So, I've been reading. That takes longer than watching a movie. A lot longer.
I just finished this one a few minutes ago so I don't quite have all of my thoughts on it in order or straightened out but I wanted to write at least a bit while it was still fresh. So none of this is really organized and some of it is thinking in progress.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is by Junot Diaz who is a Dominican-American immigrant author. His only other major publication (besides short stories in journals and etc) is Drown, a collection of short stories published in 1996. I like Drown a lot. But not in a way that I usually like books. It's definitely an academic like--I'm not going to read it for fun--but it's also not really a plot/character like. It's a stylistic like. The short stories are all extremely violent, for the reader, and not necessarily because of gruesome acts within the story. The language is violent (but not in a active verb, curse word, yicky descriptions way). There is Spanish strewn throughout the stories. I can read Spanish fairly well, have been doing so for a long time, and, at the very least, I can use a Spanish dictionary efficiently and effectively. That only gets you so far in Drown. Not only is this the Spanish from the Dominican Republic but it's the Spanish from the streets, slang and made up colloquialisms. They can't be translated. It's one of the most effective ways of getting a white American reader to understand the immigrant experience. You can't understand it. There's no way to look it up or even to ask someone because it's a word with only an instinctual translation. And that's violent for a reader--to be pummeled with words you can't know. Anyway, another reason I bring up Drown is that Yunior, the narrator for most of Oscar Wao, is a recurring character in the stories. In short, after 11 years of no new work from Diaz, I had high expectations for Oscar Wao and I'm not 100% sure they were fulfilled.
The book jacket (we all know how reliable those can be sometimes) says: "Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who 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 ancient curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still dreaming of his first kiss, is only its most recent victim--until the fateful summer that he decides to be its last. With dazzling energy and insight, Junot Diaz immerses us in the uproarious lives of our hero Oscar, his runaway sister Lola, and their ferocious beauty-queen mother Belicia, and in the family's epic journey from Santo Domingo to Washington Heights to New Jersey's Bergenline and back again. Rendered with uncommon warmth and humor, TBWLOW presents an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and the endless human capacity to persevere--and to risk it all--in the name of love."
First, I don't think anything should end with "in the name of love." I mean Diaz is a smart guy (teaches at MIT), why didn't he stop the silly book publishing people? Second, the curse isn't "ancient." It goes back three generations (including Oscar) to the grandfather he never knew. Third, this "ill-starred" love is just stupidity. Both important instances are those in which Oscar/Belicia proceed to ignore common sense and mess with the Dominican government (nasty people), the older during the reign of a dictator, for people they did not really know. Fourth, Oscar doesn't get his first kiss until page 294 of 331. Fifth, he doesn't so much "decide to be its last [victim]" as put himself in a stupid deadly situation. He's in no way defeating the fuku. No one has any idea about how to do that, if the curse even exists. Sixth, his mother was a beauty, but not a beauty-queen. Next, no one but one family member "perseveres"--Lola is the only one left standing in the end (her grandmother, maybe, but she'd old and showing it much earlier). They succumb to the fuku, their own foolishness, cancer, whatever you want to call it. But they succumb. And, finally, I don't buy that any of them did it all "in the name of love" (I mean, really, a cliche on the book jacket of what should be an important literary book). Belicia dies of cancer, no love involved there. She has an ill-advised relationship with an important member of the Trujillo regime and ends up sacrificing a lot but she gains a great deal more from the end of that relationship--a life in America and a husband (about whom we're never given any information other than he fathered Lola and Oscar and then left). Oscar dies of bull-headedness in my opinion (the same that got his mother in the disastrous mess with the regime) but, ok, there was "love" involved. But that's only after he's tried to kill himself and harbors real fantasies of trying again. So he's got some serious issues to work through. Lola sacrifices very little for love and ends up just fine and the same with the narrator/Yunior.
I'm not sure whether I like the book or not. There are some inconsistencies that concern me. The narrator's knowledge seems inconsistent to me. He uses the geek boy references that Oscar would know and use but Yunior is supposedly not that much of a geek, quite the player and a bit of a jock though apparently an English major (not apparent, though, in the narration--only in background info given). Also, there is information included that shouldn't be known and no source is given for it--what happened in a death camp (in the DR run by a government that did not keep records "like the Germans") to a man who his family was told was dead 14 years before he died and from whom no handwriting or books survive--from where exactly did that info come? And I don't care about Oscar (whose last name is really "de Leon" but a college joke about Oscar Wilde is bastardized via the Dominican accent to "Wao"). I know he's dead in the novel's present. The title tells me that much. But his life isn't so much "wondrous" and the narrator does little to make me care about him. I was much more interested in his sister (as is the narrator--he only becomes "friends" with Oscar because Lola asks him to look after Oscar while she's out of the country) and his mother, hell even the brief appearance of his grandparents and aunts interested me more. I did miss the linguistic violence of Drown. This is a much more innocuous book and the slew of geek boy references didn't have the same alienating effect as the untranslatable Spanish. Those references were fun--it's fun to hear a bad guy called a ringwraith (I also like the line: "one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away")--but they weren't the most effective thing really. I don't know. I liked them but I'm not sure they added as much as they could have to the story or characterization. I mean, you say "geek boy" and everyone gets it. Adding references to geek boy loves doesn't make him more or less of a geek boy. And since none of it is in Oscar's voice, the geek boy references seem odd coming from the narrator who isn't so much a geek boy as someone who has been briefly exposed to geek-boydom.
But for some reason the book intrigues me. It's not bad despite my litany of flaws. It's well written and I wasn't compelled to toss it aside, to relegate it to the "I'm not reading this" pile. I kept reading it and I'm more or less satisfied with the progress and ending, although I wish it has ended about 3 pages earlier than it did. I'm intrigued by the mythology of the mongoose that pops up as well as the repeated imagery of a man with no face (there's a story in Drown titled "No Face" that I'd like to revisit now). And I think it would be an interesting juxtaposition to Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (who is Haitian and friends with Diaz, his "querida hermana" according to the acknowledgments) because they both contain some brutal violence against women involving cane fields. But I'm still not sure about it. I'm going to have to think about it more.
Once last issue, I could have done without the 4 pages of acknowledgments. Really. Thank fewer people, it will mean more.
Someone should read it, though, and talk to me about it.
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