The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz


I read Junot Diaz's short story collection Drown last Winter Break when my now-roommate was going to sell it back to the school after reading it for a creative writing class. I convinced him to give it to me for my birthday (which it was) instead.
I'm a sucker for a good short story collection and Drown is excellent. I imagine it's what Raymond Carver would have written were be born Dominican in New York in the 70s. Diaz's writing is nerdy with a badass sensibility, or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, it's fucking good.
Oscar Wao took 10 years to write and it shows. The book is amazingly intricate for it's length (327 pages). It's about a nerdy Dominican teenager (Oscar) living in Jersey. But it's also about the Dominican dictator Trujillo and living under totalitarianism. But it's also about Oscar's entire complicated family history (very Marquez-esque). It's about a lot of things, but still doesn't doesn't feel overloaded or too dense.
The narrator is Diaz's alter-ego Yunior who also pops up in Drown and other short stories he's published. Yunior has a distinct sympathy for the title character, but is far enough removed to disdain him the same way most readers would a teenager 150 pounds overweight who plays Dungeons and Dragons and has never kissed a girl. The result is one of the more effective uses of narration I've read in a long time.
Oscar Wao is also the first book I've read that has footnotes containing the word 'fuck'. These footnotes contain a lot of Dominican history, but with Yunior providing such good narration they are some of the best parts of the novel.
To read the book it might help to speak Spanish and be a recovering fantasy-geek. The Spanish wasn't oppressive, I didn't feel like I missed that much with my high-school French. As for fantasy geek, having read The Lord of the Rings is sort of crucial, but the movies should work for anyone who had better things to do in elementary school.
Diaz has gotten a lot of praise from both mainstream audiences (hitting the bestseller lists) and literary circles (Pulitzer and National Book Award) and he has to feel vindicated after his decade of work. That said, I hope the next one doesn't take as long.