The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By: Junot Diaz

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell

Length: 16 hrs

Publisher's summary

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.

Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

©2007 Junot Diaz (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. and Books on Tape

Critic reviews

Winner of:

The Pulitzer Prize

The National Book Critics Circle Award

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize

A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose... A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

"Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." (New York Magazine)

"Genius... a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman - in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction - all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." (San Francisco Chronicle)

Very good.

Excellent narration, felt like watching a movie in your mind. The story keeps you absorbed into it.

Great, important work

What made the experience of listening to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the most enjoyable?

This definitive work of Diaz is a great read and an important story.

Which scene was your favorite?

The characters and plot are well developed, revealing significant aspects of the Dominican past and present, as well as a deeply personal story from the perspectives of the narrators.

Who was the most memorable character of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and why?

The male narration has various pronunciation errors in Dominican Spanish and Dominican-American slang. The Dominican accents overall were definitely flawed.

READ THE BOOK

where did all the footnotes go?! I read this book when it first came out and it had crazy footnote notes. It what makes half the book

What an amazing Whirlwind of Life, Death, and Being Dominican

Junot continues to amaze and gracefully combine both the old world of Santo Domingo and Nueva York in this beautiful story of what it’s like to uncover family secrets and struggles by a first generation American, taming both the past and the present and future.

wowed by Wao

riveting story, poignant and turbulent, funny and hopeful. fantastic voice acting and very memorable characters

so good is hard to describe

first off, and this is no spoiler, this is a sad book. all of the characters lives steeped in tragedies and those shape their lives. the second, the performance is amazing, and third the writing is so heart wrenching ly good! my one and only complaint is that there is a fair amount Spanish in the story, and while beautifully performed, my rusty Spanish could not always keep up. had I been reading the book, I could have looked up the phrases.

What a sublime story

This is a fantastic story that went right to the heart of what are meant to be Oscar. painted beautiful pictures with words and took us into his universe from a friends perspective. I loved it.

Riveting

Anyone that has ever spent time in the tri state area or has struggled with identity (especialmente nuestra gente) absolutely must experience this generational novel.

Wondrous Book!!!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (TBWLoOW) deserves every star that I can give it and its narrator. This is not a book I would have selected to read on my own. Had it not been a monthly selection of my local book club, I would have missed it and what a loss it would have been.

This is a book about a weird (just happens to be Dominican) kid growing up in Patterson, New Jersey. Coming from that part of the world myself, I can relate that much but not That much... I’m not Dominican and that’s a whole lot of what this book is about. TBWLoOW explores growing up in that part of the world and also the life of family members in the Dominican Republic under a brutal dictatorship. This book is about so many things. It’s about what it often means to be a nerd... to being a male virgin, to growing up in the New World in a family with Old World values. One might say the book’s about the Fuku, the superstition or curse of an insane, cruel dictator but that’s really only the thread that pulls all the fabric of this wonderful story together. TBWLoOW contains many stories that are all beautifully woven into one incredibly well-crafted book.

The passion and the authenticity of the author comes across in every page. There is humor and pathos sometimes in the same sentence but it is delivered so smoothly and, by the narrators, with such grace it becomes masterful. The narrators Staci Snell and particularly Jonathan Davis are extraordinary readers. The protagonists, POV and person change back and forth throughout the book. The narrators keep them straight for us in our minds and there is never any ambiguity. Frequent changes between first and third person can sometimes challenge the reader/listener; again, not here. The book is just a masterpiece. I am tempted to say read this book especially if you are _____ (fill in the blank) but that might dissuade someone else from reading it. This book has something for everyone.

Unfortunately, I read lot of crap. Just look at so many of my other reviews. This book just goes to show that we do not have to go back to another century to discover a truly gifted author.

Truly Fantastic

Junot Diaz has somehow concatenated the best of Latin magical realism, Star Trek, and J.D. Salinger with a no-holds-barred look back at the ruthless rise to power of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the lasting effects of that legacy in the Dominican diaspora today. The resulting story is a riveting combination of love, defiance, and perseverance that will make you laugh out loud one minute and weep the next. Truly a fantastic piece of modern literature.