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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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