The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
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
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.
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Community Reviews
I haven't reread very many books....but I decided to listen to the audiobook version of this because I loved reading it the first time.
I read the audio version of this book. I wanted to like it more, though the jumping back and forth between different character accounts of what happened was not really clear from transition to transition. There was even another full back story of Oscar's mom's upbringing smack in the middle of the text which seemed very out of place and didn't flow well. The audio version I read had the author's story collection Drown as well. I could not even get through the entire portion of that because the short stories were not clear where they ended and began and all kind of ran together with many of the same character names.
никто не умеет писать семейные саги лучше латиноамериканцев - даже обевропившихся и обамериканившихся. поколения страстей и страданий, витки спирали, на которой никогда непонятно, сам по себе ты личность или просто пришло твое время сыграть партию в семейном оркесте и уступить место следующему
Yes, indeed, there are worlds and cultures that I cannot without help even imagine. The DR is one of these. And in this novel, he masterfully spins a tale spanning decades, but focused on the life of one nerdy, chubby American born latinx boy. The book's language is sophisticated, except when it's mirroring life and language in the lives of some of the family. The events of Oscar's life play out as a screen over the tumultuous reign of El Jefe, the dictator of the DR for many years. The audiobook was voiced by broadway actors, narrated as Yunior or Lola, which provided nuance and credibility to the narrative.
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