The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Faber Rs 595
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.” This is the miserable fate of Oscar, the protagonist of this savagely funny, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel from Junot Diaz. Pathetic, hapless, young Oscar grows up in New Jersey, suffering from deep, self-esteem issues. He “wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber” — the eternal social introvert, closed out from the high drama of young love. And the biggest tragedy of all is that he has been born a Dominican boy in a Dominican family where issues of masculinity are all important. “Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it.”
Oscar’s story is interwoven with the tragic story of the Dominican Republic itself and the great “fuku” or curse that lay upon the land — in the form of the dictatorship of Trujillo that lasted decades, broke thousands of lives and repressed almost every kind of freedom. We are told about the dictator: “At first glance, he was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. 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.”
This interweaving is achieved in an edgy, ironic, streetwise prose that flows through the pages like electric current. The sentences are tough, muscular and uncompromising; sometimes they are just short, staccato bursts of gunfire. When Oscar’s sister Lola runs away from home and from the terrifying demands of her mother’s cancer, she simply gets on a bus out of town: “I didn’t write them a note. That’s how much I hated them. Her.” Running is a mistake, as she finds out later: “It was like the stupidest thing I ever did. I was miserable. And so bored. But of course I wouldn’t admit it. I had run away, so I was happy! Happy!”
