The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, novel by Junot Díaz, published in 2007.

The long-awaited first novel from Junot Díaz, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008, expands a short story about Oscar Wao—a lonely, overweight, Dominican sci-fi nerd in Paterson, New Jersey, who falls hopelessly in love with women who never reciprocate his feelings—originally published in the New Yorker seven years previously. It tells of Oscar’s sister, his mother, and his grandfather who, in defying the vicious Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, brought terrible suffering upon the family’s subsequent generations.

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“Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber,” says the narrator, Yunior, of the proud, otherworldly Oscar. The suffering, he explains, was the result of a fukú, or curse, a superstition as old as the first European arrival on Hispaniola and blamed for anything from the Yankees losing a ball game to an inability to have male children. In the story of Oscar Wao (a mishearing of "Oscar Wilde"), the fukú is responsible for the death of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, and two of his three beautiful daughters, as well as the suffering of the much younger third daughter (Oscar’s mother). It is this same fukú that drives Oscar mad with love and puts an end to his short, desperate life. He may be a nerd, but Oscar also has aspirations to be a superhero, and he is surprisingly fearless, with a nobility reminiscent of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

The threads of the story that tell of Oscar’s family, in particular those set in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s reign of terror, are the most captivating, brought to life by Díaz’s playful voice, which is liberally peppered with Spanish (and especially Dominican) slang and sci-fi references, a style representative of Gabriel García Márquez’s "Macondo" turned "McOndo": magic realism for the diaspora generation.