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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Audiobook9 hours

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Written by Junot Díaz

Narrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Karen Olivo

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience - and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 20, 2016
ISBN9780525493716
Unavailable
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Reviews for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Rating: 3.8407777131108776 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A humorous, self-conscious style coupled with evocative descriptions of locales and a strand of the supernatural put this above rank-and-file coming of age novels.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fuku's a bitch, man.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It was not just the life of Oscar, but his mother, sister, grandfather - told against the backdrop of the Trajillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. I might have gotten more out of it if I spoke Spanish and was familiar with the comic books referenced. As a history lesson, it was interesting, but I wasn't sure how I felt about Oscar's story - another boy coming of age, obsessed by love.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A review will be forthcoming when I unlose this book. Starts off fair, but was gaining speed and depth by the time it was swallowed by the Dulles Airport.
    Ok, book regained, restarted, finished. The writing moves along - style, plot, and context together, though the beginning and end are a little out of sync with the rest of the narrative. An enjoyable book. Bonus points for Diaz's contributions to the resurgence of the footnote.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Oscar (whose real last name is de Leon) is an endearingly, heartbreakingly nerdy fellow, and his attempts to find love and to fit in with his peers will be painfully familiar to most readers. We have all known an Oscar, and we have all felt like Oscar at some point in our lives. But Oscar takes it to another level.Diaz’s narrative, which is chock full of sci-fi and literary references, makes it clear that he is also conversant in the language of nerd, and he has great sympathy for Oscar’s character. His literary references, many of which will be familiar to serious readers, add color and depth to the story and help fill out Oscar’s already giant character even more.It may sound like a downer, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ends on a note that I found to be untraditionally optimistic. Despite Oscar’s many foibles and failed attempts to find love, he grows a great deal, and the evolution of his character is one of the highlights of this great book. He is likeable and easy to relate to, and Diaz (and his narrator Yunior) succeed in giving us a character we can laugh with, when it would have been so much easier to give us one to laugh at.Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is just so realistically written, that it's made me cry a few times. Incredible author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    How can one book be so brilliant and hilarious and so depressing and brutal at the same time??
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've had this novel on my shelf for a year or more and meant to get around to reading it. After Diaz' entertaining appearance on the Colbert Report, I thought it was time to grab it and begin. I'm so glad I did.

    This is a hip, fast-moving, deeply loving ode to chubby and geekish Oscar, the least Dominican of Dominicans, the most nerdly of his neighborhood. I LOVED Diaz' use of language throughout, especially of his characters' slang (most of which I didn't understand, but could either guess at or grab a quick Google translation for) - there's no stilted speech here. Instead there is fire and depth and fascinating, broken, yearning characters plunging headlong into a cursed life. Fuku indeed.

    A ton of reviews here on GR have slammed this book for its unclean language, its frivolous descriptions of love and sex - but that dirty reality seemed like truth to me, even though that culture isn't my own.

    I'll read more of Diaz for certain, and I'm passing this book around to folks who I think will also appreciate it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    My feelings on this book are complicated but also super easy to explain: I think it's probably brilliant for a lot of readers, I think Diaz is a fantastic writer, and I completely understand all of his techniques, and I think they are used masterfully... but I didn't enjoy it at all.

    Which is just to say, this book and I are not compatible. I think it is very good if it suits.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lonely life of obese, nerdy kid Oscar Dao. He grows up in New Jersey but returns with his family to Santo Dominica in the Dominican Republic.There is a lot of historical background to the Dominican Republic and the many revolutions in its history.The story is well written and it is told by the voices of several different people including Oscar, his sister Lola, their mother Benicia Cabral, their grandmother La Inca and Oscar’s friend Junior.Fuku, or the general idea of fate or a curse is one of the underlying themes of the Dominican psyche and Oscar and his family do not escape this sentiment.The characters are well drawn, the dialogue is a mixture of English and Spanish and the story is funny and sad at the same time. Oscar spends his whole life trying to become a sci-if author, looking for love and friendship and finds none.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I really need to stay away from books that have won awards (with one exception, the Ellis Peters Award). It's a sure-fire way I'll hate the book.

    My Book Club picked this out and it's the only reason I persevered.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Oscar, Lola, Santo Domingo, Tolkien references. Not sure which I loved most.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very entertaining
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's tough to review this book when several other people have done it so well, both pro and con. I also didn't realize that this book caused so much controversy. So I'll just toss in my opinion here and leave the hard-core critiquing to everyone else. I liked it. At first glance, you might think that this book tells the coming-of-age, life path sort of story of Oscar deLeon (called Oscar Wao when his Dr. Who costume made him look like Oscar Wilde -- at which point "Wilde" became "Wao" in pronounciation) who was quite overweight, a Dominican geek/nerd who wanted to write sci-fi and who was so desperate for female companionship that he had a bad habit of falling in love with women who paid attention to him. He has a sister, Lola, and his mom, who is stricken with cancer. The whole family, it seems, has a "fuku" (curse) on it; and the story goes back and forth in time to examine how this fuku came about under the dictatorship of Trujillo. Oscar isn't really the focus of this novel per se; but it's a great look at that time in history, especially for me, since I knew next to nothing about Trujillo or his rule. It's also a warning against dictatorships in their many forms -- and the people who stand up to them.The writing was excellent, the story doesn't let up until the end. A lot of people have complained about the footnotes, but I thought they were well placed, much like an alternative narrative to the one being told in the main story. All of the characters were well drawn -- each was someone the reader could relate to. I'm not a lit major, neither a paid nor professional reviewer, and I'm not Dominican and so perhaps I missed a lot of what has caused controversy over this book. However, as a plain old reader, I have to say that I really liked it. And yes, I'd definitely recommend it, but not to mainstream fiction readers, but to those who like a challenge in their reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Junot Diaz's first full-length fiction is a fully-realized piece, heartfelt, compassionate, and memorable. Our protaganist Oscar is a young Dominican living in New Jersey who is a "ghetto nerd": hopelessly overweight, endlessly focused on writing fantasy fiction. Unfortunately, Oscar is also completely smitten every time he sees even an average-looking woman. This is a good novel because of the author's diction: it's hip, poetic in its rhythms, and startlingly effective. It puts directly in the line of fire. Told from a friend's first-person point of view, "Oscar" wends its way from urban New Jersey to the third-world Dominican Republic. Oscar touches all he knows somehow - whether it's his friend's exaspertation or his sister's devotion. He's the final, living result of a curse on his family, and his realization of this is one of the driving forces behind the narrative.This is promising stuff from Diaz. I look forward to future entries.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Brilliantly written, but I didn't find the story too compelling, really. Sci fi/fantasy references weren't fully developed imo. However, the individual sentences stand out, each and every one of them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful book full of sci-fi references and Dominican history explained. Adult language.Some favorite passages: "Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7, and could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school" (22). "In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the "community" live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits--whether it's giving a gopher three heads or banishing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops--the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.)" (224).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Did I expect this novel to be all tetas and culos (t&a) spiced with intergalactic fanboy delusions? Not once. Did I really think I would break my heart for our ill-fated avenger or his grimy spangloid narrator? Never. But in the end, I was wrong.The Brief Wondrous Life or Oscar Wao was just what I needed right about now: a dirty, honest, modern work of mystic realism which is never quite mystic and never quite real. This is not the dreamy, semi-tragic novela of the MR genre--this is nasty and sweaty...a book which clings to your skin in a hazy film and is not beautiful because it is beautiful, but beautiful because it never once attempts to be. There are no supernatural occurances in this story, yet the sheer outlandishness of it all shocks and awes so much more. Written in an effortless spanglish prose which drips of the tongue in salty heaves, with a gift for gazing beyond the muck of living to see what is truly phenomenal, this book is a present, a gift, un regalo for any who just want to say, "wow".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When I began reading this I didn't expect to finish it. The angst of a teenage boy, told in crude language and sprinkled liberally with Spanish slang and idioms, didn't appeal to me at all. However, since it won a Pulitzer and has been widely praised I decided to read a few chapters before closing it, and I'm so glad I did. It's weird to say this in light of what I wrote above, but this is one beautifully written book. The language is lilting, and the dialogue so natural the characters jump out at the reader. It's easy to imagine this read aloud. The time jumps are a little hard to follow, probably because I know little of Dominican history. Otherwise, my overall reaction: WOW!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In many ways the book was the story of the misery which extends through generations once instigated, in this case by violent dictatorship. It was also the story of the struggle to find home and love once it's been lost. That struggle is pursued in various different ways by different characters, Oscar being the most direct. It was written in a very colloquial English/Spanish. An excellent book with a story that captured my interest.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    ... or not so brief and not all that wondrous. Sometimes I don't get why a book has received such critical acclaim and this is one of those times. The historical stuff on the Trujillo regime is interesting and well told, but the life of Oscar Wao himself is of absolutely no interest to me as a reader. I wasn't overly impressed with Diaz's debut collection of short stories, 'Drown', which was also highly praised, so should have been warned. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad book, just not all that good a one either.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Seldom is the quest for new perspectives in fiction satisfying, and even less often are they award-worthy. I avoided the automatically-generated recommendations to read this book for years based on the book's title and my little faith in the algorithms that generate the suggestions. I regret delaying my enjoyment of this debut novel for so long. It was an enjoyable international multi-generational journey with a Dominican American immigrant family focused on the short life the bookish youngest son of the de Leon family. It seems I knew a lot about Oscar's view of life. I raised a solitary bookworm who played the games and read the books (comic and otherwise) that defined Oscar Wao's thoughts and flavored the Spanish used to describe his view of women and friends, and fueled his insatiable quest for love. My understanding of his viewpoint made his story more compelling, and the history of the Dominican Republic much more interesting. The tragedy of the story is tempered by the author's writing skill and ability to make us smile and laugh at the foibles of the characters, their struggles and the cruelty of their life under Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and their new life in the USA. I consider this a really great read...including the humor and background information included in the footnotes. At the end we realize the story isn't sad because we learn Oscar actually learned to stand and lean into the wind in order to move forward with his life. He teaches us in his short life the quest for love is never futile and always worthwile if sown on fertile ground.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you happen to be anglo-ish, and have always passed through, but never stopped in the DR in your town, this book sucks you into the community, immersing you in Dominican-ness and Dominican history, and maybe your own misfit experiences via Oscar and his family. Story told by several narrators, in Domini-speak, Junot Diaz draws from Carribean language-phile storyteller/historian Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco), and does his Dominican story telling as well as the master.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A wonderful story about a young guy in New Jersey. The characters are unique and yet relatable. The book is written in a very conversational tone which I like. Plus the family dynamic is something everyone has experienced. Great book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Hope you know some Espanol!!! Ok, maybe I wasn't in the mood for this book, but I skimmed the last 30 pages. It was depressing. His writing is witty and his cadence is good, but I just didn't feel for the character as much as I should have, I guess. I think I will be happy another time that I read it, I'm sure I took something from the book, but not today.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the highlight of my reading for 2008. The spanish is very idiosyncratic but speaking the lingo definitely helps. The footnotes were a bit of a distraction but nonetheless very informative. I didn't know much about the DR at all exept what we talked about in Spanish classes at college. I traveled in the Americas and Caribean in the eighties, so for me it personalised the little that i had learnt. I also enjoyed the analagies of DR politics withscenes and characters from SciFi/Fantasy novels. I'm not a geek but i guess it gave depth to a world out there that i knew existed but hadn't been at all tempted to take an interest. Thank you Junot for everything!