Brief and Wondrous

Junot Diaz was scheduled to speak at the Festival of Ibero-American Literature hosted by Foyles bookshop a few weeks ago and I read his 2008 Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in preparation. Regretfully his talk was cancelled due to travel issues and I was disappointed not to hear him speak but enjoyed the book nonetheless.

Oscar is an unconventionally overweight and nerdy Dominican Republican teenager living in New Jersey with his mother, Belicia, and punk runaway sister, Lola. Oscar dreams of becoming the next Tolkien and is continually falling hopelessly in love. Their story is predominantly narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, who was a friend of the Cabral family, although he remains unidentified for the first half of the book. This is a narrative not just concerning the "brief and wondrous life" of Oscar but an epic that spans the Cabral's tragic past in the Dominican Republic under the rule of dictator Rafael Trujillo and a study of the fukú, or curse, that has plagued the Cabral family.

From the irreverently-told prologue explaining fukú, I was enthralled. Yunior is a witty and pithy narrator who tells the story as if he is sitting down in a coffee shop recounting it to you; I enjoyed the conversational style of the story-telling, the everyday colloquialisms and language and dialogues. However, be warned that some of the narrative is peppered with colloquial Spanish and, more often than not, I was reading without my babelfish to hand.

In honour of Oscar, much of the text alludes to and cites science fiction and fantasy, with Tolkien references and analogies prolific and a love for footnotes that are as amusing as those by Terry Pratchett. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel concerning big themes of identity, of the Dominican Diaspora, of family, of masculinity, of dictatorships. I was unaware of The Trujillo Era in the Dominican Republic, of the bloody tyranny of Trujillo, El Jefe, until his assassination in 1961; embarrassingly, it wasn't until towards the end of the book that my brain processed that this Dominican Republic with its bloody history -one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century- was the same Dominican Republic of all-inclusive holiday resorts in the twenty-first century. The tragicomic novel uses its fantastical and familial narrative to historically educate and now that I am more informed I am seeking out another Dominican novel cited, In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, a fictional account of the real-life Mirabel Sisters, who Trujillo had murdered for resistance. This type of fictionalised history that Diaz and Alvarez utilise works for me; I respond better to history in the form of fiction, when I can empathise with fully-fledged characters rather than facts and statistics and Diaz blends well the facts with the fiction.

The style of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is unique and the reader has to be paying attention to its narrative leaps in time, narrator and jumps from story to footnotes; the linguistic lapses into Spanish, the footnotes and the dependence on knowledge of the genres Oscar's life revolves around may be offputting but this is a highly enjoyable, absorbing and rewarding novel from an original voice. From its opening pages I was immersed in this humorous, heartwarming but ultimately tragic story; Oscar Cabral is indeed a wondrous protagonist.

Some favourite passages:

These were Oscar's furies, his personal pantheon, the girls he most dreamed about and most beat off to and who eventually found their way into his little stories. In his dreams he was either saving them from aliens or he was returning to the neighbourhood, rich and famous-It's him! The Dominican Stephen King!

Shrugging of her weariness, she did what many women of her background would have done. Posted herself beside her portrait of La Virgen de Altagracia and prayed. We postmodern plátanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.

To say I'd never in my life met a Dominican like him would be to put it mildly.
Hail, Dog of God, was how he welcomed me my first day in Demarest.
Took a week before I figured out what the hell he meant.
God. Domini. Dog. Canis.
Hail, Dominicanis.