The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a 2007 novel written by Dominican American author Junot Díaz. The novel is set in New Jersey in the United States, where Díaz was raised, and deals with the Dominican Republic's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. The book chronicles the life of Oscar de León, 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 a curse that has plagued his family for generations.
Narrated by multiple characters, the novel incorporates a significant amount of Spanglish and neologisms, as well as references to fantasy and science fiction books and films. Its overarching theme of the fukú curse also contains elements of magic realism. It received highly positive reviews from critics, who praised Díaz's writing style and the multi-generational story. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao went on to win numerous awards in 2008, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Concept
The book chronicles the life of Oscar de León, a 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 with 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 mediates story-telling, the Dominican diaspora, identity, sexuality, 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 Díaz's short stories and is often seen as an alter ego of the author.
Plot
Main narrative Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde) is a Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a young age, cannot find love, primarily because he is a nerd obsessed with science fiction and comic books who is often bullied for his large weight. His greatest fear is that he will die a virgin.
After high school, Oscar attends Rutgers University–New Brunswick. His sister's boyfriend Yunior (the narrator of much of the novel) moves in with Oscar, trying to help him get in shape and become more "normal". After "getting dissed by a girl", Oscar attempts to kill himself by drinking three bottles of liquor and jumping off the Raritan River Bridge. He survives the fall but is seriously injured.
Oscar recuperates and graduates from Rutgers. He teaches as a substitute at his former high school and dreams about writing an epic work of science fiction. Eventually, he moves to the Dominican Republic and falls helplessly in love with Ybon, a woman who lives near him and who works as a prostitute. Ybon is kind to Oscar but rejects his frequent romantic overtures. Ybon's boyfriend, a violent police captain, becomes jealous of Oscar and sends two goons who kidnap Oscar, take him to the sugarcane fields, and beat him into a coma. Oscar's family takes him back to the United States to heal.
Oscar recovers from the beating, borrows money from Yunior, and returns to the Dominican Republic. He spends 27 days writing and stalking Ybon. She is horrified at first but softens and eventually has sex with Oscar. Ybon's boyfriend's goons then find Oscar, take him back to the sugarcane fields, and kill him.
Flashbacks and secondary narratives The novel contains significant exposition on Oscar's family history. One section is a first-person narrative from the perspective of Oscar's sister, Lola, who explains her struggles to get along with their headstrong mother, Beli. Subsequent sections detail Beli's backstory growing up as an orphan in the Dominican Republic after her father was imprisoned and her mother and two sisters died. Her father was imprisoned after failing to bring his wife and daughter to meet some government officials, as he feared they would take them. After being raised by an aunt, Beli enters a relationship with a wealthy gangster named Dionisio. However, Dionisio turns out to be married to one of Rafael Trujillo's sisters, who, in parallel with her son, has Beli taken to a cane field and also beaten nearly to death. She then escapes to the United States.
Style
Narration Instead of Díaz directly telling the story to the reader, he creates an aesthetic distance by speaking through the novel's narrator, Yunior. Yunior provides analysis and commentary on the events he relays in the novel. His speech often exemplifies code switching, switching rapidly from a lively, Caribbean-inflected vernacular, replete with frequent profanity, to wordy, eloquent, and academic prose. This runs in parallel to several central themes of the novel regarding identity, as Yunior's code-switching alludes to a struggle between his Dominican identity and his identity as a writer. Code-switching between Spanish and English is also central to the narrative itself of the book, as characters switch back and forth as they see fit.
The book's narration also shifts away from Yunior to another character at several critical moments in the story. In chapter two, Lola narrates her story in the first person, foreshadowing the intimacy between Lola and Yunior. The beginning of chapter two also features second-person narration, which is rarely used in literature.
Díaz's use of Yunior as the book's main narrator strengthens the novel's idea as metafiction. Yunior consistently reminds the reader that he is telling the story instead of the story happening in its own right.
Footnotes The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao extensively uses footnotes to the point that many of the characters are developed in the footnotes in addition to the story. Rather than provide factual background, Yunior's narrative continues in the footnotes just as it does in the body of the novel. When describing Oscar's deep love of science fiction and fantasy literature, Yunior continues in the footnotes: "Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one quite seems to know. It might have been a consequence being Antillean (who more sci-fi than us?) ..." The presence of Yunior's footnotes, therefore, reminds the reader that there is always more to one's story.
Yunior even refers in the footnotes to his present life earlier in the novel than when he describes it in Chapter Eight. "In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa." Yunior thus builds the writing of the novel and his relationship with Oscar into the greater history of the Dominican Republic. The many science fiction references throughout the novel and footnotes emphasize (Yunior believes) the fantastical elements of Dominican history. Yunior cites the fall of Mordor and the dispelling of evil from Middle Earth from The Lord of the Rings as a complement to the fall of Trujillo.
The footnotes contain many references specifically to the reign of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961, providing historical background on figures like the Mirabal Sisters, whom Trujillo assassinated, and Anacaona, an Indigenous woman who fought against the invading Spanish colonialists. While referencing historical figures, Yunior frequently includes the novel's fictional characters in the historical events.
Thus, Yunior builds a context for Dominican history, where the characters are used just as much in the footnotes as in the body of the novel.
Many footnotes ultimately connect to themes of coming to a new world (underscored through the novel's references to fantasy and sci-fi) or having one's world completely changed. Trujillo's reign, as revealed in the novel's footnotes, becomes as dystopian as one of Oscar's favorite science fiction novels.
Slang Díaz moves between several styles in the novel as the narrative shifts to each character. Oscar's speech reflects an autodidactic language based on his knowledge of fantasy, 'nerd' literature and his speech is filled with phrases such as "I think she's orchidaceous" and "I do not move so precipitously", whereas Yunior "affects a bilingual b-boy flow" and intersperses it with literary language. The story of the De Léon family is told and collected by the fictional narrator Yunior and the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has described the voice of the book as "a streetwise brand of Spanglish". He often gives his commentary and analysis on the events he is relating in the story and sometimes reveals failings in his own life, both as a narrator and a person: "Players: never never never fuck with a bitch named Awilda. Because when she awildas out on your ass, you'll know pain for real."
His informal and frequent use of neologisms can be seen in sentences such as a description of Trujillo as "the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated" or his description of the effectiveness of Trujillo's secret police force: "you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you'd be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass."
Oscar Wao also oscillates between English and Spanish. Yunior peppers the English-speaking novel with Spanish vocabulary and phrases, and specific English sentences are built with Spanish syntax: "Beli might have been a puta major in the cosmology of her neighbors but a cuero she was not."
Oscar lives his life surrounded by the culture of fantasy and, as Oscar describes them, "the more speculative genres", and the language of these cultures are strewn throughout the book along with Spanish. Brief phrases relating to games like Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop role-playing game terms are used as common colloquialisms: "He [Oscar] could have refused, could have made a saving throw against Torture, but instead he went with the flow."
Magical realism
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains several of the hallmarks of Latin American magical realism. The novel's plot is intricately bound up with the notion of Fukú Americanus, which is "generally a curse of doom of some kind; specifically, the Curse or Doom of the New World". The reliance on Fukú, and its counterpart Zafa gives the novel a fantastical element which shows the magical realism aspect of the plot, as the narrative follows the impact of the supernatural curse.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed., 2008 This is coupled with other supernatural elements, such as the man with no face and the mongoose.
The novel's fantastical elements occur in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. This combination establishes a real-world setting for these events and blends the natural with the supernatural, another attribute of magical realism.Zlotchew, Dr. Clark. Varieties of Magical Realism. New Jersey: Academic Press ENE, 2007. p. 15
In addition to the fantastical elements of the novel, Oscar Wao also includes a degree of political critique in the discussion of the Trujillo dictatorship of the Dominican Republic and a portrayal of metafiction in Oscar's writing on fantasy novels. Both political critique and metafiction are typical features of magical realism.Thiem, Jon, "The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction" from MR: Theory, History, CommunityD'haen, Theo, "Magical realism and postmodernism: decentering privileged centers" from MR: Theory, History, Community
Díaz also hints at the novel’s magical realist elements by claiming that Fúku was popular in places like Macondo, which is the fictional setting for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, which is seen as one of the most prominent Latin American magical realist novels.