
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Narrated by:
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Lin-Manuel Miranda
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Karen Olivo
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By:
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Junot Díaz
About this listen
Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel.
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience - and, 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 Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
©2007 Junot Díaz (P)2016 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose... A book that decisively establishes [Diaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
"Diaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." (New York Magazine)
"Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Diaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman - in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction - all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." (San Francisco Chronicle)
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Poor Oscar
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A wondrous tale
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Wonderful book, with a great performance
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Great story with some historical info about DR
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Perfectly balanced
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Amazing performance!
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Narration is exceptional
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Entertaining and thought provoking
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What did I love?
Each and every chapter were Lola was narrating
What did I like?
- The ubiquitous Dominican references
- The sprinkle of Dominican slang
- And Lin Manuel Miranda trying to pronounce things in Spanish which are not really Spanish but Dominican.
What I didn't like?
- Some of the shifting. Honestly I love a good complicated history line, with some shifting narrator. Damn that's my kind of shit. But every time the history started turning really political/historical I couldn't help but to roll up my eyes and doze off. I'm not sure if it was because of the story itself, or if it was because of that history teacher I once had that made me hate history or simply because it's easier to silently shame Germany and the Nazy for the holocaust but it's way harder to see our role in the our own Haitian holocaust.
Favorite Quote:
That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.
Make u miss el patio in each of its chapters
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And the National history, woven with family history, woven with personal history so well done.
Ok I gotta start listening all over again
So good on so many levels !
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