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Literary Review
FICTION
The unlikely romantic
SHELLEY WALIA
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Hilarious and subversive, Diaz’s book is a commentary on the complexities and contradictions of transcultural conflicts.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Junot Diaz, Riverhead Books, $24.95
There is a novel buried in each one of us. As long as one gets it out of one’s system, books serve as a kind of catharsis leaving the writer with the pleasant agony of having delivered a ‘child’ after some agonising labour pains. A
s Junot Diaz, Associate Professor of Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, remarked in a interview after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year, “Books are not people. They are never late to the party. It doesn’t make any difference, early or late, as long as you get it done. . . . In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself.”
Junot Diaz had already achieved national fame with his 1996 collection of short stories, Drown that got him the National Book Critics Circle Award. His readers had to wait 11 years for the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Compelling
This heartbreaking and compelling novel is about a lovesick supernerd Oscar Wao (a Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde) from the Dominican Republic, a fictional representation of Diaz himself who arrived in the U.S. when he was six years old.
As he emphasised, “I’m just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.” Diaz is apparently referring to his arrival in the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 1974 when he could hardly speak English.
From his own experience of being an outsider and an insider, he was adequately equipped to write a story both of the Dominican Republic and the New Jersey of the immigrants, precariously poised in a hybrid culture.
It is indeed an effort of cerebral density and moral straightforwardness, describings the fascinating life of Oscar and his sister and mother who move from Santo Domingo to Washington and then to New Jersey and back again. This is a determined, unusual novel about Wao’s obsession with science fiction and his dreams of becoming the J. R. R. Tolkien of his country.
But this may never happen as his family is cursed to a life of oppression, torture and unrequited love. The country of his origin is under the blight of the Doom of the New World, known to the natives as ‘Fuku’: ‘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 been in the shit ever since.’
Dominican history experienced ruthless oppression and political and sexual violence at the hands of Trujillo the dictator who ruled the republic from 1930 to 1961 with support from Washington: “He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator,” Díaz writes, “a personage so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.” The novel, while exploring the historical and cultural roots of Dominican Republic, does not forget to underscore the callous adventurism of the U.S. in Latin America.
Dark and soulful
The narrative of the novel is dark, soulful as well as uproarious, covering a long history of the nation which cannot possibly be erased out of the tragedy of Wao and his family. The story is told by Yunior, a roommate of Oscar, in a narrative that mixes English with Dominican Spanish, New Jersey slang with high school lingo and ‘nerdspeak’ with references to Tolkien and science fiction that make the text deeply multicultural as well as polyphonic to the extent that it becomes a vibrant response to border-crossing in a deeply fragmented contemporary world. The sense of doom throughout the novel is underpinned by a wickedly humorous and lively prose that irresistibly borders on the comic, and yet, is inherently realistic as well as deeply political.
Compassion and violence inextricably intermingle in the magic realism of Dominican Republic which, according to the narrator, is a deeply science fiction country. ‘What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo?’ Oscar asks, ‘What more fantasy than the Antilles?’
The impact is at once hilarious and subversive, a commentary on the complexities and contradictions of transcultural conflicts infused with the unpredictable and the bizarre. It is a rare and welcome experience indeed, important because of its insight into the cultural consequences of migration.
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