The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A college sent this to me for freshman seminar. I felt obligated to read it, even though I didn't go to that school this year, but I almost didn't finish it.

How this book won such a prestigious award is beyond me. The reader knows what's generally going to happen from the title, and the outcome is pretty obvious from the start. The details (which are the only reason I kept reading) are mostly shrouded in Spanish slang. I don't read next to a computer, so looking the phrases up was impractical, and I couldn't understand a large chunk of the prose because of that fact.

Add to that the narrators who all speak in the same tone, and that's a recipe for confusion. I got to a "part" break and read a page and a half before I realized the narrator and subject had changed.

I honestly don't know how I managed to push myself through the book. I haven't hated a book this much since I had to read [b:Beloved|6149|Beloved|Toni Morrison|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165555299s/6149.jpg|736076] in high school.

Fuku- The curse and the Doom of the New World.

"...it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku's Kilometer Zero, its point of entry, but we are all its children, whether we know it or not."

That's a nice backdrop, no? A perfect setup for tragedy. This is the story of Oscar de León, as told mostly by a close friend who knew his family well. After the fuku prelude, the first chapter is called GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987, or how Oscar grows into a social outcast of a teenager, weighing in at 300 pounds, interested in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons (remember that?), comic books, reading science fiction (ALL of it), and writing science fiction. He spends hours each day writing, and one Halloween, when he dressed up as Dr. Who, his peers laugh, joking about how he looks like a big fat Oscar Wilde. He was thus dubbed Oscar Wao.

Eventually, though, Oscar becomes obsessed with obtaining a girlfriend, which proves to be nearly impossible for a seriously obese guy with strange tastes. A few girls are happy to chat with and unload their problems on him, but--that's it. His self-esteem hits a scary low. After all, Dominican guys are supposed to be genetically infused with babe-getting skills.

In and out of Oscar episodes, author Junot Diaz paints Oscar's surroundings, his acquaintances, the life stories of his mother and sister, and their volatile relationship with each other. To explain his mother's early history, or how she came to be in New Jersey, it is necessary to embark on the history of The Dominican Republic under the shocking dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Diaz puts most of the hard facts in his tantalizing and surprisingly humorous footnotes, as his mother's disastrous story progresses.

The narrative, as told by Oscar's friend Yunior, is a lesson in Dominican culture with its focus on the local language. It's very colorful at times and always intriguing. I've never read dialogue like this before. Yunior is Oscar's unlikely roommate during a year of college so that he can keep an eye on Oscar to please Lola, his worried sister, while she studies in Spain. Oscar turns out to be a difficult charge, to say the least.

Much later, after Oscar is out of college and teaching high school, he joins his family on a summer trip to visit family in The Dominican Republic (DR), where he meets an older woman and falls in love. Still miserable over his lack of love life, he makes the courageous choice to live and experience his dream, no matter the consequence.

That's making an involved story short! Once you start reading this, the pages will turn themselves. I loved Oscar, and highly recommend this book.

**note in passing: The author infuses humor into a painful story in an intriguing way that reminds me somewhat of Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havanna

I've got mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the language was sometimes wonderful, vibrant, fun, and full of energy. At other times I was occasionally annoyed with longer spanish language passages. A word or two interspersed isn't too bad, I can guess from context what is being said, but sometimes the longer sections were problematic.

My other issue is with the structure of the story. I feel like about halfway through it turned down an entirely different path than what I expected. Which isn't necessarily a problem, but in this case I'm not sure if I found the diversion to have any payoff. Therefore what was the purpose of the diversion? Instead I just kept asking myself, when do we get back to the good stuff? And eventually we did, but in between there was a large problem section that I don't think contributed to the story significantly enough to warrant the inclusion of that portion.

Still, there is some wonderful good stuff in the book, and there were sections that really rolled along with a great tone and rhythm. I've had a hard time deciding between three and four stars. I'd probably go with 3.5 if that was an available choice.