February's Book Club: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Details
At our last meeting we voted for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, suggested by our dear members Kiron and Gina. This one is a little more lengthy than books in the past so I suggest you get your book ASAP.
I have not yet selected a venue, but I am open for suggestions!
Synopsis and reviews for the book are below.
Synopsis:
The novel is an epic story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas and chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, obsessed with science fiction 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.
The middle sections of the novel center on the lives of Oscar's runaway sister, Lola, 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 on story-telling, the Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World.
NY Times Review:
Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.