My original feelings after I finished this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) book were to envelop myself into my arms and go to bed dreaming of life’s possibilities and downfalls. Any book that can spark an emotional response in you is a rare breed in today’s world of mass market fiction and Harry Potter nonsense. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that tugs your emotions in many different directions, sometimes in the same sentence. It can be laugh-out-loud funny and it can also be somber and depressing. What I found so tremendous about this book is that it reflects life so beautifully, in terms of running the gamut of emotions and the moments that make life worth living (and unbearable).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. That, in and of itself, should put it near the top of any reading list you have. Now I’m not saying that every book that wins this prize is a masterpiece or even the best book by that author. I liken the Pulitzers to the Oscars in the sense that they get it right most, but not all, of the time. I still haven’t forgiven the Motion Picture Academy for naming Gladiator best picture, but they got it right with Million Dollar Baby. Nor do the Pulitzers even award the best books by a certain author. In 2007, The Road by Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer, but that was viewed more as an apology award, as in saying, “Sorry about Blood Meridian and Suttree, here’s the award you finally deserve for those books.”
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of a fat, ugly, scifi fantasy, comic book reading geek who has never kissed a girl. Oscar’s family is from the Dominican Republic and he and his sister are the first generation born in the U.S. The novel’s protagonist is Oscar, but the entire family is given equal time as the book tells the stories of his headstrong sister Lola who loves him unconditionally, his mother Belicia who fled the Dominican Republic under VERY unique circumstances, his one and only friend Yunior, Lola’s sometimes boyfriend who hates and loves Oscar at the same time, and at last of Fuku, the ancient family curse that followed his family from the Dominican Republic to Paterson, NJ. The novel splits time between New Jersey, where Oscar grows up and goes to college, and the Dominican Republic, where the Fuku began.
The family’s history, going back a generation or two, is vital to the shaping of Oscar’s life and his struggles. We feel Oscar’s pain as his weight increases, and so does his desire for women that he has no chance of ever getting with. There’s Ana, Jenni, Ybon…..the list goes on of women Oscar falls in love with. The more he gets rejected, the further his depression gets and he buries himself more and more into his safe world of comics, science fiction, role playing games and writing. Amidst flashbacks is the telling of the sordid history of the Dominican Republic under the reign of dictator Trujillo, who murdered, raped and ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, all under the approval or the United States government.
The primary characteristic of Diaz’s writing is his matter-of-fact sentence structure combined with his English-Spanish slang and urban dialect, creating a smooth flow as well as providing instances of humor. However, different chapters are told through different narrators, thus different voices and styles are used. Lola narrates a chapter, Yunior narrates most of them. Oscar is never given a chance to narrate his own story. Everything we know of Oscar is told to us from those that love him the most. The chapters that Yunior narrates are the most poignant, and the most heartbreaking. Yunior tries to teach him how to approach girls, tries to get him to exercise and lose weight, and tries to wean him off science fiction, all with disastrous results.
Now that I’ve described all the virtues of this novel, onto the flaws, and there are flaws. The tough part of being a book reviewer is that I have to contend with the issue of personal taste. I think part of the reason I loved this book so much was that it spoke to the nerd in me. I’m a science fiction and fantasy reader. I read graphic novels and comic books. The novel is filled with countless references from the world of geekdom and the first flaw of this novel is that it depends on a prior history. Diaz writes as if he’s assuming that his audience has a track record of being nerd-literate and goes with that assumption. Luckily I have read all the books that were referenced and I found the style to be quite hilarious, but this won’t play as well for the reader who has no idea what a Bene Gesserit witch is (a Dune reference).
The second flaw is that Diaz intersperses English with nuggets of Spanish to create what is affectionately known as “ghetto slang”. The majority of the novel is in English; however he’ll throw in a phrase or two in Spanish. That worked for me because I am Latino and understand Spanish. Since I am fluent in both languages, the combination sometimes made me laugh out loud, simply because it is a reflection of my personal childhood growing up and if you know one crazy Latino mother, you’ve know them all. For me, easy enough to decipher what is trying to be said, however I feel that a non-native Spanish speaker won’t get the 100% enjoyment of the prose that I did.
Now comes the star review portion of this column. This is a hard book to quantify because of the flaws I spoke about. For someone like me, this is a 4 star book immediately. But being a reviewer, I have to review for all of you, not just for the Hispanic, science fiction nerds out there. I want to say 4; I probably should say 2….let’s split the difference, albeit with a wink and a nudge.
