On Friday afternoon I finished reading “The Brief Life of Oscar Wao”, the debut novel by Junot Diaz, which also won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
From Publishers Weekly, a review by Matthew Sharpe will have to serve as a plot synopsis for my review:
A reader might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather. However, Junot Diaz’s dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and … victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue’s end, it’s clear that this story of one poor guy’s cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book’s pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. Even the presumed reader shape-shifts in the estimation of its in-your-face narrator, who addresses us variously as folks, you folks, conspiracy-minded-fools, Negro, Nigger and plataneros. So while Diaz assumes in his reader the same considerable degree of multicultural erudition he himself possesses — offering no gloss on his many un-italicized Spanish words and expressions (thus beautifully dramatizing how linguistic borders, like national ones, are porous), or on his plethora of genre and canonical literary allusions — he does helpfully footnote aspects of Dominican history, especially those concerning the bloody 30-year reign of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The later Oscar chapters lack the linguistic brio of the others, and there are exposition-clogged passages that read like summaries of a longer narrative, but mostly this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.
I cheat with this review as the synopsis. Though part of that was force. I couldn’t find anything that I liked in the much shorter variety. It all circled around Oscar and no one else. This review though tells of the depth of the story, that there are other figures that are as important and even make Oscar do what he does, and that it adds a history lesson of the Dominican Republic (or DR as it is usually referred to in the book). It also does it so much better then I could. I love writing reviews of the books I read, but I feel like a hack a lot of times, and sometimes the depth of a story or message goes over my head. (Though sometimes that due to the ineptitude of the author.)
Junot Diaz
So basically what I want to say is that I agree with everything that Mr. Sharpe said. It’s a great book, with so many levels to peel back, yet comes across as very readable, not something so high on itself that it can’t see past it’s own prose.
One thing that made me smile throughout reading this book was the language itself and the main character. It is great to see that the panel that awarded this novel the Pulitzer “get’s it.” They understand a good story, regardless the subject or language. To read references to famous sci-fi and fantasy novels/movies/games by the lead character like any geek/nerd would (my hand gets raised here, too) was astounding. It was done with the right tough. Not too much, not too little, just enough to make Oscar a complete nerd but not turn off other readers.
A great novel that lived up to the hype and my own interest before the hype.
Added bonus! Here is Stephen Colbert’s interview with Diaz from “The Colbert Report” on Wednesday, June 18.
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