Today THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE was included in the New York Times list of funniest books since Catch-22. And The Atlantic listed OSCAR WAO as one of the Great American Novels. Took 11 years to write but here it is still finding readers. Grateful for these honors and to be in such esteemed company and grateful to the readers, the book sellers and the librarians.
NYT: "This book is so terribly dark, and yet light and laugh-inducing. It concerns the titular Oscar Wao, an overweight and nerdy young man — “I’m a Morlock,” he whispers, regarding himself in the mirror after a Dungeons & Dragons campaign — who desperately wants to lose his virginity. It’s also nothing less than the history of the Dominican Republic, specifically under the brutal rule of Rafael Trujillo, a.k.a. El Jefe, “the Dictatingest Dictator Who Ever Dictatored.” The ultimate joke here is the “fukú,” the name for a curse of the New World, which can explain any misfortune or tragedy (and there is tragedy aplenty in these pages). Told in freewheeling, profane Spanglish by Yunior, Oscar’s rueful roommate from Rutgers, and laced with footnotes, the novel argues for writing as the thing that unjinxes, jolting and reordering old defeatist beliefs."
ATL: “"Narrators are a tricky thing in contemporary literature. All-knowing, godlike ones are out; tightly focused first-person perspectives are in. The latter are great for creating intimacy but can lack the soaring view and freewheeling power that makes a third-person novel (think Pride and Prejudice or Anna Karenina) so pleasurable. Unless the I in question belongs to Yunior, the narrator of Díaz’s magisterial novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Yunior is an omniscient storyteller and a fallible jerk. He’s a minor character—Oscar’s sister’s cheating would-be boyfriend; Oscar’s fair-weather friend—but his heartbroken, profane, register-shifting, code-switching narration makes the book. Oscar Wao is about the poor, doomed Oscar, yes; it’s about grief and displacement and diaspora; but really, it’s about the way Yunior talks about those things. He makes the massive specific. Only a very special I can do that."
