The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a novel written by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel draws heavily from his rough childhood in New Jersey and his homeland's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. It has received numerous positive reviews from critics and went on to win numerous prestigious awards in 2008, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Plot introduction

The novel chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction, fantasy and women, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean since colonization and slavery. The middle sections of the novel center on the lives of Oscar's mother Beli and his grandfather Abelard under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, and street Spanglish, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, and the contours of authoritarian power.

Critical reception

The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. Time magazine's Lev Grossman named it #1 of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, praising them as "a massive, heaving, sparking tragicomedy".

External links

• Podcast: Junot Díaz reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with commentary. From the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.

References