the brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot díaz

The book’s pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to “Negropolitan” vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. By the prologue’s end, it’s clear that this story of one poor guy’s cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. victim” was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). , “the Curse and Doom of the New World,” whose “midwife and.

The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. However, Junot Diaz’s dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.

Areader might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoĪre devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather.

The brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot díaz