03.01.08
Junot DÃaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot DÃaz received such a rapturous reception for his debut collection of stories, Drown, in 1997 that it must have scared the living daylights out of him. How to follow that? In preference to knocking something out in a year or two, he has ruminated, cogitated and gestated for a decade over his first novel. Would the book have been any different if he hadn’t taken such pains? Posterity will not care, of course, or even remember the slow birth, but for a reader now it’s hard not to have it in mind. Any consideration of the extra-literary aspects of this book can’t ignore the cover (when do I ever?): the US edition is clean and apt, while the UK design, in an unusual break with tradition, is so bad with its primary coloured faux naivety that its awfulness can only be the result of concerted effort. Nobody’s going to be buying this because it looks nice on their shelves. The pressure’s on.
The title of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is presumably a riff on Hemingway’s story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ about a man whose rebirth from cowardice to courage is his downfall, and one could tangentially link this to DÃaz’s novel. Despite the title, Oscar de León (the Wao is an accented version of Wilde, which his peers use to mock him) appears only fitfully in the book, in maybe a third of its pages, though it does begin and end with him.
The bulk of the book delves instead into the lives of his sister, his mother and grandparents, all by way of depicting life in the Dominican Republic (DR) and among its diaspora in the US. The shadow behind all their lives is the “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto” Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the DR from 1930 to 1961. Linked to this is the central idea of a curse, or fukú, being upon the world: “it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since.”
It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fuá, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow.
You can see from this that DÃaz is a writer with a love of lists, and his style has the expansive fluency that is familiar in a certain type of American literature. What gives him a novel flavour is his kitchen-sink approach to the language, chucking in everything from foreign languages (and context wasn’t always enough here) to the tropes of sci-fi and comic books. Oscar, you see, is not just an immigrant, but a geek:
Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. … Couldn’t have passed for normal if he’d wanted to.
This is far from unique - there’s a definite whiff of Salman Rushdie in places, and the sections where Oscar’s grandfather falls foul of Trujillo reminded me of Louis de Bernières’ Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, where torture and turmoil are made almost seductive by the vigour of the prose - but DÃaz as a storyteller has considerable charm that gets him away with a lot. Sometimes there’s a sense that he’s trying to cram too much in: the book tries to be a family saga, a coming-of-age story, and an immigrant account of “the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.” There is also an annoying number of footnotes in Robert Walser-sized text, detailing the political and cultural history of the Dominican Republic.
One interesting aspect of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is who is telling us the story. This seems to switch, so that at times we are in the hands of an omniscient but personal narrator - “your humble Watcher” - which may be DÃaz himself, while at others Oscar’s schoolfriend Yunior takes over, or in one section, a female I struggled to identify. They all bring aspects of themselves to their direct or distanced reports of Oscar, taking us from decades before his birth right up to the ending which is dramatic, but not entirely surprising. Well, it does warn you, as early as the front cover, that his life is going to be brief.
Kirsty said,
Sunday, 2 March 2008 at 9:36 am
Have to say that the UK cover looks not unlike a children’s book. I like it not. But then, not overly keen on the US cover either. I’m so fickle.
Sinéad said,
Sunday, 2 March 2008 at 5:36 pm
John, thanks so much for your congrats. Would love to have met you at the awards and had a good ol’ book natter.
I really want to read the Diaz book, but it’s been so unbelievably hyped on the other side of the pond that I’m afraid of being disappointed.
John Self said,
Sunday, 2 March 2008 at 6:15 pm
Your hat trick is well-deserved, Sinéad! (For anyone who hasn’t noticed the box at the top right of my blog, or who’s reading this after it comes down, Sinéad last night won the Best Arts & Culture Blog for the third year running at the Irish Blog Awards.)
If you buy into the hype then I suspect you will be disappointed: what I didn’t mention above is that it made all kinds of Best of the Year lists in the US. I wouldn’t have placed it that high, but I did enjoy it and the best way to approach it is without expectations … though that’s now impossible, not least because of what I’ve written above!
Mark Thwaite said,
Monday, 3 March 2008 at 10:22 am
Terrible, terrible British cover. However, truth be told, the US one isn’t up to much either!
What is going on with book design at the moment!? I recently blogged about the terrible UK cover for George Steiner’s excellent My Unwritten Books — the US version for this title has real grace, the British one is a mess …
Isabel said,
Monday, 3 March 2008 at 4:50 pm
Dominican Dictators - A few years ago, I read “In the Name of Salome” by Julia Alvarez.
An interesting tale of how the women had to survive without the men of the family when another dictator ruled. And how one of the main characters was trying to write poems while trying to feed the family.
This novel is set years early from Diaz’ books.
jem said,
Monday, 3 March 2008 at 4:53 pm
Since joining Bookmooch I’ve got a fair few novels from the US with their cover art instead of the UK version. Mostly I’ve not been that keen on their approach. They seem to go for quite busy, traditional and sometimes soft-focus covers (but perhaps that says more about my choice of reading!). But you’ve tipped the argument the other way with this example. The UK one is truly vile. But something that still bothers me about the US one (and most of their novels) is why do they have to write ‘A Novel’ on them? We look at the back to know whether we are getting fiction / non-fiction. Do you think the ‘A Novel’ tag is some sort of disclaimer so people won’t read something and believe it too much?
John Self said,
Monday, 3 March 2008 at 11:38 pm
The best I can say for the UK cover is that it’s presumably supposed to look like the sort of cartoony 3-D writing that a geeky schoolboy might doodle during class (er, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything) - but it’s still damned ugly.
Mark, that Steiner UK cover plumbs new depths! Looks like it was designed by the Ryanair in-house press ads team.
Thanks for the reference Isabel. I certainly haven’t read any other books set in the Dominican Republic so aspects of Oscar Wao were certainly an eye-opener.
Jem, as hinted in the main text above, I agree that US book design generally lags behind UK (though there are always counter-examples). Too often the cover illustration and the text seem to be unrelated, when really they should form a seamless whole. As for ‘A Novel,’ I suspect it’s an example of US producers wildly underestimating the intelligence of their public: they worry that people might think it’s a biography perhaps. It’s the same mindset that leads US sitcoms occasionally to be named after the title character or (worse) the star, as in Roseanne, The Cosby Show, Frasier, Joey and of course, in the case of the ‘timeless’ (I mean ’short-lived’
US version of One Foot in the Grave, the classically simple, er, Cosby.
Stewart said,
Tuesday, 4 March 2008 at 10:11 am
And don’t forget both remakes of Fawlty Towers: Amanda’s and Payne.
Richard Ford: Women With Men « Asylum said,
Tuesday, 4 March 2008 at 12:34 pm
[...] the second time in a row, I spy a title inspired by Hemingway; his 1927 collection of stories was titled Men Without [...]
Isabel said,
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 at 7:48 pm
An interview with Junot Diaz, but hurry. The on-line copy will disapper soon.
http://worldliteraturetoday.com/
Click on the cover, then click on Junot Diaz’ name.
John Self said,
Friday, 21 March 2008 at 9:34 am
Thanks for that Isabel!
John Self said,
Tuesday, 8 April 2008 at 8:17 am
Junot DÃaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2008 for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
All I can say is… Wao.
Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 2008 - Book & Reader Forums said,
Saturday, 12 April 2008 at 12:25 pm
[...] Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Asylum __________________ book reviews | world lit [...]
colettejones said,
Sunday, 20 April 2008 at 9:19 pm
Just finished this today and loved it. There was a time early on, when it was being narrated by his sister Lola, that I thought I wasn’t going to like it… I really don’t like the sassy teenage girl stereotype, and then the tale of her mother who was remarkably the same, surprise surprise. But Oscar is entirely loveable and the story of his grandfather had me gripped. That was enough to swing me over to a 5-star rating.
JRSM said,
Monday, 21 April 2008 at 2:28 am
I’m 2/3 of the way through this at the moment, and liking but not loving it. I want to spend more time with Oscar, frankly, and less with his ancestors, even though there are very interesting sections to their stories.
John Self said,
Monday, 21 April 2008 at 8:17 am
My feelings precisely, JRSM. Oscar does reappear in the last sections of the book but it wasn’t enough to repair the damage in my view. But I’m glad you liked it, Colette!
Rosemary said,
Thursday, 22 May 2008 at 1:29 am
I think the book was wonderful he definitely deserved the prize, I just loved how he changed the narrators so smoothly that if you were not paying attention to the story you would not know who is speaking. He’s a great author and I just hope that he publishes something soon; I don’t want to have to wait another 10 years. Hurray to Junot!!!!