Book Review – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
In what seems like the start of a trend, I present a review of something other than a comic, again written by someone other than me (don’t cheer too hard), and again written by a bold woman.
The reviewer is a dear friend of mine who through her intelligence, inquisitiveness, and sense of humor has been known to let her geek flag fly on various subjects like politics, cooking, music, books, and more…
-Dave
I want to share this book because it is important to remember that. . .
Every true nerd wants to believe that he (she) is truly a superhero who has not yet had their powers revealed to them. At one point in this remarkable story, when things are just beginning to get out of hand, the main Character, recites the Litany Against Fear, from Dune. I’d have known what it was he was saying even if the author had not told because I have the Litany memorized myself. I learned it in high school, because I too believed I had these powers. Science fiction, fantasy, comix and The Simpsons are Oscar’s only touchstones. Like so many of us, he has no other way into society. It will amuse a “nerd” reader to have their cultural land marks noted. To hear Oscar’s uncle compared to Abraham Simpson, for example because it’s just so right and because Oscar has no other way of seeing.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
The story is a tragedy.
That should have been self-evident: the title is, after all, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Are not all brief lives de facto tragic?
But the author was so funny and so charming, and the NPR interviews so intent upon discussing the pop culture references and the quirky “Spanglish” narration that the tragedy at the heart of the thing was glossed over. The reader, left to her own devices, suffers the realization, about half way through the book, that this is not Magical Realism, “the curse” is whispered of because it is the only means the people of the Caribbean have of speaking of the nightmare that has been their lives for the last 500 years. And who are we to be surprised if the curse, fukù, follows them to North Jersey in the later 20th century.
Still, having absorbed that shock, I have some questions, Once we get beyond the primary narrative, the brief life of Oscar Wao, the story seems to be about the places where sex and power intersect. But having finished the book I am left with no idea what the author Junot Díaz was trying to say about those intersections. On the one hand you might say that there is nothing to be said; the story is about the narrative. Sex and power just happen to be those things that life entails; just as eating and shitting intersect in the intestines, they are there but they are not the point. But excepting medical journals and weird diet books, there aren’t many items published driven by the facts of digestion. If the author took the time to write all this sex, violence, and power into his story, surely he meant to say something about them, and about us in light of them.
I have learned, along with a short history of a ruthless dictatorship on the island of Hispañola, that the men of Dominica are all sexual carnivores. The “good” men have perhaps only one or two lovers beyond their wives, the bad rape their way through the world. I have also learned that the women of The Dominican Republic are goddesses of exceptional grace and beauty. It is a fact of their lives. It is both a critical danger to themselves, and their only protection. Still they seem only dimly aware of this fact, oblivious that the men they throw themselves at in all ardor have their own agenda, the simple fact of spreading seed.
So why, in describing this world of sex and power, create a title character who is a pathetic schlub? Who can not even bring himself to talk to women but thinks of human encounters in terms of hit points and experience points, then ends up dying for the love of a woman who uses her sexuality to gain, if not power, at least some freedom of her own. What is Junot Díaz saying about the state of affairs between men and women? The powerful and the powerless? Haitians, Dominicans, and Americans? Because if he is simply telling the story of Oscar Wao, he has gone a long way for the tale of a damn fool or an autistic who disappoints his family by dying as he lived, a deluded dreamer to the last. And furthermore disappoints the reader, who is left to wonder only; why. Why?
I cannot escape the notion that I missed something in the reading. That I must go back and read again how generations of sex, violence, fear and intrigue were the undoing of a boy raised in the haven of strip malls and comic shops. Who, knowing absolutely nothing of that past, died a victim of it. Maybe if I read it with Babel Fish by my side, translating the Spanglish, asides I would find what I missed. The reason this kid was sacrificed, and every other character thwarted in their perfectly human drive for a life with some meaning and, in the end, some promise of hope. There is no happy ending here. For every cultural reference that includes some kind of transcendence of good over evil, of Narnia, and Rivendel, even of Watchmen, (Oscar’s favorite comic of all, which went with him to his doom); there is thwarted promise in the present.
Junot Díaz really does not take the easy way out, this book is really and truly a tragedy. It was not written lightly. That is why I am having trouble dismissing it lightly, besotted by one quirky flattering pop cultural reference after another. Junot Díaz is saying something important about the world, or at least believes himself to be doing so, but aside from complete nihilism, I cannot for the life of me decide what it is.
Reviewed by Marya DeBlasi
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