The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

First edition hardcover
Author	Junot Díaz
Language	English, Spanish
Publisher	Riverhead
Publication date	September 6, 2007
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	352 pp
ISBN	1594489580
OCLC	123539681
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 22
LC Class	PS3554.I259 B75 2007

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a best-selling novel written by Dominican author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator 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 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The title is a nod to Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".

Plot introduction

The book chronicles both the life of Oscar de Leon, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as the curse that has plagued his family for generations.

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. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, and various Spanish dialects, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, the Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, and oppression.

Most of the story is told by an apparently omniscient narrator who is eventually revealed to be Yunior de Las Casas, a college roommate of Oscar's who dated Lola. Yunior also appears in many of Diaz's short stories.

Plot

The novel opens with an introductory section which explains the fukú -- "generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World," and the zafa—a counterspell to the fukú. The narrator of the book, unknown to the reader at this point, explains that the story he is about to tell is his own form of a zafa.

Part I

Part I of the book contains an introductory section, as well as the first four chapters of the story, and runs for over half the novel's length.

Chapter One: Ghetto Nerd at the End of the World (1974-1987)

This chapter introduces the reader to the titular character Oscar de León. Oscar comes from a Dominican family, and is therefore expected to be successful with girls. However, Oscar is more interested in science fiction, cartoons, reading, and role-playing games.

This chapter explains Oscar's history as a child through high school, focusing on his inability to find love.

When he was seven, Oscar had a week-long relationship with two girls at the same time, Maritza Chacón and Olga Polanco. When Maritza gives Oscar an ultimatum, he breaks up with Olga, only to be quickly dumped by Maritza. The narrator mentions that this event will cause all three of them to be unlucky in love.

In high school, Oscar is an outcast. He is very overweight and his fascination with "the Genres" causes him to be teased. When his two friends Al and Miggs both find girlfriends and do not involve Oscar (or try to help Oscar find a girlfriend), Oscar quickly stops spending time with them.

During his senior year of high school, Oscar takes an SAT review course. There, he meets and shortly begins to spend a lot of time with a girl named Ana Obregón. Oscar shortly falls in love with Ana. When her ex-boyfriend Manny returns from the Army, Ana stops spending time with Oscar. It is around this time that Oscar begins to start writing heavily, science fiction or fantasy stories, mostly centered around the end of the world.

When Oscar discovers that Manny has been physically abusing Ana, Oscar takes his uncle's gun and stands outside of Manny's apartment, but Manny never returns that night.

The chapter ends with Oscar revealing his love to Ana, Ana rejecting him, and Oscar going away to college at Rutgers.

Chapter Two: Wildwood (1982-1985)

The narrative changes to the first person, from the perspective of Lola, Oscar's sister. It explores the distant and often verbally abusive relationship that Lola has with her Old World Dominican mother, and Lola's resulting rebellion.

It opens with Lola telling, in the second person, the story of how she found out her mother had breast cancer. It then proceeds to explore the negative relationship that Lola had with her mother. This poor relationship causes Lola to run away from home to live with her boyfriend and his father on the Jersey Shore. After a bit of time, Lola finds herself again unhappy and calls home. She talks with Oscar and convinces him to bring money and meet Lola at a coffee shop. When they meet up, Lola discovers that Oscar told their mother about the meeting.

In an effort to run away from the coffee shop and from her mother, Lola accidentally knocks her cancer-ridden mother over. When Lola turns around to make sure her mother is okay, her mother grabs Lola by the hand, revealing that she was faking crying in an effort to get Lola to come back.

As a result of her running away, Lola is sent to live with her grandmother, La Inca, in the Dominican Republic.

Chapter Three: The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral (1955-1962)

This chapter introduces the reader to the history of Oscar and Lola's mother, whose full name is revealed to be Hypatía Belicia Cabral, though she is usually referred to simply as Beli.

It is revealed that Beli's family died when she was one, with rumors that Trujillo was responsible. She was raised by a series of abusive foster families until her father's cousin, La Inca, rescues her from such a life. La Inca continually tells Beli that her father was a doctor, and that her mother was a nurse as a way to remind Beli of her heritage. La Inca brings Beli back to her hometown of Baní, where La Inca runs a bakery.

At the age of 13, Beli lands a scholarship at El Redentor, one of the best schools in Baní. There, she falls in love with a light-skinned boy named Jack Pujols, and spends a lot of her time trying to earn his affection, to no avail. Because she is poor and dark-skinned, Beli is often made fun of, and is a social outcast. However, during the summer of sophomore year, Beli quickly develops into a full grown woman, and the book describes how Beli becomes very popular with men of all ages.

With her new body, Beli is finally able to catch the attention of Jack Pujols and loses her virginity to him. However, when they are discovered in a closet together, Beli is kicked out of school. Instead of transferring to a different school, however, she earns a job at a restaurant run by two Chinese immigrants brothers, Juan and José Then, where she works as a waitress.

After a time, Beli goes to a club with another waitress named Constantina. There, she meets a gangster, and the two of them form a relationship. Eventually, Beli becomes pregnant with the gangster's child. It is then revealed that the gangster is in fact married to one of Trujillo's sisters, "known affectionately as La Fea" (The Ugly). When La Fea discovers that Beli is pregnant with her husband's child, she has two large cops resembling Elvis, with pompadour hairstyles, kidnap Beli, with plans to take her to have a forced abortion. As she is being led to the car, she sees a third cop who does not have a face. Before the cops can drive away, Beli spots and calls for help from the Then brothers, who save her, but only temporarily. Soon, Beli is tricked into being taken by the cops. On the way to drive to a cane field, the two cops physically beat Beli close to death, and continue to do so in the cane field. Her fetus dies due to the injuries.

When she discovers that Beli has been taken, La Inca begins to pray very intensely, and in short order, a small but intense prayer group forms about La Inca.

Back in the cane field, after she has been left for dead, a mongoose with golden eyes appears and leads Beli out of the cane, telling her that she will have two children. As Beli returns to the road, she is picked up by a group of traveling musicians. Due to La Inca's connections in the medical community, Beli is nursed back to health.

After Beli returns to La Inca's care, it quickly becomes apparent that Beli will not be safe in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and so she is sent to New York to live.

Chapter Four: Sentimental Education (1988-1992)

This chapter explores Oscar's time at Rutgers, and introduces the narrator, Yunior, who was Oscar's roommate and a boyfriend of Lola's.

Part II

Part II of the book contains an introductory section, as well as chapters Five and Six of the story.

Chapter Five: Poor Abelard (1944-1946)

This chapter is the story of Abelard, Belicia's father (Oscar and Lola's grandfather), and the "Bad Thing he said about Trujillo," which causes his family to be torn apart leaving most family members dead. The dictator, Trujillo, known for his sexual desire for young girls, whose families cannot protect them, learns that Abelards's oldest daughter Jaquelyn, has become a beautiful young teenager. As a father Abelard does not want to give his daughter to Trujillo, as so many other fathers had been forced to do, and does not bring her to the event it had been demanded she come to. Some four weeks later Abelard is arrested for supposedly making a joke that there were no bodies in the trunk of his car. As Trujillo's henchmen disposed of opponents this way he was accused of slandering the dictator. After his arrest and torture his wife learns she is pregnant with what turns out to be her third daughter, Belicia. Two months after the baby's birth she is killed by an army truck in a probable suicide. Her two older daughters die under suspicious circumstance and the baby is taken to be criada, a child slave. Mistreated and bearing the scars of the hot oil thrown on her back she is rescued at the age of nine by her father's cousin, La Inca, whom she comes to regard as her mother.

Chapter Six: Land of the Lost (1992-1995)

This chapter is about the post-college life of Oscar, and the time he spends in the Dominican Republic. He falls in love with an older prostitute named Ybón Pimentel. This results in Oscar being severely beaten, reflecting the same situation of his mother. The golden mongoose, which saved his mother's life, returns to save Oscar's life. Oscar returns to the United States.

Part III

Part III of the book contains chapters Seven and Eight, as well as the novel's epilogue, "The Final Letter."

Chapter Seven: The Final Voyage

Oscar returns to the Dominican Republic to write and to attempt to be with Ybónn

Chapter Eight: The End of the Story

The narrator reveals the eventual fates of the characters

The Final Letter

An epilogue to the novel, Yunior describes a letter he received from Oscar before he died.

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 Dayton Peace Prize in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. New York magazine named it the Best Novel of the Year and Time 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

• Audio recording of Junot Díaz reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with commentary. From the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.
• The Annotated Oscar Wao Website explaining many of the book's Spanish phrases and cultural references