’s a chick point of view here, but whether Oscar will ever experience sexual intercourse seems like a slim reed to hang things on. I would have been more interested in whether he got published.For readers having trouble persisting till the end ... Yes, Oscar does get laid. Skip ahead and read the last little chapter. The narrator describes a letter--not even quoted--he gets after Oscar’s death. Gosh, what suspense. So, we don’t even get to see or smell the deed up close. Maybe if Diaz had done that—a diary discovered in the love nest?—we’d start questioning other things. Try not to think to much about the holes in the story. For example, the prostitute he is infatuated with--momentarily vivid then faded into a character as flat as a manga page--has a kid in Puerto Rico and has traveled the world. So why can’t she and Oscar meet outside DR and get married? Maybe she doesn't like him much? Maybe she's afraid of him or---? You get no sense of how she feels about the whole situation. why wouldn't she be afraid of getting killed? Or is she?Another hole not filled: no matter what Oscar looks like, some poor Dominican girl, even one not in the trade for very long, would be very eager to marry him to move to the US and get US citizenship.There are also fat and plain poor DR women who aren't working girls. Then there are the parents of poor girls, even virgins, who would be scoping out the potential grooms. Yes, I've been to DR, but that isn't why I know and feel this; you'll find this the case in just about any developing country or a very repressive one. DR is both. Even for not-so-poor Filipina women, marrying some old fat slob isn't such an onerous demand if they can go to the US and help their families. Better than marrying a poor Filipino, or going to work as a maid in Hong Kong. I don’t know about DR women, but the Catholic Filipinas don’t even plan on divorce in such situations. (Thais are a whole 'nother situation)More holes: Oscar has *no* friends or comrades? Aren't most adolescents into these genres pretty geeky? There are no such specimens among Oscar's students at Don Bosco? Don't these fans have conventions? Like Star Trek, etc. Even if you don't want to hang out with these people in public at home, these are precisely the spaces where phenomenal, freaky knowledge of trivia pays off. And don't you need somebody to play Dungeons and Dragons with? Look at that fat slob Keven Smith; he lived in New Jersey and he apparently had some kind of friends before celebrity struck. Didn't even he write a graphic comic and run a such a bookstore in NJ? Just the kind of place nerds hang out? Given the timing of this book, shouldn't Oscar be an early internet geek? Playing multi-user games and assuming identities? (For an idea of how Diaz could have conveyed the attractions of certain comics, publishers and artists: Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist. It's nonfiction book, a memoir, a collection of memoir-ish--essays. He doesn't spend a lot of time, comparatively, on graphic novels/comics and his youthful obsession with them, but I got a much greater feel of the nature of the obsession *and* why certain kinds of kids would line up behind and against particular artists and series. And, voila, of course, this shapes friendships, You get nothing of that in Oscar Wao. I just noticed Lethem has also written something called Men and Cartoons; since he's usually a novelist, this could be very interesting.)But brushing aside the holes and implausibilities behind (even considering the hyper-real style of the novel) ...We eventually find out that the narrator is Oscar’s sister’s off-again, on-again boyfriend, who is briefly Oscar's college roommate.. This nameless narrator turns out to be a fiction writer. We’re told again and again that Oscar was into sci-fi, comics, superheroes, Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons and the like but we never find out whether Oscar was a good writer, what his stories were about, whether he had interesting ideas, or our narrator’s opinion after reading Oscar's massive tomes. He's at Rutgers ... did he take no creative writing courses? What were his profs' reactions? He don’t hear many of Oscar's own words, but apparently he has very formal and elaborate speaking style. Why? Do characters in one or more of these books talk like this?What’s exciting about Diaz’s work—and maybe his stories?—is how he extends some of the styles and techniques you see in writers like Oscar Hijuelos and Maria Vargas Llosa into American English. Maybe a bit of Isabel Allende too.( And we all know this is just the beginning. If Jewish novelists, children of European immigrants, dominated the last 60 years of US fiction, the dominant writers of the coming decades are going to be Latin-American Americans. It's about time.)I'm thinking of Vargas Llosa in Julia and the Scriptwriter. It would take a lot of skill—this isn't for a Zadie Smith—and I'm not sure Diaz could pull it off ... but I wish an editor had suggested that part of this story be told by Oscar’s own tales. Or maybe the crush on the puta could be told in the style of one of these comic books with Oscar as a hero. Hell, I had no idea what radio plays consisted of but I got a sense of it reading Vargas Llosa.I gradually realized that Diaz himself wasn’t into comics, fantasy, etc., as a kid, even if he also grew up in New Jersey, has Dominican parents and went to Rutgers. (If he did, Diaz is weaker than I thought). I know next to nothing about these genres, but I kept expecting to learn something eventually. Was Oscar identifying with certain characters? Using the ideas and characters in some genre to create a Dominican universe of superhero? Are there Latino comics like this? There have to be. Maybe not. Maybe something in DR mythology? Trujillo could be the super villain .., but the idea isn't developed.(BTW, How much Spanish do you need to know? Not much. I think there are more words and phrases here than in, say, The Crossing, but it's an easier read. When I looked up words in my dinky dictionary, they sometimes didn’t exist. Some might be peculiar to DR, but others I think are Diaz’s creations and portmanteau words. Got to look up jerguenza again.)

[gingerbreadman_1 · Nota: 3 de 5 estrelas]

This looked really promising at first. An epic drawing bridges from the oppressed pueblo of the Dominican Republic to a non-existing love life in New Jersey, written in a funny, fast, smartmouthed kind of way, peppered with references to role playing games, super hero comics and sci-fi. And on top of that providing fascinating insight about life under the überdictatorship of "Caribbean Sauron" Trujillo.But this tale of a fukú, a curse affecting a family for several generations, is just too thematically loose to work as a novel. About two thirds in I felt my interest with the people in the story's present crumbling. I was still drawn into the stories of the earlier generations, set in Dominican Republic, but Oscar as a character for me became vaguer and vaguer. His sister Lola even more so. And most of all Yunior, the book's ever present narrator, whom we learn so little about he becomes an irritation.As Oscar finally bets all on his deathbound love, to remedy the fukú, I'm already a tad bored and don't really get affected. Which is a shame, because there's so much good stuff here. With just a little more attention paid to arcs and orchestration, this could have been a much better book. As it is now, it's merely alright.

[thatotter-1 · Nota: 2 de 5 estrelas]

I think I would've liked it more if I knew some Spanish--there's a limit to how much one can get from context. Good energy, but overall I didn't care for it; there was too much misery, and I didn't love the way the narration was split, either.

[stbalbach_1 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

Masterful, colorful, humorous, large.Oscar Wao is named after Oscar Wilde. The novel has many pop culture references straight from the zeitgeist of the Geek, reminiscent of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, similarly loaded up with references to the current art of its day (now obscure except to the literary geek). Just as Gray leads a secret obsessed fantasy life, Oscar Wao does too, and they both perish for the love of their art and erotic obsessions, blind to its consequences.Oscar Wao has achieved his dream of being famous, except instead of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar ended up Francis Macomber. Francis Macomber is the character in Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", which is the other story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is named for. In Hemmingway's story Macomber's head is blown off by his wife, ironically after he acts with bravery, when he had previously acted a coward. It's an ambiguous story but there are connections with Oscar Wao's final days.The audiobook adds a new dimension to the work that reading alone, silent, may not capture. This is a swaggering, colloquial, emotionally toned novel that rewards reading out loud in character.

[hairball_1 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

Took me forever to read this book, leaving me mired in guilt and not knowing what my problem was. I usually read a book straight through, but I kept getting diverted by other books...But I always enjoyed reading it while I was reading it; somehow, I just wasn't drawn into it as deeply as I needed to be. It reminds me a lot of Don Quixote in this way, and others...The somewhat episodic nature of the events, the boy influenced by books and driven by love. Yeah, I'd call it the second Don Quixote I've read this year.

[mojomomma_1 · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

I loved this book, I just wish I had enough Spanish to understand everything that was going on! This is the story of one family's life in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo years and beyond, spanning three generations. It's a powerful story, frightening and terrible, yet there is an element of hope and strength here, especially in the female characters. Great stuff!

[jiles2 · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

Easily the best book I've read in the past year. Oscar Wao preys on everyone's social stereotypes to prove to be a tragic figure. Throughout my reading of the book I debated as to whether or not Oscar life would've been different if he were not Dominican - of course it would've been different, but would he have been more accepted? Probably not. Regardless, this book, for the first time in my life, encouraged me to read all of the footnotes. A wonderful book from a very gifted author.

[damsorrow · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

"As some of you know, cane fields are no fucking joke." Five fucking stars. Fuck yes to you, Mr. Diaz. On a personal note, I have the X-men logo tattooed on the inside of my lip because I've grew up feeling like a big queer bruja and I never knew that anyone else would ever know what that was like.

[trotsky731 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

A great book that reminded me a lot of a more modern version of one hundred years of solitude as it tells the stories of different generations of the same family.

[mamitamala · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

At long last Junot Diaz releases his novel, a coming of age tale of a Dominican nerd from New Jersey told from multiple points of view, mixed in with some Dominican history and splash of Latino humor. Well worth the wait and highly recommended. No wonder it won a book award.

[alana_leigh_6 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

From the beginning, I was concerned about the hype surrounding Oscar Wao... to the point where I think I scaled back my expectations enough before reading it and ultimately, I was quite pleased with this novel. Don't get me wrong, it has flaws... but I enjoyed the experience of reading it and that makes up for a lot.In general, the book is about the life of super geek Oscar Wao, who isoverweight and obsessed with fantasy & sci-fi novels. He's always hopelessly in love with a girl, but has never been able to actually have a girlfriend. The novel is also about his family, who has possibly been cursed... this fukú has potentially been plaguing his family for generations... though the narrator also notes that it's possible this fukú is on most of the world since slavery and colonization and all that.Above all, I think this novel really comes down to the narration. Talk about a voice! I quite enjoyed the narrator, even as I recognize some moments of disconnect, but for some reason, they didn't bother me as much as they bothered some other people. I mean, we get some small jumps in perspective, but from the beginning, we have a novel narrated by someone that we don't meet until a good while into the book -- Yunior (who was also a main character in another of Díaz's books, apparently). However, despite being a character, Yunior is also an omnipotent narrator, speaking with knowledge beyond what is possible for a character within the story to know. His narrative is filled with all the geek-infused knowledge of Oscar (even though Yunior is actually a jock and a ladies man), so there's a small question mark that pops up there. But for whatever reason, I just accepted it for the sake of enjoying the novel. Assume that it's part of understanding Oscar and without that knowledge (I was impressed when I could catch a few of the references myself), then the novel would slip into something more mainstream... and you wouldn't be able to appreciate how geeky the author must be in order to have all this knowledge.Beyond the story that revolves around Oscar, you also have the focus on his family, which includes his sister, his mother, and his grandfather. I know very little about the Dominican Republic, but what I did know before reading this book all seemed to be focused on Trujillo... and so I didn't feel so amazingly confused, as a lot of this focuses on life during and after Trujillo in the DR. It's amazing how much influence this dictator has had on the art that now comes from those in the DR or with Dominican ancestry.I heartily recommend this novel, even though I'm not entirely sure that the Pultizer was warranted... because for me, Pultizer seems to signify something so amazing... and usually something about the author, who should probably be a little bit more known, yes?If you haven't read it, I suggest putting it on your short list. It's a very quick read and I don't think you'll regret it. Just try not to expect the world of it and accept it for being simply a good book.

[mich_yms · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

There was so much about the book that I found immensely intriguing. For one, this is probably the first fiction book I’ve come across that came with such extensive footnotes. With parts of the story set during the Trujillo era (military dictatorship), and parts of it post-Trujillo, the footnotes, I have to say, came very much in handy, elaborating on some of the finer points of that period in history for the Dominican Republic.But that doesn’t in the slightest way imply that this is a dry dull book. If anything, it is the direct opposite. The writing was very conversational, with generous splashes of Spanglish sprinkled everywhere.It was so easy to just love the characters, be it the fat nerdy Oscar, or his sister Lola who loved Oscar fiercely, their scary-as mother Beli, their abuela (grandmother) La Inca who sort of seemed to have some sort of weird power or whatnot.. I just loved every single one of them. I particularly liked Yunior, who was Oscar’s roomie for a while.Even with my zero knowledge of the Spanish language AND science fiction (there were a lot, and I mean a lot, of references to science fiction and fantasy stories, such as J K K Tolkein’s LOTR, Marvel comics and the like), and despite the fact that I had to read the book with my computer right next to me, I did very much enjoy it.

[bhenry11 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

It's not too often that a book elicits a primal response from me, but I flat-out sobbed at the end. Oscar is tragic in the way that so many of us are: we want to be flawless, but also often can't even fail correctly. We want to be heroic, but instead brood alone in our pride, stuck in our own social anxieties and hangups. We don't conform to how the rest of society wants us to be, but we also can't figure out why we're not universally loved and accepted. Diaz' novel excels not just in its parallel construction between Oscar's mother's Trujillo-dominated past and Oscar's ill-fitting present, but in the seamless integration of the two at the story's climax. Just a great read.

[fuzzy_pickle · Nota: 2 de 5 estrelas]

I enjoyed the history lessons from the footnotes, but didn't enjoy the story very much -- despite the fact that I understood many of the fantasy references and many of the Spanish words. The ending was tragic and without any redemptive features, maybe that's just be a personal preference...

[dudara_2 · Nota: 4 de 5 estrelas]

Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his first novel, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. The tale centres around a Dominican family who live in New York, but a fair portion of the book is devoted to the family history and the obsession of Dominican people with fukú (curses or bad luck).Oscar is the fat, intense, science-fiction and gaming geek of the family. (In fact the book is peppered with fantasy and sci-fi references.) Given this combination of characteristics, it is no surprise that he is a virgin and easily falls for women. Oscar is doomed to tragedy, just as previous generations of his family were the victims of bad luck and illwill (Hence the continuing thread of fukú in the novel). Diaz does such a wonderful job of presenting the lives of Oscar's family, that Oscar's ultimate end seems somehow fitting to the circumstances of his mother and grandparents.A lot of the book takes place during the era of the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Footnotes throughout the text provide context and background to this era. The tone and cyncial humour in which these footnotes are presented is just brilliant. In fact, Diaz's prose throughout the novel is energetic and vitalising. It's been a while since I read a novel written in such a vibrant and snappy manner. It is a fairly unique piece of work.

[brianajae · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

I loved, loved, loved this book. That said, I would not recommend it to everyone. The story follows the Cabral family but is mainly centered around the overweight, undeniably geeky and hopelessly lovelorn Oscar. The family is from the Dominican Republic and lives in New Jersey, but the story goes back and forth between the two places. Each chapter, also, is about different people and it jumps around a lot, making it confusing at times. But still wonderful. Is it weird that I really connected with this complete loser of a protagonist? Because I did. The story is a great one, but the reason I would not recommend it to everyone is the language. The entire book is written in a sort of Spanglish. There was at least one Spanish word per sentence. Which means anyone who does not speak Spanish would probably not be able to get as much out of the book. You would still be able to follow the story but I don't think it would be as enjoyable.

[sturlington_1 · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

“They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú–generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.”Thus begins Oscar Wao, a book that is not easy to read. The narrative voice — an observer of the novel’s events named Yunior — is often difficult to follow. A lot of Spanish is mixed in with the text, and since I don’t speak Spanish, it was sometimes frustrating trying to figure out what was being said (although I did pick up some choice Spanish insults by context). There are also numerous references to fantasy and science fiction, comics and role-playing games — Yunior is a closet geek — so numerous that they could get tiresome, and many are not immediately understandable to a reader who isn’t also a total nerd. (I am only 50% nerd, comparatively; I got the Lord of the Rings references and sci-fi shout-outs, but not the numerous comic book allusions.) And then there is a total lack of quotation marks, which important contemporary writers have apparently declared extinct, much to my dismay.Despite all this, I grew to love the tragic story that unfolds in Oscar Wao. The plot revolves around a curse that afflicts Oscar’s family, which reflects the curse that afflicts their home country, the Dominican Republic. The family’s history and the country’s history are interwoven in a tangle of broken dreams, disasterous love affairs and brutal violence, seasoned with a bizarre mix of fatalism and unwarranted hope that there may be change, despite all evidence to the contrary. My only major criticism was the brief section where point of view shifted to Oscar’s sister, Lola, which threw off the narrative rhythms, in my opinion. But following that section, when Yunior enters the story as an actual character, the book takes on life and took hold of me.This book surprised me, too, by teaching me quite a lot about the bloody history of the Dominican Republic, particularly its capricious, long-standing dictator Trujillo, which I knew next to nothing about. The historical details are mainly relayed in footnotes, which aren’t as jarring as you might imagine, and since they are written in the same lively narrative voice, are fun to read.Oscar Wao is different, and it’s not easy. But it sucks you in, if you let it. It creates a world and shoves you right into it. As Oscar says at the end: “Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!”

[jenneb_2 · Nota: 5 de 5 estrelas]

Apparently these Pulitzer dudes occasionally know what the hell they're talking about, because this book was awesome.
You should read it.
You should make your book club read it.
You should make your mom's book club read it.