The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Book Review

Sometimes you stumble across something that just speaks to you. The Brief But Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Junot Diaz. And at first blush it sounds like the classic literary novel. It's a story about a person told after their death by the people around that person. It is as though somebody is going around, you know, and interviewing folks about this individual, Oscar Wao. But the person isn't famous. Oscar is not a celebrity. So it's not the typical thing where you're trying to find out what made him famous. Instead you're trying to find out who he was. And more importantly, Oscar's a geek. Oscar's one of us. Oscar loved reading The Lord of the Rings. And this is a set some years ago, before the movies I believe. But he was the kind of guy who was just very enthusiastic about sci-fi and fantasy and geeky things. And the people around him generally were not. Importantly also, Oscar was from a, I think a second or third generation immigrant home. He went to college. The family was doing well for itself. But you get a lot of the perspective of people who struggled in this country. And again, did well for themselves. But the difficulties of that and what that does to a person. And what that does to the next generation, the next generation that grew up with that. One of the interesting things is about how Oscar's parents grew up with this sort of hard-scrabble mentality. But Oscar and his sister did not. And they kind of can't quite understand. They can't quite grasp why you would be that worried about money. But what makes the book so special to me is the love and respect that the author has for Oscar. The fact that this is a story about an otaku, basically. A fan. Which does a great job of saying, being a fan does put you on the outsides of society. But let's look at that. Let's delve into that. It's not trying to make a case that we should all be treated equally. It's just saying that Oscar was on the outsides of society. And this is what happened to him. And this is what his life was like. It's a remarkably pragmatic novel in that sense. Especially because you see life from multiple different perspectives. Many different people who lived around Oscar. One of whom in particular is kind of a jock who Oscar got to know. And one of these sort of geek-adjacent people where he's into sports and all this kind of stuff. But he maybe played some D&D a little in college. Stuff like that. And so you see it from this perspective of a guy who is not into that stuff. But saw the enthusiasm for it through somebody else's eyes. And that kind of didn't make him a fan. But helped him understand why you would like this. What I also love about the novel is that it is, in many ways, not quite a defense of geekiness. But there's a respect for it. There's a saying that this is a subculture that exists and is useful to some people. And it can be taken too far. It's not necessarily a great thing all the time. But it is a really, really worthwhile endeavor for many people. Now, Junot Diaz's style can be a little difficult to follow sometimes. Partly because you do have multiple different people from different cultural backgrounds in the story. And they'll often pepper their dialogue with words from other languages. Now, it doesn't go as deep into infinite jest or anything. It's just an occasional word here and there. And I think those are usually translated with footnotes and such. But it can go pretty deep. I should also point out that there are some geek references in there that he does not explain. He will just mention some board games or some sci-fi movies or fantasy novels or whatever. And he won't tell you why these are relevant or why these are important. He'll just say, Oh, of course he read blah blah blah blah blah blah. Just like a sci-fi fan would kind of say to you. That's kind of all you get in the book. And so it can often be useful, as with a lot of books like this, to not take that at face value. To take those references and look them up and say, Okay, what was the relevance of this book? Why would somebody mention in passing, Oh, of course I've read Left Hand of Darkness or whatever. I sometimes find these sorts of literary novels somewhat impenetrable. Often they are a little too high concept for me. This was not the case for The Brief Wanderer's Life of Oscar Wilde. This is a book you can consume and just read through. There will be parts that are a little hard to follow because it is kind of dense and because he's throwing a lot of material at you. But it's not deliberately obtuse or complex. You can follow what is being explained to you very clearly. And for a novel that is simply trying to reconstruct and understand somebody through other people's stories about that person, even though they're all fictional, which is a pretty high concept thing, it's still quite, quite understandable. I found myself not having to flip back, not having to write down notes or things like that. It really flows surprisingly well. Again, literary novel requires a little more tension than a thriller. But yeah, this is one of those novels that I picked up and I was like, I'll give it a try and just devoured. And I look forward to devouring it again. It's a book I'd love to come back to occasionally. Because it gets it. The author understands what he's writing about and appreciates it. And if you go back and read about Junot Diaz, he has had his geeky sides in the past, even into the present. He understands. So that's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. If you're looking for an interesting book to read, something that's a little bit out of the norm, but also comprehensible, this is one of my go-to recommendations.