About book The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007)
Meet Oscar de Leon, dubbed "Oscar Wao" by bullies who liken him to the foppish Oscar Wilde. Our Oscar is a fat, virginal Dominican-American teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunchbox to school, spends hours painting his Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, and who knows "more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee." If Nerd was a country, Oscar would be its undisputed king. Oscar is the kind of kid—sweaty, mumbles to himself, inevitably invades personal space, probably has bad breath—we would avoid on the subway. In Junot Diaz' debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, however, Oscar is the flame and we are the moths. An earnestly open-hearted protagonist, he draws us to him until we incinerate in the intensity of his character. He's a pitiful-but-hopeful loser we can all relate to, even the Prom Kings and Queens among us (who might just be the loneliest kids in school). The last time I was this absorbed by a fictional weirdo was in 1989 when John Irving's Owen Meany forced me--FORCED, I SAY!—to read his Prayer twice in rapid, thirsty succession. Oscar held me captive in much the same way with his sweaty, sticky fingers tightly gripping my attention. Let's return to Diaz for a moment. To use the words "Diaz" and "debut novel" in such close proximity is something of a joke. Diaz has been a middleweight figure on the literary scene for eleven years, based almost exclusively on his previous (and only) book Drown, a collection of interconnected stories which, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, chronicled the Dominican immigrant experience with a startling freshness. If you turn to the back flap of that 1996 book, you'll read an author bio which concludes with "He lives in New York City and is at work on his first novel." That was eleven years ago. To say that Oscar Wao was much-anticipated would be an understatement. Why the long wait? Tick off the reasons on your fingers: writer's block, the paralysis of sudden fame at a young age (Diaz was in his late 20s when the accolades started flooding in), working for years on an apocalyptic novel about the destruction of New York City which was eventually trumped by the sur-reality of 9/11, not seeing anything on the blank wall which stares back at you unblinking, you name it. Little of that matters now, except as an interesting footnote of trivia, because today we hold in our hands the solid, substantial Oscar Wao. For a first novel, it's an impressive triumph. Now back to Oscar. As the novel's title implies, this is the chronicle of Oscar's brief, candle-flame life and charts his quest, but rarely conquest, of girls. You see, not only is Oscar a Tolkein-loving, Star Trek-quoting, Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek, he's a horny geek whose tongue hangs out and eyes bulge in cartoon cones every time a pretty girl walks by. The only trouble is, as his friend Yunior points out, "Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber." Save for one incredibly happy encounter late in his life, Oscar's lust is unrequited, but he takes this as a matter of course because he believes his family is living under the cloud of an Old-World curse called fuku, brought to our shores, he believes, by Columbus. Despite wearing the family doom like a black, itchy sweater and meeting romantic rejection at every turn, Oscar optimistically journeys through the 1970s, "the dawn of the Nerd Age," Diaz writes. It's Oscar against the world and he glumly accepts his lot in life. "Everybody," he says at one point, "misapprehends me." As he grows older and retreats from his peers into the world of Lovecraft, Doc Savage, Asimov, Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Oscar begins to think his destiny is to be "the Dominican Tolkein." He spends countless hours holed up in his room writing science-fiction and fantasy tales. If Diaz had allowed, Oscar probably would have spent eleven years working on his masterpiece; but, as we're always reminded, this is a brief life. Oscar tries to make the most of it, even with the fuku hanging over his head. The novel is more than just a Nerd Epic, however. Diaz pulls out all the stops in an attempt to tell a all-encompassing story of immigration and assimilation. Oscar lives with his mother and sister in the ghetto of Paterson, New Jersey, and the novel is as much their story as it is his. We're just starting to groove with sympathy for fat little Oscar when Diaz suddenly shifts gears and takes us into the world of Lola, Oscar's beautiful, athletic sister who has a stormy relationship with their mother, Belicia, a "hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador." Then, before too many more pages have elapsed, we're deep in that woman's story, in a long section of the book called "The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral," where we learn what happened to her back in the Dominican Republic to make her so bitterly protective of her children. These chapters, along with the rest of the book for that matter, really are filled with heartbreak, a transmogrification of fuku that shapes the course of everything to come, from Oscar's obsession with Shazam to Lola's runaway teen saga. Diaz also proves to be something of a risk-taker. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao bravely assumes there is an audience of readers who will sit through a long novel in which the English and Spanish languages mingle without the author once stopping to translate the unfamiliar words. The gist of what the Spanglish phrases mean is pretty easy to pick up, and for those readers who absolutely have to know what guapa or chuleria mean…well, an English-Spanish dictionary is as close as the internet. Diaz also assumes his readers will come to the table with some knowledge of Dominican history, specifically the tyrannical regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and who, if Oscar is to be believed, was master of the fuku. Trujillo who? You know, the "portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery." If your mind is as blank as mine when it comes to the island's past, never fear: Diaz replays the highlights of Santo Domingo History 101 in footnotes which annotate the novel. Yes, footnotes. The novel is peppered with them, as any well-respecting Screed of Nerd should be. Diaz knows most of us don't know squat about Dominicans and, as in Drown, he brings us briskly into the light. (Pay attention to Trujillo, though, because he plays an important role in Oscar's destiny.) Diaz never lets the pace lag and his sentences remain fresh and sharp throughout. One woman is described with "eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had set"; later, Yunior describes how it feels to be mugged: "my guts feeling like they'd been taken out of me, beaten with mallets, and then reattached with paper clips." Through his wondrous use of language, Diaz brings the book alive and makes it tremble in our hands. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an epic in the truest sense and in its fat, endearing hero's chest beats a Homeric heart. Oscar leads us through his unflagging quest for happiness, while Diaz tumbles us through a century of Dominican history and shows us how the brief life of one lonely boy can epitomize the immigrant experience. This novel was well worth the decade-long wait.
How this book won the Pulitzer Prize AND the National Book Critics Circle is beyond me. It's terrible. Here's the review I wrote when it came out. I stand by this completely. If someone says they read this and liked it, punch them in the throat. (I'm kidding, naturally.)Review of Junot Diaz’s first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” published Oct. 7, 2007tImagine, if you will, that seven years after publishing "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Ernest Hemingway decided to expand his well-known short story into a 350-page novel. Imagine if, before Macomber is "accidentally" shot by his wife on that safari, Hemingway decided to pad the narrative with a couple hundred pages about Macomber's mother, sister, and grandfather -- tangents that only serve to betray the proper focus of the story, its title, and the reader's trust.That, in short, is what Junot Diaz has done with "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (Riverhead Books, $24.95) -- a short story he wrote for the New Yorker in 2000, and which, in novel form, devotes more pages to the title character's extended family (and it's so-called curse or fuku) than it does to the fat, girl-challenged nerdy writer who loves “The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and aspires to be the Dominican Tolkien. Diaz, now 38, burst on the literary scene in 1996 with his well-received collection of short stories, "Drown," which critics and readers both loved. I've been meaning to read it for some time, and when I learned he was coming out with a novel, I figured the timing was perfect: I'd sample his lone collection of short stories, get a flavor for his style, and then progress to the novel. Unfortunately, the library's sole copy has been checked out for weeks, so I didn't get to read "Drown" before experiencing "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which happens to be one of the most erratic, ill-conceived and annoying books I've ever encountered.The book begins with short-lived promise. We meet dorky Oscar as a high school sophomore living in Paterson, N.J., with his mother, Belicia; his sister, Lola; and his heroin-addicted uncle, who plays a minor, insignificant role. The mother had been born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. The kids' father, whom she met on the plane to the states, took off a long time ago, and the story of his flight from domesticity is about the only case of love-gone-bad that isn't described in excruciating detail in this book.Crazy love is the family's curse or fuku, which is the superstitious element of magical realism that threads through the novel."No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the (bleep) ever since," says the sometime narrator, Yunior, the onetime boyfriend of Oscar's sister, whose name and identity won't be revealed until halfway through the book, and for no other reason than Diaz wants to torture his readers. (That's the only reason I could glean, anyway.)So, Oscar's personal fuku is that he loves girls, but they don't love him. And basically, they don't love him because he doesn't look like Enrique Iglesias. To hear Diaz tell it, Oscar's the only Dominican who doesn't."Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn't have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn't play sports for (bleep), dominoes, was beyond uncoordinated, threw a ball like a girl. Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks. He wore his semi-kink hair in a Puerto Rican afro, rocked enormous Section 8 glasses…sported an unappealing trace of mustache on his upper lip and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded."Yunior goes on, "Perhaps if he'd been like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe (bleep) would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to."At this point, we don't who the narrator is or what his relationship to Oscar might be. Truthfully, wanting to know does help drag the reader through the novel. But learning the identity isn't ultimately rewarding; it's annoying.Early on, the forward momentum of the novel stalls and the narrative flashes back in time and focuses on Lola, the sister, and how she ran away from home in the 1990s; and then to the mother, Belicia, and how she was a star-crossed lover herself in the Dominican Republic. The mother's section of the book lasts 90 pages and covers the years 1955-1962. A wise reader would have quit the 335-page book at this point, because "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" had morphed into "The Bloated Family Background of Oscar Wao." But I read on, waiting for it to get better. Unfortunately, it never did, and the reasons seem clear.Not only is the narrative timeline all over the place, but important information -- be it dialogue or exposition -- is often relayed in Spanish. Now, I took two semesters of the language in college and yet I had no idea what characters were saying in many parts, because context didn't lend hints. If Diaz is aiming this book towards a bilingual audience, then so be it. But how difficult would it have been to translate the Spanish in footnotes? The book is already rife with footnotes anyway, which mainly serve to explain the history of the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Throw a gringo a bone.In describing how Belicia, Oscar's mother, had developed a brash attitude as a teenager (while living in the Dominican Republic with her adoptive mother, La Inca), Diaz writes, "Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed perished along with Beli's first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, pariguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre."Uh, no comprende, amigo?A lack of Spanish skills won't be the only thing that keeps you from enjoying this book. Beyond its organizational problems, the literary devices in play -- the magical realism, the comic book references, and the fat, supposedly lovable title character -- make the book feel derivative of Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay"), and "A Confederacy of Dunces."Towards the end of the novel, Yunior, the narrator, is describing Oscar's last great love, a semi-retired prostitute named Ybon. He says, "I know I've thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can't we believe that an Ybon can exist and that a brother like Oscar might be due a little luck after twenty-three years?"This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix."Too bad that offer came so late - on page 285. Do yourself a favor and take the red pill now. Return to the Matrix and don't read this book.
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In an interview I read (but can't seem to find) with Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son*, Johnson describes how the individual narratives of the people of North Korea were inseparable from that of their (then) Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. So too were the stories of those living in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorial leadership of Rafael Trujillo subsumed and intertwined with that of El Jefe (AKA “the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface”). Author Junot Díaz describes this in the pop culture trivia and Spanish-laced voice of our (sometimes) narrator, Yunior. “He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.” The sepulchral powers that shaped the life (brief, and wondrous) of Oscar Wao, however, were (are?) bigger and beyond those of any mortal. “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú Americanus, or more colloquially, fukú --generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” Fukú – intoxicating to consider, puts this story on a new vibration that's somehow fundamentally ineffable (which is just a fancy way of saying that I can't figure out how to describe it). As per usual, I'm not uncovering a hidden gem in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . To be honest, it might have sat on my shelf unread if it weren't for this being a brilliant book club pick, as its title had me envisioning some sort of “triumphant” tear-jerker. However, I did have a bit of fun with fukú in photoshop (which I'll have to off-set with a Zafa! series at some point). So, in lieu of coherent commentary, I'll leave you with some bits and pieces of that (the contents of which probably will make little sense if you haven't read the book, so, you know, read a book). ____________________________________________* Which, FYI, is yet another great book I recently read, and highly recommend, but haven't found the time to review.
—Mara
This is almost like (Llosa's) The Feast of the Goat: The Sequel. The central character Oscar and his sister are descendants of victims of the cruel three-plus decades of the Trujillo dictatorship (their grandparents, directly; their mother, indirectly). They do not remember the past. In fact, they do not know the past. But the past apparently has not forgotten them. They carry its curse, "fuku," and when Oscar falls in love, he only gets a brief taste of happiness by paying for it with his life.Like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman this also has footnotes. But whereas the former has footnotes seemingly only to satisfy Puig's certain idosyncrasy, this one by Junot Diaz has them out of necessity. It seems that unlike Llosa he finds it difficult to build up his story without these minute aide-memoire at the bottom of the pages, fearful perhaps that the reader wouldn't know what he's talking about without them. But what can we expect? Llosa is a master story-teller, with a Nobel under his belt, while Diaz only has a Pulitzer though he exhibits a lot of promise.Nevertheless, Oscar Wao is as enthralling and as well-told as Llosa's Goat. So it likewise deserves my highest praise.(now, by way of footnote, I say that to those who have not read Goat and Oscar yet, it is best if you read Goat first before reading Oscar...)
—Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly
I have tended to neglect the Latin American masters of magical realism because of foolish biases in expectation. For my taste I stubbornly clung to a preference for outright science fiction or full-fledged fantasy over some half-way order of things or a sporadic supernatural or otherworldly force of causality in a narrative. But I am changing my ways under the onslaught of talented writers who make the magical realism approach work well. Like with this one, where Diaz gets me onboard already in the prologue with the nameless narrator explaining how this book is a “fukú story”, an example of a sort of karmic curse playing out endlessly since it was given birth in the New World with Columbus’ landing in Hispaniola. The clencher for me was his sleight of hand with the following:It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.” In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.The tale that leads in this book is the life of Oscar at different times in his life. He is an overweight nerd who immigrated with his mother and sister from the Dominican Republic to Paterson, New Jersey, in the 60s. He has some nurturing and protection from his secretive mother and wild sister Lola, but his fatness, social ineptness, and geeky interests in comics, fantasy and sci fi, and, later, video games make it impossible for him to find love and assures he is an easy mark for bullies. We watch him develop, cringe over him as endless, fruitless crushes obsess him, and get hopeful over his throwing himself into writing as a sphere for success. As we follow him into college at Rutgers, where his sister studies, we can only be sad over how he has never grown up. But somehow Oscar is able to achieve a meaningful platonic relationship with a popular student he is smitten with, something his roommate has failed through his typical Don Juan type of pursuit. And what was simply a childish escape into the fantasy of comics, “Lord of the Rings”, and “Dune” becomes a perfect medium later in life when he must comprehend the cruel legacy of Trujillo’s reign on his family and people. Actually, we get this overlay from the beginning by the narrator, who seems to be channeling Oscar. Tucked into a footnote on page two, we make the acquaintance of the dictator who held supreme power over the DR from 1930-61: A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napolean-era haberdashery … He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.The overall thrust of Oscar’s story, which we can only guess will be brief and somehow wondrous, is interrupted by long interludes that paint the portraits of key members of his family’s lives. It will become clear that we cannot understand Oscar and that Oscar cannot become Oscar in isolation from that knowledge. His sister Lola runs away, experiences great passion and heartbreak, and gets in trouble before finally settling down. We follow the life of his mother, Belicia, who was even more a force of nature. She works in the with a bakery business while living under the strict but loving regime of an aunt, with no knowledge of who her real father. She is pretty and wild, and gets in trouble when she falls for the effete son of an evil military officer high in Trujillo’s power structure. She barely escapes with her life (a mystical mongoose, at least in her mind, had an important role to play). The next step is into the life of her father (Oscar’s grandfather), the surgeon and intellectual Abelard, a man blessed in the love of his wife and three daughters. How he stood up to the practice of Trujillo of taking and raping whatever teen daughter in his land that caught his eye is a true tale of superhero proportions. For Diaz to bear witness to this aspect of history through the tragedy of Abelard was powerful and disturbing. So easy to imagine fukú in action and that Belicia’s survival as some sort of miracle. Oscar in his twenties ends up teaching high school English in Paterson, and in his despair he seeks more of his roots and identity and comes to spend more and more time in DR on breaks or summers. He falls in love yet once again. This time he has some hope of reciprocation. But despite Trujillo being long gone, fuku still lives, and Oscar is brave in facing its forces. The hidden narrator emerges more clearly now as his friend from college and Lola’s intermittent boyfriend, Yunior, who has told us that his writing of the story is a form of counter-fukú, which he calls zafa. I was totally wowed (“Wao-ed”) by the craft and richness in this story, by the coming of age saga of both boy and mother, the immigrant experience of striving to fit in vs. need for cultural identity, and the pitting of the imagination against the real horrors of a corrupt state. I didn’t get a lot of the geeky references beyond Tolkien and Herbert and popular movies I had seen. That didn’t detract much. A lot of the Spanish interlacing in the book I wished I could have gotten more than what context revealed. One reader has made an annotated guide to these bottlenecks to full appreciation (http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/). I learned by internet surfing that it took about 10 years for Díaz to write the book after a successful volume of short stories called “Drown” (a free story from this called Edson, New Jersey is available). Yunior is a character in a lot of these and is the protagonist of his 2012 novel “This is How You Lose Her”. I like his voice and his struggles with his macho ways, so I aim to read it (and a science fiction novel under construction). The ironic, self-deprecating humor shown by both Yunior and Oscar alike is an outlook I love. In a joint interview with Díaz and fellow writer and friend Francesco Goldman in the Christian Scientist Monitor, Diaz shares a lot on his struggles to achieve what I find as a perfect balance of light and dark in his book:"Oscar Wao" more than any of my other works was a delicate balancing act – keeping the voice from becoming too funny or too bleak, too historical or too nerdish. Junot Díaz, by Nina Sundin
—Michael
