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The beauty! in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

April 19, 2009 in book reviews

I finished reading Junot Díaz’s vibrant novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this weekend…amid some tears on the downtown A train. It was that good.

For those of you who are even further behind in their Buzz Books Reading List, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the generational story of the de Leóns, with a (slight) emphasis on Oscar: his ignominious youth, his return to Santo Domingo, and his death-defying end.

No other book is written this truly. There is artifice here, but it is not the artifice of an elegant narrator, beautiful descriptions, and structured dialogue. This is a quick-flitting mind observing impressions as they are made with unfiltered disgust and admiration. Granted, this means that the story isn’t always even: it sprints too quickly in some parts, lags in others—but I hope it’s not too facile to say that life does that, too. Read with Drown, one can almost understand what it’s like to grow up poor, bored, and culturally oppressed in Dominican Jersey. And I do recommend reading Oscar Wao and Drown—I might be making a leap here, but there’s a Yunior in both books, and they both deliver pool tables as a side job during college. Drown‘s Yunior stories flesh out the life of Oscar’s narrator in a satisfying way, especially for a reader like me who was reluctant to say goodbye.

I especially enjoyed Yunior’s footnotes, which showed the extent to which the private lives of Dominicans are informed by the public history of the country. Oscar’s life is impossible to understand without an awareness of Trujillo’s overlong and terrifying reach. The various nicknames that Yunior employs for Trujillo (El Jefe, T-illo, Fuckface) evince an everyday familiarity with the dictator and his role in Dominican life, even decades after his assassination.

How to sum up? This was the singularly most alive book I’ve read in a long time. The story has a life, blood, and heartbeat all its own. With most books, I feel that my act of reading animates the characters, if only while they’re being read. But in the case of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the characters animated me.

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What goes into a Eurozine?

April 19, 2009 in the literary conversation

In going through some of my old bookmarked pages, I found this interview with one of my academic heroes, Homi Bhabha. The interview first appeared in Crosswords, a multilingual and transnational journal on multilingualism and digital networking, and later appeared in the pages of Eurozine.

In this interview, Homi Bhabha criticizes Eurozine (itself an online aggregate of many European journals) for limiting itself to European publications. After all, Europe as an institution is so often defined (and continues to be defined) by its interactions with non-”European” countries. And if these other countries are a part of the definition, should they not be a part of the dialogue?

Recommended reading.

(via a post on Bookforum, which also links to an entertaining list of 5 homeless guys who accomplished great things)

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April 12, 2009 in the literary conversation

A moving assessment of where literary studies is versus where it ought to be:

We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn’t, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It’s, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to “teach the conflicts”: We and our squabbles are what it’s all about. That’s how we made a discipline, after all.

Why do I say “moving,” rather than “distressing”? I think dispatches like this one from the U. S. Naval Academy’s English department remind us what literature is—not a source text for our pet theories, but as Norman Rush wrote, “humanity talking to itself.” And it’s still more moving to suppose that one day we’ll have an opportunity to teach it as such.

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This Week in Books

April 12, 2009 in book reviews

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Every now and then I like to read a non-fiction book—it’s like going over a speed bump when I’m hurtling along too quickly on Fiction Boulevard. Instead of inhaling a novel a week, I’m forced to take a month to read the facts, assess the argument, and synthesize the thesis. And then when I go back to fiction, everything seems fresher. I guess I have a demonstrable genre bias.

Anyway, having finished the refreshingly uncluttered Postethnic America, I sped through Carolina de Robertis’s debut novel, The Invisible Mountain. A friend of mine described the book as “the greatest Lifetime movie ever made…and Lifetime’s made a lot of movies, so that’s saying a lot.” I agree, and with no degree of condescension or irony. The Invisible Mountain is like Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but with an all-female cast of characters. I don’t think I need to explain—you pretty much know what you’re getting: a splash of magical realism, a revolution, epic narratives that span generations, and moving displays of passion. On the other hand, this is a debut novel, so expect flightly turns of phrase, à la “She sped, leapt, careened towards the dazzling bluebright open sea.”* Nevertheless, I still recommend picking up a copy of this book when it comes out in August—it’s the kind of engrossing book that turns off all of your extrasensory perceptions while reading it. Don’t read it on the subway.

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At last! I’ve been looking forward to reading this book ever since the buzz began, but I insisted on reading Drown first. I’m glad I did: having familiarized myself with Díaz’s previous stories about living Dominican in New Jersey and Washington Heights helped to contextualize Oscar’s life and those of his friends and family. And the narrative voices…wow. As I was discussing with a friend, it seems like most recently published and recently hyped books come in one of two voices: cynical white male and excited/impassioned white female. I’m not saying that Oscar’s voice is better, but it is startling. And invigorating. So, unlike The Invisible Mountain, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is exactly the right book to be reading on the subway—the cultural pastiche syncs up perfectly with the chaos of a subway car.

I’m still on the first story, but I can already tell that Jhumpa Lahiri is a master of domestic drama. This genre of story doesn’t often get its due, having been weighed down by bestselling tepid potboilers, but home sweet home can be literature’s most destructive setting.

Quickly, two things I’ve learned from Istanbul:
1. Istanbul is sad because it used to be mighty, but now it is not. Much like some people I know from high school.
2. Orhan Pamuk is definitely a mama’s boy.
*Not an actual quote—I’ve already loaned out my copy of the book, so I can’t refer back to an actual passage.

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The Tyranny of the To-Read Pile

April 1, 2009 in gewgaws

I was going over some of the old news items that I had bookmarked for posting in the past couple of months—you know, during those dark days when you thought this blog had died an inconspicuous death. One of them, from last December, remains relevant: “The Tyranny of the To-Read Pile” from The Guardian.*

Yes, it seems simple enough to suggest that, during these trying economic times, we turn to the books that we’ve hoarded but never read. Squirrels do it with acorns; why not I? For what purpose have I been haunting used book sales and slapping down Border’s ubiquitous 40% off coupons than for this very moment? If I liked, I could not buy another book for the rest of my life and still have more than enough books to read (no, seriously, I have about two bookcases worth of unread books. Two bookcases.).

And yet…with bookstores on the brink of bankruptcy, the discount coupons are flowing ever more freely. And with the industry-wide layoffs, the pickings on the “take shelves” (as in, “take these books, because I’m not taking them with me”) are better than ever.

And that damn to-read pile grows more despotic.

*Which, as it turns out, is switching to an all-Twitter format after 188 years in print.

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