339 pages
English language
Published April 19, 2007 by Riverhead Books.
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 Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the 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.
Fun book - come for the playful Dominican language and culture and history and stay for the warm heart hidden throughout
Unsurprising for a Pulitzer winner, this story was extremely well told, and I ended up reading the last 200 pages in one sitting.
It was an interesting journey and punctuated with juicy and sometimes frightening tidbits from the Dominican Republic in its dictator days. Similar to other spoken word style family biographies, but still unique and compelling.
My one criticism is that I think some poor editing choices were made. Footnotes were sometimes historical and sometimes in universe and those occasionally took me out of the story. Chapters open from an unknown point of view that takes a few sentences longer to resolve than I'd like. Some idiomatic Dominican Spanish wasn't translated and wasn't made clear with a search engine. It felt clumsy in those notes, even giving definitions of terms we were expected to lookup or infer pages before.
Anyway, I could hear Diaz's voice telling the story clearly …
Unsurprising for a Pulitzer winner, this story was extremely well told, and I ended up reading the last 200 pages in one sitting.
It was an interesting journey and punctuated with juicy and sometimes frightening tidbits from the Dominican Republic in its dictator days. Similar to other spoken word style family biographies, but still unique and compelling.
My one criticism is that I think some poor editing choices were made. Footnotes were sometimes historical and sometimes in universe and those occasionally took me out of the story. Chapters open from an unknown point of view that takes a few sentences longer to resolve than I'd like. Some idiomatic Dominican Spanish wasn't translated and wasn't made clear with a search engine. It felt clumsy in those notes, even giving definitions of terms we were expected to lookup or infer pages before.
Anyway, I could hear Diaz's voice telling the story clearly from page one and it was told with such expertise and practice that I can forgive any minor foibles and just say it was definitely worth a read.
The first couple sections in I thought, how could trash like this pass for literature and even win awards?
As I pushed myself to continue, I actually found I wanted to know what happens next. This must be where the part where writers get divided as either good, or bad.
In the end, the story, the history, the references to nerdy stuff that I know about all too well, and the mind games that go on in a male, all seem to make an OK story with OK characters and, (if not terrible, then), unconventional writing.
That's the best I can give it but I'm not a professional reviewer, or writer, or important enough to warrant any weight to my usually ignored opinions. I suggest you borrow the book first to see if you can get into it.
DNF will not rate.
(Updated May 2018)
In light of sexual misconduct allegations against the author, I've realized that the explorations of toxic masculinity in this book were not trying to make the statement that I thought they were. I've updated my star rating accordingly.
This book was awful. So self-consciously wonderkid like dave eggers. I paid full price for it and doubt I will ever finish it.
Some millenials just need to put on their big boy pants. Not all, just most of their most popular authors.
I was disappointed. I was in the minority. Don't listen to me. But I still don't like Oscar Wao, the main character, and I gather I was supposed to.
While I liked this book, I found it too long. It's not a long book, but it's not edited well. It is clearly a wonderful novella wrapped in an okay novel. I'd have liked to see this cut down more; down to its essential core. In the end though, the true test of a book is whether I would recommend it to others, and I certainly would recommend this book to everyone. It has broad appeal, despite its geeky references and Dominican Spanish. I gave it 4 stars, but that's only because I can't give it 3 1/2.
One of the strongest novels I've read. Powerful, energetic writing. Great characters that Diaz makes you really care about. Highly recommended.
A family saga that shows the lives of members of a Dominican family from various perspectives. Painful at times, but compelling.
Fuku- The curse and the Doom of the New World.
"...it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku's Kilometer Zero, its point of entry, but we are all its children, whether we know it or not."
That's a nice backdrop, no? A perfect setup for tragedy. This is the story of Oscar de León, as told mostly by a close friend who knew his family well. After the fuku prelude, the first chapter is called GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987, or how Oscar grows into a social outcast of a teenager, weighing in at 300 pounds, interested in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons (remember that?), comic books, reading science fiction (ALL of it), and writing science fiction. He spends hours each day writing, …
Fuku- The curse and the Doom of the New World.
"...it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku's Kilometer Zero, its point of entry, but we are all its children, whether we know it or not."
That's a nice backdrop, no? A perfect setup for tragedy. This is the story of Oscar de León, as told mostly by a close friend who knew his family well. After the fuku prelude, the first chapter is called GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987, or how Oscar grows into a social outcast of a teenager, weighing in at 300 pounds, interested in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons (remember that?), comic books, reading science fiction (ALL of it), and writing science fiction. He spends hours each day writing, and one Halloween, when he dressed up as Dr. Who, his peers laugh, joking about how he looks like a big fat Oscar Wilde. He was thus dubbed Oscar Wao.
Eventually, though, Oscar becomes obsessed with obtaining a girlfriend, which proves to be nearly impossible for a seriously obese guy with strange tastes. A few girls are happy to chat with and unload their problems on him, but--that's it. His self-esteem hits a scary low. After all, Dominican guys are supposed to be genetically infused with babe-getting skills.
In and out of Oscar episodes, author Junot Diaz paints Oscar's surroundings, his acquaintances, the life stories of his mother and sister, and their volatile relationship with each other. To explain his mother's early history, or how she came to be in New Jersey, it is necessary to embark on the history of The Dominican Republic under the shocking dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Diaz puts most of the hard facts in his tantalizing and surprisingly humorous footnotes, as his mother's disastrous story progresses.
The narrative, as told by Oscar's friend Yunior, is a lesson in Dominican culture with its focus on the local language. It's very colorful at times and always intriguing. I've never read dialogue like this before. Yunior is Oscar's unlikely roommate during a year of college so that he can keep an eye on Oscar to please Lola, his worried sister, while she studies in Spain. Oscar turns out to be a difficult charge, to say the least.
Much later, after Oscar is out of college and teaching high school, he joins his family on a summer trip to visit family in The Dominican Republic (DR), where he meets an older woman and falls in love. Still miserable over his lack of love life, he makes the courageous choice to live and experience his dream, no matter the consequence.
That's making an involved story short! Once you start reading this, the pages will turn themselves. I loved Oscar, and highly recommend this book.
**note in passing: The author infuses humor into a painful story in an intriguing way that reminds me somewhat of Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havanna
this is exceptionally good
Compelling characters and a great job bringing Dominican history into the book. It never completely grabbed me though.
A very good book about the lives of members of a dysfunctional family and how they got that way, focusing around a very nerdy fat Dominican boy on his journey to discover what it's like to be Dominican-American.
I found myself reading this with a Spanish/English dictionary handy. Of course, there are some things you won't find in a respectable dictionary anyway. This isn't a detraction from the book however. I actually thought it was an interesting experience reading a book that would occasionally drop Spanish phrases and dominacano slang.
