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Sto caricando le informazioni... La breve favolosa vita di Oscar Waodi Junot Díaz
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This is the Pulitzer Prize winning story by Junot Díaz who was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, featuring geek and social outcast Oscar de León and the Fukœ or curse that afflicts his family. The story begins with the woes of overweight, fantasy and game-obsessed Oscar and his frustrated attempts to get a girlfriend. Oscar tries everything, but the female sex either view him with complete contempt or as strictly friend material only. The book then moves to the life of his sister Lola and her difficult relationship with their authoritarian mother. It also shifts back to the 1950s in the Dominican Republic when their mother Belicia was growing up in the turbulent and frightening era of the Trujillo dictatorship. The family believe they are afflicted by a Fukœ or curse, meaning each of them are haunted by bad luck, accidents and doomed love affairs. On the positive side Díaz paints a picture of the Dominican Republic and it’s suffering under a cruel and bloodthirsty dictatorship. On the negative side, I became totally fed up with the complete monopoly of misogynistic feckless men, in both the storylines and the narratorship. The whole book is full of men who abuse women, beat them up, rape them, sleep around and consider themselves to be complete studs based on how many women they can shag. Somehow this toxic masculinity is always written off as the Dominican way. Sure, feel free to be a total jerk and man-whore who views women merely as conquests or holes to be filled, but don’t blame it on your culture. I began the story feeling sorry for Oscar, but by the end I couldn’t care less about his quest to get laid, as I was so put off by the too-cool-to-move tone of the narrator (who is supposed to be a reflection of Díaz himself) and his gross attitudes and behaviour towards women. Interesting book, not sure what was really going on with the main storyline but I learned a lot about the history of the Dominican Republic. (If you read this and don't know Spanish, get ready to use your translator a lot.) Can't see why it won the Pulitzer but maybe I missed something. Like 3.5 stars.
Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar’s coming-of-age is in some ways the book’s thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus. It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves. In doing so, he’s written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiÈ contenuto inHa come guida per lo studentePremi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
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 Fukœ-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. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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![]() GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:![]()
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The book tells of the fall from grace of an affluent family, starting in the present with the nerdy, obese titular character, his strong, rebellious sister, their sometimes overbearing mother, who we find was once rebellious and in love herself, and finally getting to their grandparents, whose lives were gradually destroyed by Trujillo. The immigrant experience is often written about, but it has such vitality here, and elements like the chapter on Oscar returning to the D.R. (“Oscar Goes Native”) were among my favorite in a book full of great chapters. Because of all its references and ideas this is a book that takes active effort to read, but I found it rewarding, and well worth it. (