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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 (2007) is a best-selling novel
Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
 written by Dominican
Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are List of divided islands, Saint Martin being the other....
-American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 author Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz

Junot D?az is a Dominican Republic-United States writer and professor at MIT. Central to D?az's work is the duality of the immigrant experience....
. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey
New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, on the east by the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, on the southwest by Delaware, and on the west by Pennsylvania....
 where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator
Dictator

A dictator is an authoritarian ruler who assumes sole and absolute power without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship....
 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
National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English language....
 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life....
.






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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a best-selling novel
Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
 written by Dominican
Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are List of divided islands, Saint Martin being the other....
-American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 author Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz

Junot D?az is a Dominican Republic-United States writer and professor at MIT. Central to D?az's work is the duality of the immigrant experience....
. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey
New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, on the east by the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, on the southwest by Delaware, and on the west by Pennsylvania....
 where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator
Dictator

A dictator is an authoritarian ruler who assumes sole and absolute power without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship....
 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
National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English language....
 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life....
. The title is a nod to Hemingway
Hemingway

Hemingway is a surname of England origin. The best-known Hemingway is Ernest Hemingway, the writer.Hemingway may refer to:...
's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Set in Africa, it was published in the September 1936 in literature issue of Cosmopolitan magazine concurrently with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."...
" and to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish people playwright, Irish poetry and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest Celebrity of his day....
.

Plot introduction

The novel is an epic love story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the protagonist of Díaz's first book "Drown" and chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction
Science fiction

Science fiction is a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology. Science fiction is found in books, art, television, films, games, theatre, and other media....
 and fantasy novels, with comic books and role-playing games and with falling in love, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean (and perhaps the entire world) since colonization and slavery
Slavery

Slavery is a form of forced labor where a person is compelled to Labor for another . Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive Remuneration in return for their labor....
.

The middle sections of the novel center on the lives of Oscar's runaway sister Lola and his mother Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral and his grandfather Abelard under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, various Spanish dialects and hip-hop inflected urban English, the novel is also a meditation
Meditation

Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the reflexive, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness....
 on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World. The book also, though controversially, makes frequent use of the N-word in the form consistent with it's urban vernacular usage.

Book Format

The novel is divided up into different sections that center around specific relatives of the Oscar Wao's family:

GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987/Oscar Wao

Wildwood 1982-1985/Lola

The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral 1955-1962/Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral

Sentimental Education 1988-1992/Oscar Wao

Poor Abelard 1944-1946/Abelard Luis Cabral

Land of the Lost 1992-1995/Oscar Wao

The Final Voyage/Oscar Wao

The End of the Story/Oscar Wao and Yunior

Critical reception

The novel was an overwhelming critical success, appearing in over thirty-five best-of-the-year book lists and winning the John Sargent Senior First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Book Prize, the Dayton Peace Prize in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English language....
 as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life....
 in 2008. New York
New York (magazine)

New York is a weekly magazine concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it offers less national news and more gossipy, tabloid-like stories, but has also published noteworthy articles on city and state politics and cultur...
 named it the Best Novel of the Year and Time
Time (magazine)

Time is a weekly United States newsmagazine, similar to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. A European edition is published from London....
 magazine's Lev Grossman named it #1 of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, praising it as "a massive, heaving, sparking tragicomedy".

External links