Penguin, September 2007
Junot Diaz utterly defied the expectations I had upon picking up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I anticipated a sad yet humorous traverse along the life of first-generation American Oscar de León, from his Planet of the Apes lunchbox to the twenty-sided dice of his high school years, and on through the sad though magnificent end promised by the title. And while The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is part nerd's bildungsroman, this part is just one small piece in a much larger story, a story of fukú.
Never heard of fukú before? Right. Get used to it, because there's a lot more of that -- unless you happened to have come of age in the Dominican Republic or in the New Jersey barrios from which both Junot and Oscar hail. Diaz describes fukú as "the great American doom," a curse brought to the New World by a certain Genoan explorer (think 1492) to whom Diaz only refers to as "the Admiral," because "to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours."
Junot Diaz utterly defied the expectations I had upon picking up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I anticipated a sad yet humorous traverse along the life of first-generation American Oscar de León, from his Planet of the Apes lunchbox to the twenty-sided dice of his high school years, and on through the sad though magnificent end promised by the title. And while The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is part nerd's bildungsroman, this part is just one small piece in a much larger story, a story of fukú.
Never heard of fukú before? Right. Get used to it, because there's a lot more of that -- unless you happened to have come of age in the Dominican Republic or in the New Jersey barrios from which both Junot and Oscar hail. Diaz describes fukú as "the great American doom," a curse brought to the New World by a certain Genoan explorer (think 1492) to whom Diaz only refers to as "the Admiral," because "to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the story of a fukú unleashed upon Oscar's family two generations prior to Oscar ever having seen his first Star Trek episode, read his first Marvel comic book. It is rooted in the despotic dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, "the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated, the man who was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu," against whom Oscar's family ran afoul in the 1940s. Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's depiction of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Oscar Wao traces Oscar's family history from Trujillo's 1940s Dominican Republic to the 1980s Patterson, New Jersey of Oscar's youth.
The novel's narration is captivating and dynamic, switching from formal diction to ghetto-speak when, for instance, switching between Oscar's mother's coming-of-age in the Dominican Republic to this night scene involving Yunior, Oscar's sister's sometimes-boyfriend, who largely narrates the novel:
The novel's narration is captivating and dynamic, switching from formal diction to ghetto-speak when, for instance, switching between Oscar's mother's coming-of-age in the Dominican Republic to this night scene involving Yunior, Oscar's sister's sometimes-boyfriend, who largely narrates the novel:
"The year before Oscar fell, I suffered some nuttiness of my own; I got jumped as I was walking home from the Roxy. By this mess of New Brunswick townies. A bunch of fucking morenos. Two a.m., and I was on Joyce Kilmer for no good reason. Alone and on foot. Why? Because I was hard, thought I'd have no problem walking through the thicket of young guns I saw on the corner. Big mistake. Remember the smile on this one dude's face the rest of my fucking life. Only second to his high school ring, which plowed a nice furrow into my cheek (still got the scar). Wish I could say I went down swinging but these cats just laid me out."
In the final analysis, I will not be insistently pressing copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into the hands of friends and loved ones, despite the novel having already been lauded and recommended by the most respected literary authorities in the business. This, however, has more to do with mismatched expectations on my part than with Junot Diaz's craftsmanship.
In the final analysis, I will not be insistently pressing copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into the hands of friends and loved ones, despite the novel having already been lauded and recommended by the most respected literary authorities in the business. This, however, has more to do with mismatched expectations on my part than with Junot Diaz's craftsmanship.
The author has uniquely fused a multi-generational view into immigrant experience with one nerd's 1980's coming-of-age story, and, for good scholarly measure, has thrown in more than a dash of Dominican Republic history. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is, in fact, much larger on the inside than it appears to be on the outside, and it is this literary sleight-of-hand on the part of Diaz that portends more great writing from him in the future.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Check out Junot Diaz's reading at Google in September 2007.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Check out Junot Diaz's reading at Google in September 2007.
