Oscar Cabral is a doughy, sci-fi loving virgin. His sister, Lola, is a tough, pragmatic survivor of her own rebellious youth, and his mother, Beli, is an even tougher survivor of her own romantic past and of the brutal and repressive Trujillo regime. The women are as resilient and capable as Oscar isn’t. Lola reinvents herself as the traditional American success story; Beli survives brutal violence and comes back kicking; but Oscar can’t even manage to kill himself effectively. The Carbral family has its origins in the restive Dominican Republic, and has since resettled in New Jersey, bringing with them plenty of baggage and a possible curse from their ancestral land. The Cabrals love hard, lastingly and disastrously, and the unlikely Oscar exemplifies this family trait most of all.

Narrated primarily by Yunior, Lola’s well-meaning but hopeless playboy suitor, the novel’s energetic and entertaining voice is perhaps its strongest element. Diaz writes with enthusiasm, sweeping the reader along through multiple generations, from the DR to Brooklyn to Jersey and back, with quick jumps down to footnotes which ground the reader in the Dominican history of which the narrator candidly assumes our ignorance. Junot Diaz is a solid writer, whose future work I won’t hesitate to pick up, but I wouldn’t number his book among my favorites, and I doubt it will stay with me long. Diaz has original voice down and handles his material with skill and authority…but I’m not sure the material he’s handling is anything much, and his characters are cartoonish types (particularly the women). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a fun read, but for me, it doesn’t get at anything that resonates, and I’m unconvinced it has much real depth despite the accolades it has received.

As someone who admires the writing of author Junot Díaz, it brings me great pleasure to share an excerpt from BOMB Magazine’s dynamic conversation between Díaz and “the inimitable” Edwidge Danticat. To no surprise, I will highlight the exchange that deals with process – offering insight(s) into the various practices and approaches of each author to the production of writing. The advantage of having a small, focused readership (if any) is the absence of a paralyzing kind of pressure to produce. For instance, I maintain a positive relationship to blogging largely due to the fact that I have creative control — I decide when to publish a post as well as the contents of each post. The often unreasonable demands and expectations of publishers and popular audiences can produce crippling writer’s block and/or encourage mediocre work. Of course, for some writers (artists, musicians) pressure mobilizes and motivates. There exist an infinite set of permutations. Beyond the expectations of others, we each have to battle our own set of fears (the voices in our heads) that keep us from finishing what we’ve started. In the words of Díaz, “I always start with the best intentions and then end up screaming.” I am interested precisely in what happens between these places (best intentions —> screaming). I enjoy/ed reading their thoughts, read on:

Edwidge Danticat: I think most folks would want me to ask you, those of us who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this book: What the heck took you so long?

Junot Díaz: What, really, can one say? I’m a slow writer. Which is bad enough but given that I’m in a world where it’s considered abnormal if a writer doesn’t produce a book every year or two—it makes me look even worse. Ultimately the novel wouldn’t have it any other way. This book wanted x number of years out of my life. Perhaps I could have written a book in a shorter time but it wouldn’t have been this book and this was the book I wanted to write. Other reasons? I’m a crazy perfectionist. I suffer from crippling bouts of depression. I write two score pages for every one I keep. I hear this question and want to laugh and cry because there’s no answer. What I always want to ask other writers (and what I’ll ask you) is how can you write about something so soon after it’s happened? What’s to be gained by writing about something—say, the death of a father and uncle, as you do in your new book, Brother, I’m Dying — when the moment is close?

Edwidge Danticat: There are several factors for me. The first is that I’m totally compulsive. If something is on my mind, writing-wise, I have do it and do it in the instant. I have to at least put down a first draft. Otherwise, I am so afraid I will lose it. Like you, I live with the eternal fear that I am not supposed to be doing what I’m doing. Who do I think I am to be writing books and shit, as you might say. So I write when the moment is close so it won’t slip away. Writing is also the way I process things and when I am done with a piece I feel a lot closer to understanding the subject.

…

Edwidge Danticat: Finally, in spite of Oscar’s brief life, the narrator’s life—writing-wise—ends on a happy note. Yunior says, “These days I write a lot. From can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. Learned a lot from Oscar. I’m a new man, you see, a new man, a new man.” Is Junot Díaz a new man?

Junot Díaz: I wish. I’m happier, no doubt about it, and less devoured by my fears, but I still have no handle on my talent. I don’t know how to make it work. I don’t write with any regularity or joy. I fear that it might take me another eleven years to write another book. But I did finish a novel that was threatening to break me, and I finished it in a manner that I feel reflects my hard work, and this finishing has been one of the happiest accomplishments of my life. Through all those years I never did think I would ever finish Oscar Wao, so the fact that somewhere inside me I found the strength to do what I thought was impossible…it almost makes me believe that one day I will be like Yunior: a new man, a new man.

:: Read the full interview HERE ::

Took the scioness to storytime at the library the other night.  Glancing over the paperbacks for sale, I spotted Middlesex, by Jeffery Eugenides, Atonement, by Ian McEwan, and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.  Picked ‘em up for a buck a pop.

Not being much up on non-ebook contemporary lit, I haven’t read anything by any of these writers before.

Cage match!

Any votes for reading order, best to worst?

There’s a first time for everything, so, we’re linking to O Magazine:

That’s my tale in a nutshell. Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.

That’s Junot Diaz, summing up the happy ending to his 10 years writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The last sentence seems to sum up a generally good reasoning for picking any profession. Read the rest of the brief article, here.

Written by Junot Diaz, this collection of short stories is a cohesive dive in the psyche of an immigrant dealing with growing up and adjusting to a new culture. When reading this, it feels almost as a autobiographical affair on Diaz’s part due to the consistent use of a first person narrative through the short stories.

Though some may feel Diaz may have waded to much in   the waters of drug use and dealing, alcohol, and sex. It is inevitable to deny how he successfuly creates a backdrop of energy that rushes through each story and draws a sharp contrast to the heartfelt reflections of the main character’s relationship with his family and the society he has been placed in.

This collection presents to the reader a reality that many may refuse to acknowledge and in doing so, creates an edge to the writing that makes it irresistible and emotionally arresting.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz

Successful authors, it seems to me, figure out what they know and what they’re good at–and then they keep writing it. Over and over again. It’s the same story every time, but you keep coming back to it because they’re so good at this one story. Milan Kundera has one story (post-communist Czech couples have love affairs and try to piece together their lives), Jhumpa Lahiri has one story (Indian immigrants feel misunderstood), even my beloved Virginia Woolf has one story (Can people, isolated as they are, ever find unity?). Junot Diaz has his one story, too: Tortured family sagas of Dominican immigrants.

But he’s great at it. He writes with charm and humor and you keep coming back, even though you’ve read it all before. I was enchanted by Diaz after reading Drown, his celebrated collection of short stories; he blew me away. But when I started The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I began to get the uncanny sense that I’d met these people before.

Even if you haven’t read Drown, you have at least met Oscar before. He was that socially inept, fat kid who lurked in the hallways of our high schools and sat alone at a table in our American History class at our universities. He always ate alone. He was always reading books with galaxies on the covers and playing games on his computer. We gravitate to Oscar and his plight because we recognize it. Diaz’s craftiness lies in his ability to lure you to care about Oscar, and hope desperately for his lot to improve. But it doesn’t. Diaz was never one for sugar-coating reality.

I wasn’t initially sure what to make of the device of footnotes throughout the novel. I’ll admit I expected to be annoyed by them, but they were often the most amusing paragraphs in the book, and it’s Diaz’s way of giving you the background of Dominican history that he wants you to have without being pedantic.

Oddly enough, Drown felt more whole to me than this novel. But it did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize. And I don’t regret reading it; meeting the troubled Wao family, harking from a long line of family unluckiness (or was it Trujillo’s curse?), worth it.

READ IF: You love a good, tortured family saga about immigrants in America.

A personal note: Finally revived this blog. I am going to try to post every Friday, and perhaps give it broader focus on media happenings, as well as what I’ve been learning in my time at UNC Press.

AUTUMN MEDITATIONS

I’ve been really struggling with Junot Diaz’s new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s half finished and I’ve given up on it. Diaz’s debut collection, Drown, is one of the best short story collections I have ever read. It ripped my head off and smashed it back together like a broken egg. Up there with Chekhov if not better. I don’t think there is any other modern book (besides perhaps Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor which is a masterpiece) that has quite had that effect on me.

In contrast Oscar Wao is totally over written. The beauty of Drown was in its simplicity. It was raw, bleak, funny and dark as hell. It was a pleasure to read, and when I finished it I turned right back to the beginning and started again.

Drown was a real antidote to some of the magical realism novels I had been reading at the time, namely Pedro Paramo, House of Spirits, Paradiso and The Crystal Frontier. Like Pedro Juan Gutierrez Diaz completely rejected this form and wrote stripped down bare knuckle prose. His characters and dialogue were completely believable, and the situations were just as applicable to life growing up in the North of England as they were in the Domincan Republic. ‘Ysrael’ is the sort of story you’d expect from a Shane Meadows film.

But Oscar Wao is such a let down. I feel that Diaz has messed with his voice by including too many random footnotes and using language that is hard to decipher even for an English Literature student. It’s as though Diaz has read The Waste Land and decided to go down the experimental path. I was really surprised to see that this novel was in the top 10 books read in the New York Times’ ‘Most Read On The Subway Poll’. So it obviously has some followers.

As I’m currently reading manuscripts for a publisher – in my head I want to find a writer who can produce something of Drown’s energy crossed with the desolation of Morvern Callar. Or the beauty of Tanizaki or Akutagawa with the ferocity of Niall Griffiths. I’m maybe setting myself an impossible task but I’m sure at some point I’ll trip over the Holy Grail…

And, Meanderings was right, not to toot our own horn. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao really was the best book of the decade, experts bedamned.

The Millions is counting down the 20 best books of the century (“so far,” as they add). They’re only halfway through, and I’m curious what the top 10 will look like, because my favorite book came it at No. 11.

It’s not easy to explain why I liked Oscar Wao so much. But one reason is the ability to weave lines like this:

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven- where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with- he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he’d jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

And this:

Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.

And, finally, this:

Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
But your yourself sucks!
It is lamentably all I have.

Into something that actually made sense. Go read it – it’s got a money-back satisfaction guarantee from me.

Oh, and let me know what book’s been better than this.

Update: The people side with Meanderings.

“Hers was the generation that would launch the revolution, but which for the moment was turning blue for the want for air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same.”

– Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

Oh my paperback fools, it’s been far too long since I graced you with an update of my reading life.  I apologize!  Alas, it’s been an obsessive week of reading, with two fabulous books consuming my every waking minute (and then some).  In fact, my computer is acting a little slow so I’m still reading during the minutes it takes to catch up with itself.

Let me begin by saying how truly wondrous Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao really is.  Words really can’t describe how I felt about this book–it was that good.  I knew it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  That’s why I bought it.  I knew it was supposed to be good.  That’s why I chose it rather than the other books on the B&N display table.  Little did I know how good it was going to be.

Now, let me start by saying I know nothing about the Dominican Republic.  I can’t tan in my lovely suburban backyard, and so I can’t even pretend to know what it’s like living in the ghettos of New Jersey as a dark-skinned minority.  Besides the “ghetto nerd” blurb on the back cover of the book (which made me smile), I didn’t expect to relate to much in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Now, I expected the writing to be superb and the story brilliant.  Those expectations were filled.  Diaz’s voice shifts throughout the novel, jumping from the story of the supremely nerdy Oscar, to his sister, his mother, even the grandparents killed by Dominican dictator Trujillo in the 1940’s–the original sin that cursed the de Leon family for generations.  Each family member must confront their handicaps in order to assert something of themselves–claim whatever shreds of love, acceptance, independence and success they can before it’s inevitably wrenched from their grasp.

It’s a powerful story, and a hilarious one at that.  Oscar’s love of science-fiction, unbelievably nerdy role-playing games and Lord of the Rings trivia (the sign outside his college dorm room says “Speak, friend, and enter”…in Elvish) is worth more than few laughs (self-conscious ones, on my part).  Plus, you never can tell who the narrator is but the random footnotes are priceless and an interesting way to construct narrative.  But what really surprised me was how intimately I became involved in the story.   There were some truly heart-wrenching parts, and I felt my entire self  consumed by this story.  I found myself dwelling on it, remembering random passages, at odd moments during the day.  I couldn’t shake it.  But what I loved the most was the writing and Diaz’s language.  It’s crude–there’s  a lot of cursing.  How else do you think they talk in the ghetto?  But then, there would be one sentence that I would stumble over.  Not because it didn’t make sense or was poorly written.  And not because I was having trouble keeping up with the diction and narrative rhythm.  I’ve read a lot of difficult texts in my day, and I pride myself on being able to fall into narrative patterns quite easily.  But Diaz tripped me up.  These sentences would be so brilliantly constructed, and so insightful–penetrating to the very depths of what it means to be human–and I would scramble to re-read them, unable to believe what I had just read.  They surprised you like that.  I would then read these sentences again and again, savoring them slowly and enjoying their genius. For someone who doesn’t do that enough, it was amazing.

Upon finishing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was ready to keep on reading.  Unlike the Lord of the Rings–books I couldn’t let go–Oscar Wao ended just where it should, leaving me satisfied and ready to move on.  So I began Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, a book I’ve had lying around from my trip to New York.  It was a thick hardback, and from the description seemed like enjoyable high-brow chick lit with a college setting.  And so far, that’s what it is.

Admission follows the life of Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan, who’s neat little life is quickly becoming unraveled.  She has to face her past, confront who she really is, decide if her life at 38 is really where she wants to be….yada yada yada.  It’s all pretty contrived and easily predictable, but I don’t mind.  Actually, I’ve become scarily addicted to this book.  It took a few chapters–there was a lot of nonsense at first about Portia visiting two very different schools and giving presentations on Princeton.  You know, plot stuff.  Then, she and an old friend from Dartmouth get it on in the hotel, brought together by some unexplainable but very irresistable desire.  Oh yeah.

The rest of the plot unfolds in bits and pieces–Korelitz likes to reveal things very slowly–such as Portia is actually in a sixteen-year relationship with an Englishman, but they’re not married (you won’t learn why for another 200 pages).  Portia conveniently forgets about the tryst in the hotel until the Englishman reveals he has cheated on her, another woman will be having his child, and he’s leaving Portia for this other woman.  Dun dun DUN! There are plenty other emotion-heavy revelations like these scattered pretty evenly throughout the story, and they’re all equally as satisfying.  My favorite character is the Dartmouth lover, John–a man who doesn’t and will never exist.  However,  Korelitz has happily created John for women like me, women who like reading about: compassionately good guys, English teachers, men who adopt Ugandan children by themselves at 25, and (of course) men who are hot in bed.  Don’t forget, John’s also been secretly pining for Portia since their days at Dartmouth, biding his time teaching, raising his adopted son and passing in an out of non-serious relationships until the very day Portia walks back into his life.  BAM, it’s literary magic.

Now, as you can see, I’m focusing solely on the book’s romantic element, because I think that’s where it’s strongest.  All the information on the college admissions process (the author was a part-time reader of Princeton applications) is interesting, especially if you’re applying to college yourself.  I’m not, so most of the time it seemed like overkill.  The soul-searching, life-changing bit…well, you can read it here and it’s just as believeable as it is anywhere else.  I’m personally plowing through these lengthy monologues for the next scene with John, the wonder-man.  Other than that, the prose is a bit dense at times: it can be repetitive and annoying, and sometimes you wonder if people actually think things through that extensively.  Korelitz attempts some “real” teenage dialogue at one point, which is full of way too many “likes” for my taste (hey, I was only a teenager a short 3 years ago).  But you know what, dense prose or unbelievable men aside, I’ve been reading this book obsessively since I started it two days ago.  I couldn’t fall asleep for four hours last night thinking of it.  That, my friends, is a good book.

For someone who has often wanted to become a person with no history, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a crushing tale of  the self, a heartbreaking bit on geekdom, the inescapable social unit called family, a nation’s becoming and unbecoming, US-backed dictatorships, diaspora and beyond. 

Though less so if, like in this case, it’s going to be narrated by someone who ought to be a rockstar or a pop culture journalist, or someone who can comfortably tell the tale of national amnesia without the readers actually vomiting their lunch.

I bought the book because of my friends (they have that hold on me, the literary kind), and because much has been said about this Mr. Diaz, who actually looks dapper on the back cover photo. It is beyond me now to say something useful about the book, something that would delve on its literariness, but from page one onwards I was able to taste the violence and grief and despair in my mouth.

Oscar’s sister Lola puts it so sadly yet ruthlessly, “If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.” No fuku, no supernatural Trujillo, just life as you have it.

And there’s Oscar, the kind of sensitive, well-meaning guy geek who broke my heart to smithereens yet chose to deal with the whole fuku thing until the end, who, in his moment of catharsis or something, knew there’s life as it is and life as you decide it to be.

Now I can’t wait to get my hands on Drown and be seducted by Diaz’s prose all over again.

I saw Junot Diaz on The Colbert Report when The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out. And the guy is a bona fide geek. Watching him and Colbert riff on Tolkiennish stuff was great fun, so the non-nerdishness of the book surprised me. It was kind of like Contemporary Literature for SF fans.

I’d been under the impression that it would all be focusing on Oscar, this Dominican-born American-raised nerd. And that’s how it starts. But after a section with more Jack Kirby and Mordor and Planet of the Apes references than you’d catch it shifts and you’re dealing with his sister, and you lose the narrator and I was a bit disappointed. But. The narrator comes back (and becomes a character in his own right) even as the books delves back into the family’s fuku from the D.R. and by the time the nerd-talk resumes I was okay with its absence.

And you know, poor Oscar de Leon is a pretty sympathetic character for the kind of geek I am.

This past Wednesday, Junot Díaz addressed the 2009 Helen and Philip Brecher New Student Forum, a Brandeis orientation tradition. His novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was chosen as summer reading for incoming freshmen at the University. In anticipation of his address, he sat down for an interview with the school newspaper. Here are some excerpts and the link to the interview.  

JustArts: Your first book, Drown, was a collection of short stories published to wide acclaim. Was there a sense of expectation afterwards as to what your next work would be? Did that contribute to the subsequent writer’s block?
Junot Diaz: I wanted to write a novel. What it was about wasn’t clear, but I wanted to write a novel for sure. It just happened to take 11 years. I’m sure the expectations didn’t help but that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was that I was too hard on myself and on my book.
JA: In the 11-year span between the publication of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you’ve mentioned that you wrote a lot of unsuccessful material. Is all of that related to what would become Oscar Wao or your upcoming novel? What other kinds of ideas did you pursue?
JD: All of it was for versions of Oscar. All of it terrible.
JA: Were the stories about Oscar and Trujillo always intertwined in your mind from the very beginning? Did Yunior always narrate the tale?
JD: Yes, Oscar in some ways was the anti-Trujillo. And Yunior was always the narrator for reasons that are in my opinion essential to the book.
JA: Part of Oscar’s loneliness stems from his total isolation as this Dominican ghetto-nerd. If he had grown up with the Internet, do you think meeting and interacting with other fanboys would have made him less lonely? Could he have found some of the intimacy or connection he so craved?
JD: Oscar’s loneliness runs deeper than the non-networked ’80s. Oscar is a victim of a society, a culture that has losers and winners and his love for a “useless” art form and his atypical masculinity all helped to marginalize him as well.

For the interview go to http://media.www.thejusticeonline.com/media/storage/paper573/news/2009/08/25/Arts/Diaz-Dissects.oscar.Wao.Success-3756547.shtml

As a follow-up to my post about the movie Julie & Julia, I would like to share with you The Advocate’s interview of the movie’s producer, Nora Ephron, in which she answers questions about Julia Child’s homophobia and closeted actors/actresses in Hollywood.

I must admit that I never knew that Julia Child was a notorious homophobe (remember, I knew little about her before I saw the movie). Nevertheless, I do not think that this information should discourage people from seeing the movie, because the movie portrays not the “real” Julia Child but rather Powell’s idealization of her. In fact, after spending the entire movie lionizing Child as this perfect being, Julie arrives at the harsh realization that the *real* Julia Child could be a huge bitch! 

Some queers would take great issue with my support of a movie that glorifies a bigot, but I hold people up to the standard of their times, not to the standard of our times. I know many people would disagree with this stance. Nevertheless, I do not believe that we should refrain from reading Shakespeare because of his misogyny, Jefferson because of his support of slavery, or Kant because of his racism. Rather, I think we should endeavor to understand these people in the context of their times and as incredibly accomplished yet also profoundly flawed individuals, because we cannot help but recognize and enjoy genius where it exists, despite its disappointing flaws. I turn to a line from Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to illustrate this point. In this passage, the narrator reveals Oscar’s reaction to his idol J.R.R. Tolkien’s racism: 

He read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and greatest comforts since he’d first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favorite librarian had said, Here, try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy but the line ‘and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls’ and he had to stop, his head and his heart hurting too much (307).

While our heroes may disappoint us with their myopic social consciences, we still try and love them despite their flaws. Nevertheless, when a movie tries to portray a character of genius, it should endeavor to portray the character in his or her entirety: no human being is without complexity, especially in regards to his or her morality. And it is on this point that I can fault Julie & Julia for eliding an important aspect of a pre-eminent American cultural icon.

I’ll tell you the truth, straight-up:

Hypatia Belicia Cabral de Leon — “Beli” for short — haunted me in a dream. It was this crazy impactful noir-reality anxiety dream. I was in another place, a feverish island that was not called the USA, where I was a tourist. I took a wrong turn, and soon enough a mugger was beginning the dance of our traditional transaction by shooting me in the ankle. And there in the sugar cane field, in the dream, while my mind began to attempt to break down the complexity of my colonially touristic intentions and fears, I saw something. It was fast but unmistakable, and it was the spirit of a proud, hurt girl, who later became a hurtful mother, who later was finally whupped by the invisible beatings of her very own cells — that ultimate thug Cancer. I’m not giving anything away by telling you that. The girl was Beli, who is the mother of Oscar “Wao” de Leon in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

For the past couple years, critics and literary types have been drooling over Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This is one of those novels that, by the time it comes out in paperback, has three pages of praise-filled review quotes and blurbs stacked at the front of the book before you even get to the title page. “Genius” is a very common word on these pages; “revelatory,” “groundbreaking,” and “masterpiece” all repeat, too. I’m not sure what to make of all that.

I have read a few short stories by Junot Díaz. I’ve heard good things about his writing from all sides; I know he does great work here in the Bay Area every summer with VONA, a workshop for writers of color, and for that I respect him. But my usual approach when faced with a title that comes with such copious praise is to rebel, to not read the book at all or else to counter with “it’s not all that.” (Yes, I should probably work on that.) However, once I do start a book, I always try to give it the respect it deserves until it earns otherwise. So. Let’s talk about the dream some more.

As in the novel, in my dream Beli is not the “main character,” but her story takes over. In my sleep I relived remnants of the scene in which the fearless, attitude-throwing, newly pregnant 16-year-old is beaten and presumably raped to within an inch of her life by a group of goons courtesy of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. As Dungeons-and-Dragons loving Oscar would say years later, she must have come within a only one or two hit points of her life. (The occasional violence in the book is impeccably written — just detailed enough so that you know and can see the severity but also not even remotely voyeuristic or exploitative.)

In my dream I didn’t actually see Beli, although I’d read her and what happened to her only hours earlier when I was awake. I saw instead what she  saw, in those crazy minutes or hours before her unlikely survival: I saw a spirit in the fields, a man with no face springing up in a split-screen jump-cut from earth beneath the cane stalks to arise, a standing scarecrow of Bad. I saw a bad spirit, in the fields, I said to my sweetheart when I awoke scared. Because, well,  yeah. I’m as lily-white as the sand beneath the Caribbean sea, and even I know it too, to be true, as told by Junot Díaz: fukú americanus.

The fukú is the curse that hangs over the family of Oscar “Wao” De Leon, the hopelessly nerdy and unlucky-in-love title character in Díaz’s somewhat over-hyped but really good novel. It hangs over the entire island of the Dominican Republic, actually, and its entire diaspora, and possibly everyone who’s ever entered or left any place that has ever known colonization.

The premise of the novel is this: there’s this family in the Dominican Republic. Because of some things having to do with the horrendous and epic reign of Trujillo, the family becomes American. It’s a big sprawling tale that spans love, death, politics, geography, and pop culture oddities, and it’s told in different sections through the eyes of the different characters themselves.

We  start with Oscar’s world, the bleak sci-fi-buffeted reality of growing up an “un-Dominican” Dominican dude in Paterson, New Jersey in the 80s and 90s. (Because he’s such a nerd and so not a ladies’ man, Oscar is always having to tell people, no, really, soy dominicano!) Then the story breaks sharply and moves on to Oscar’s sister Lola’s 1980s teenagerdom, then we veer all the way back to the island for his mother Beli’s heartbreaking pre-diaspora life in Santo Domingo. Soon a few more switches back up to Oscar and Lola’s stories, and then back to the origins of the fukú: Oscar’s grandfather’s tragic undoing at the behest of that same imperialist fucker, El Jefe.

The narrator is, ostensibly, Yunior, a fantastically voiced sometimes-boyfriend of Lola who peppers his talk with Lord of the Rings references and footnotes that draw Lord of the Rings parallels explaining the low-down on twentieth-century Carribean history for those of us readers who may not know what that’s really all about. Yunior, however, is a device by which Diaz can go very closely into the perspectives of his various characters. He’s just the scribe in this epic Modern Tragedy. Through him we access the interiors of each of the characters (some more successfully than others– I never really felt like Oscar became clear to me, ultimately.) But the characters are solid and smart, the stories are great and the writing undeniably prolific. And Beli, of course, haunted me.

However, something kind of keeps needling me about the form of the novel. I’m always on the fence when it comes to circular narration. Sometimes I feel like a writer isn’t letting me in when they switch perspectives so frequently, like I wish the author could just pick a main character and have the balls to stick to that person’s story for a whole novel. But I also think that it is one of only a few non-hierarchical approaches to narrative that have lasted in contemporary literature, as well as an interesting way of jumping around in a story that lends intrigue and complexity to a novel’s structure and content. Some parts do certainly shine brighter in Oscar Wao’s epic family adventure. But in this case, I think the hop-scotching narration is actually really appropriate. In its detached messiness, it somehow begins to hint at the weird and wondrous experience of diaspora, of displacement and disappointment and the totally ridiculous way in which the little private things you do can threaten even the biggest, baddest boss out there. And Oscar’s life is indeed brief, and possibly wondrous… and certainly worth checkin’ out.

So, if anyone out there is reading these book reviews, what do y’all think of the literary trope by which authors write in the first-person perspective (or very close third-person) of many different characters in the novel? Or even switch time periods in an extreme fashion (I also keep thinking of Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, in which the narrative skips about 30 years halfway through). Is it a trick? A cop-out? A brilliant subversion of narrative norms? Tell us in the comments!

Hello!

I’ve decided, after being asked by an editor at Abrams Image (publisher of lovely art books) what science fiction and fantasy he should be reading, and after many conversations too unremarkable to convey at length by people who dismiss sci-fi but would probably enjoy it, and after a re-read of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which is itself wondrous), I’ve decided to start a project on this blog.

Twice each week (usually on Tuesday and Saturday), I’ll post a sentence from a work of science fiction or fantasy that belongs to a book worth reading, and a little on why you ought to read it.

This is not a definitive list, nor an attempt to create a canon. What it is, is a quick demonstration of the quality of writing that’s out there. And despite my disavowing the whole canon thing, I’m also going to take the opportunity to include works that aren’t generally thought of as science fiction or fantasy, or works that are that come from authors who don’t think of themselves as writers of either. We don’t have a really good word yet for imaginative literature (people have tried labeling it fabulism, and speculative fiction, and sci-fi, and so on, here in the States, and none of it really works, and imaginative literature is on the mark but too much of a mouthful), but I’m including everything that belongs under the wider umbrella.

By the end, I hope this list will expose literary readers to sf/fantasy they should consider, sf/fantasy readers to literary fiction they should consider, to both groups, some classics they may have missed (or should re-read), and to people who don’t read as often, books that they might get something out of, which will ideally induce them to pick a couple up and have a go.  And I hope some of you will suggest things you think I should read.

Today’s sentence is from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2004):

A great magician has said of his profession that its practitioners “… must pound and rack their brains to make the least learning go in, but quarrelling always comes very naturally to them,” and the York magicians had proved the truth of this for a number of years.

First, the quote-within-a quote speaks to the reader.  It feels true.  It’s philosophical, but not in an intrusive way.  In my case, I was reminded of how I have trouble retaining little details, and also of how, when there’s a cyclist who wants to blow past people on a crowded street, I want to give him a flying tackle. But I shouldn’t, and don’t, tempted as I may be to dive into one of those Critical Mass twerps.

Next, the sentence hints at a wider conflict among the York magicians.  It turns out there’s a lot more going on in the story than their academic infighting.  Susanna Clarke creates a wonderful alternate history of England (the novel is set during the Napoleonic Wars), and skillfully uses magic as both a multi-level metaphor and an engrossing part of the world she creates with her novel.  I find her writing elegant, and the book’s a page-turner.  The first time I read it, I plowed through its thousand pages in eight hours of riding the bus to and from Boston.

So if you’ve not read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it’s well worth your time and energy.  When you’re done, feel free to discuss with other readers (or fire off a missive) in the comments section below.

You’ll find this in the fantasy section of your local bookstore.

I just finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.  I tell you what, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in ages. I’d put it in my top ten, along with Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon, and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, anything by Edwidge Danticat, Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Stephen Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer,  John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

The story of Oscar Wao got me thinking about family history–how could it not–so after the good cry that ensued at the end of that book, I pulled out the history my grandfather wrote for the family before he died. My grandfather served as a tank mechanic/operator in the Italian army during WWII and was captured by the British and held as a POW in northern Africa for 3 years. His recounting of that time period is most vivid. He writes about prisoners building lighter and transistor radios from scraps. My grandfather even found a way to bring electricity to his tent–he was in charge of the camp’s vehicle maintenance and drew power from vehicle batteries on the sly. He remembers the personalities of his fellow prisoners and the small kindnesses of some British officers. Great stuff. I wish everyone would write a personal history before they died, and this has nothing to do with fiction, of course, rather a desire that a work of fiction ignited…

When the writer Junot Diaz came to Fordham University this spring, he wore old jeans and a hoodie and swore more than Junior, the profane sometime narrator of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He was funny, distracted, self-deprecating, self-indulgent, and brilliant. He kept trying to get off the stage, saying he was only going to read a little, only going to take a few questions. But alone at the podium, he acted out short passages of his novel and talked eloquently, without notes, about being a novelist.

And one thing Diaz said in particular struck a chord in me.

“The fact that my novel isn’t autobiographical doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply personal,” he said, answering a question he said he gets a lot, about whether Oscar Wao is based on his own life. “This is the power of art: to take a complete lie – fiction – and produce inside people a complete relationship to it. When a novel works, it creates an emotion of profound connection with the reader. You love it with your whole being. Because these emotions are real, it creates an analogue [within the reader]: the novel must be true.”

This, I think, is at the heart of the impulse to write – and read – a novel. It’s what writers strive to do:  immerse the reader in a dream world that seems so real, and rings so true, that it echoes or reflects their own experience; it reveals and illuminates motivation and parses emotion; it expresses the inexpressible.  It is as real as life.

Lots of beachy (read: going-to-be-movies) books on the list but enjoyable nonetheless. A welcome break from the required English lit major reading of the academic year.

Up next: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Suggestions welcome!

click here to jump to this week’s chapter

BOOK REVIEW :: BY KEVIN WILDER

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacle growing out of your chest.”

Though The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not brief (335 pgs.), it is wondrous, and has a lot to say about life. Of course there’s also a lot of Oscar de Leon (over 300 lbs worth). It felt like a whirlwind ride, which is funny, because when I reflect on the experience I can only remember learning about the hypersensitive kid’s troubles with girls, and becoming Dominican Republic’s answer to Tolkien.

Junot Diaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel speaks about the mysterious fuku curse that’s followed Oscar’s family around for years, in both the D.R. and America. We meet a handful of characters along the way, and see how their portions of the story fit (or fail to fit) in the larger whole of the fuku curse and Oscar’s life. After the first 100 pages I was wishing we could stay on Oscar or his sister Lola, but further into the story came Yunior (our protagonist’s roughneck roommate, Lola’s sometimes-boyfriend, and probably my favorite narrator of all).

At about halfway Diaz’s storytelling became a challenge to follow, but his intense energy and amazing sentences kept me going. There was enough irreverent humor and wit to carry me through the liberties he took with grammar usage. He’ll switch from English to Spanish to slang (non-Spanish speakers beware), and as is the case with writers like Cormac McCarthy, he chooses to abandon dialogue punctuation completely. Diaz likes to use footnotes that tie in historical facts we probably wouldn’t know, and also mentions himself from time to time, just in case we’re forgetting it’s a work of fiction we’re reading.

If my review of this book is failing to jell, it might be because I’m still struggling to make sense out of it myself. I want to love the story more, not only because so many others seem to, but because there’s so much in the language to admire and appreciate. Maybe a re-read will transpire at some point, assuming I’ll become a more fluent Spanish-speaker.

Cross-posted at Some New Trend:

Though #28 is not brief (335 pgs.), it is wondrous, and has a lot to say about life. Of course there’s also a lot of Oscar de Leon (over 300 lbs worth). It was a whirlwind ride, which is funny, because when I reflect on it I can only remember learning about the hypersensitive kid’s troubles with girls, and becoming Dominican Republic’s answer to Tolkien.

Junot Diaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel speaks about the mysterious fuku curse that’s followed Oscar’s family around for years, in both the D.R. and America. We meet a handful of characters along the way, and see how their portions of the story fit (or fail to fit) in the larger whole of the fuku curse and Oscar’s life. After the first 100 pages I was wishing we could stay on Oscar or his sister Lola, but further into the story came Yunior (our protagonist’s roughneck roommate, Lola’s sometimes-boyfriend, and probably my favorite narrator of all).

At about halfway Diaz’s storytelling became a challenge to follow, but his intense energy and amazing sentences kept me going. There was enough irreverent humor and wit to carry me through the liberties he took with grammar usage. He’ll switch from English to Spanish to slang (non-Spanish speakers beware), and as is the case with writers like Cormac McCarthy, he chooses to abandon dialogue punctuation completely. Diaz likes to use footnotes that tie in historical facts we probably wouldn’t know, and also mentions himself from time to time, just in case we’re forgetting it’s a work of fiction we’re reading.

If my review of this book is failing to jell, it might be because I’m still struggling to make sense out of it myself. I want to love the story more, not only because so many others seem to, but because there’s so much in the language to admire and appreciate. Maybe a re-read will transpire at some point, assuming I’ll become a more fluent Spanish-speaker.

Friday links. Jaimee got her wisdom teeth out today and is pretty out of it, so that’s my focus today. But between ice-pack rotation and gauze changes here are a few links:

* Via Srinivas, I see the Supreme Court has ruled in a (what else?) 5-4 decision that inmates do not have the right to DNA tests. Let Justice Stevens tell you why this makes no sense.

“For reasons the state has been unable or unwilling to articulate,” Justice Stevens wrote, “it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”

* Elsewhere in the annals of justice: a Minnesota woman has been ordered to pay the RIAA $1.92 million for illegal filesharing. The 24 songs in question could have been downloaded for $2 each, so we can clearly see how the jury arrives at such a reasonable sum.

* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the class of 2013’s summer read at Duke. I just started this last night and I can confirm it’s very good; it’s targeted like a laser at 1990s Jersey nerds.

* Is there any company better at the PR game? ‘Pixar grants girl’s dying wish to see ‘Up.’

* Top Republican Environmental Achievements. Actually not a joke post.

Things you should not be afraid of if you read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

1. A lot of obscenity.
2. A lot of urban slang.
3. A lot of Spanish.
4. A lot of sci-fi/fantasy references.
5. A lot of confusion.  Particularly for people who don’t live in the city, don’t speak Spanish, and don’t read science fiction.  (… Hey there.)

As confusing as all the unexplained references/foreign languages may be, one thing they add for certain is authenticity.  Huge, overflowing buckets of authenticity.

Speaking of authenticity, let’s talk about those footnotes, because god are they long and verbose and packed with historical context.  Which reminds me of certain textbooks that I’ve become quite familiar with over the past couple years of high school.

But once you read the very first footnote, which describes Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, for the benefit of “those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (I don’t think I even got two seconds, honestly), you realize that this is no ordinary historical writing.

Famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican Republic to honor himself [...]; for building one of the largest militaries in the hemisphere (dude had bomber wings, for fuck’s sake); for fucking every hot girl in sight, even the wives of his subordinates, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women; [...] for stripping friends and allies of their positions and properties for no reason at all; and for his almost supernatural abilities.

And so on.

The first part of this book was almost a little too close to home for me.  It details the childhood and teenagehood of Oscar, a completely socially inept nerd who uses a lot of big words and spents more time fantasizing about members of the opposite sex than actually interacting with them.  But who is in fact (ah, but of course) capable of great love.

It had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad.  The only thing that came close was how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he’d read and everything he hoped to write came even close.

Eventually, to put it bluntly, it is this love that ruins Oscar.  And I do mean ruins.  (Arguably, this is a spoiler, so sorry– but come on, it is called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.)

As we are taken from the Dominican Republic to “Nueva York,” through the lives of Oscar’s sister, mother, and grandfather and the curse (tellingly named fukú) that living under the regime of Trujillo has put on the family, the tone of the novel darkens considerably and its scope broadens.  Gradually, it becomes not about what one human will do for love, but what all humans will do, and endure, for love.  Which, in case you’re wondering, is a lot.

But this isn’t doing Oscar Wao any justice at all.  Because while the theme, like all themes, is cliché*, the book is anything but.  Glancing at the blurbs on the back of the book, I note that Lev Grossman seems to be in concordance, as he has called it “an immigrant-family saga for people who don’t read immigrant-family sagas.”  Though of course, I wouldn’t know, because I don’t read immigrant-family sagas.

* This reminds me of my review of DFW’s This is Water, which I wrote as sort of a Tattler exclusive but which I may post here at some point.