Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating DominicanAmerican history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
[...]... twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S occupied Iraq either.) During the First Occupation it was reported that members of the American Occupying Forces would often attend Dominican parties but instead of joining in the fun the Outlanders would simply stand at the edge of dances and watch Which of course must have seemed like the craziest thing in the world... working On the last minute of the last hour of the last day my mother would be at work She would be at work when the missiles were in the air I guess I must have missed him real bad, or I just wanted to see somebody who knew anything about me, or the cat piss had damaged my common sense because I gave him the address of a coffee shop on the boardwalk and told him to bring some of my clothes and some of my... before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end -of -the- world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet) Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams I’ve been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys... that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise And get rid of those porn magazines They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date Sound counsel that in the end he did not adopt He tried a couple of times to exercise, leg lifts, situps, walks around the block in the early morning, that sort of thing,... smells Then stay out of it! I will! But of course I was happy! Happy! I kept waiting to run into my family posting up flyers of me on the boardwalk, my mom, the tallest blackest chestiest thing in sight, Oscar looking like the brown blob, my tía Rubelka, maybe even my tío if they could get him off the heroin long enough, but the closest I came to any of that was some flyers someone had put up for a cat they... it he realized that these very cousins could probably have gotten him laid if only he’d bothered to hang out with them But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.) In the afternoons, when he couldn’t write another word, he’d sit out in front of the house with his abuela and watch the street scene, listen to the raucous exchanges between the neighbors One evening, at the end of his trip, his abuela... while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck? Poor Oscar Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of those Let’s-Be-Friends V ortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women Perhaps In... terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM’s screen, and watched his adolescence stream by Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years It would have been one thing if like some of the nerd boys I’d grown up with he... him run their errands, making fun of his games and his looks; to make shit even worse, they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives with no regard for him, while he sat in the kitchen, clutching the latest issue of Dragon Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering there’s a male unit in here Where? Marisol would say blandly I don’t see one And when they talked about how all the Latin... then in Catalan Breathe, breathe, breathe! I’ve got like no fat left on me, and the musculature of my legs impresses everyone, even me I can’t wear shorts anymore without causing traffic jams and the other day when my abuela locked us out of the house she turned to me in frustration and said, Hija, just kick the door open That pushed a laugh out of both of us So much has changed these last months, in . wood carving of Oscar. It is a name that would haunt him for the rest of his life and that would lead him to another Watcher, the one who lamps on the Blue Side of the Moon. Had none of the Higher. ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most. Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they’d gone, building another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called he no longer expected the Big Blow-off. She was the