The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a relatively recent and wildly popular entry into the canon of diaspora literature, a Spanish-inflected treatise on love, masculinity and the ways in which people deal with cruelty and tragedy. It raises issues of racism, feminism, governance and inability to change, whether on a personal level or a national one, all interspersed with a deeply personal language born of bilingualism and ingrained geekery.
Key Aspects of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Tone
Diaz's novel is a postmodern take on magic realism, a genre associated with Latin America and the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. Traditionally, magic realism is the...