Books Worth Reading

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

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 a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

Thus begins Oscar Wao, a book that is not easy to read. The narrative voice — an observer of the novel’s events named Yunior — is often difficult to follow. A lot of Spanish is mixed in with the text, and since I don’t speak Spanish, it was sometimes frustrating trying to figure out what was being said (although I did pick up some choice Spanish insults by context). There are also numerous references to fantasy and science fiction, comics and role-playing games — Yunior is a closet geek — so numerous that they could get tiresome, and many are not immediately understandable to a reader who isn’t also a total nerd. (I am only 50% nerd, comparatively; I got the Lord of the Rings references and sci-fi shout-outs, but not the numerous comic book allusions.) And then there is a total lack of quotation marks, which important contemporary writers have apparently declared extinct, much to my dismay.

Despite all this, I grew to love the tragic story that unfolds in Oscar Wao. The plot revolves around a curse that afflicts Oscar’s family, which reflects the curse that afflicts their home country, the Dominican Republic. The family’s history and the country’s history are interwoven in a tangle of broken dreams, disasterous love affairs and brutal violence, seasoned with a bizarre mix of fatalism and unwarranted hope that there may be change, despite all evidence to the contrary. My only major criticism was the brief section where point of view shifted to Oscar’s sister, Lola, which threw off the narrative rhythms, in my opinion. But following that section, when Yunior enters the story as an actual character, the book takes on life and took hold of me.

This book surprised me, too, by teaching me quite a lot about the bloody history of the Dominican Republic, particularly its capricious, long-standing dictator Trujillo, which I knew next to nothing about. The historical details are mainly relayed in footnotes, which aren’t as jarring as you might imagine, and since they are written in the same lively narrative voice, are fun to read.

Oscar Wao is different, and it’s not easy. But it sucks you in, if you let it. It creates a world and shoves you right into it. As Oscar says at the end: “Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!”

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