Its not often that a book blows my insides out. They were able to quite frequently when I was younger, and my mind became irreprably twisted on a diet of science fiction and fantasy. At some point I got “old” and realized that the highs I got off those books couldn’t be matched by a real life. Now I read mostly non-fiction and stay away from any strong stuff that could push me off the wagon and require literary methadone treatments. I started doing what I could to seek out the rush, the lust, the magic in the real world. I’m still doing what I can in the real world.
And then I relapsed last week. Hard. My past is why I so connected with the title character in Junot Diaz’s brilliant first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Or rather, I connected at some middle ground between this dateless, hopeless nerd and the consummate ladies man who tells us the story. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the desi connections. From the back of the book:
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that speaks in tongues. This long-awaited novel by Junot Diaz is a masterpiece about our New World, its myths, curses, and bewitching women. Set in America’s navel, New Jersey, and haunted by the vision of Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is radiant with the hard lives of those who leave and also those who stay behind — it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.” Walter Mosley
This book is a “diaspora novel” that transcends both time and reality (its filled with quotes from Lord of the Rings and other books that any real sci-fi nerd would know). As another reviewer stated, to paraphrase, “this is a diaspora novel for people who hate diaspora novels.” Set in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic it is the tale of a several generations of a strong Dominican American family that has been cursed (like all Dominicans) by the Fuku, brought by the “Admiral” who should never be named (but arrived in 1492). It is a curse so powerful that it is pointless to fight it. Diaz uses the life of an overweight science-fiction nerd to propel the story, a roughneck ladies man to narrate it, and a group of strong and beautiful latin women to beat the nerd and the roughneck out of each man and make the sadness of this book worth enduring. It is also a detailed and illuminating account of the brutal 20th century dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (a.k.a Sauron or The Eye).
It was when I started to see all the desi references in the book that I began to understand what is happening in literature. A great many diaspora communities get to mix here in the U.S. We’ve become a unique literary lab where all the good shit from all the people that come here can start to mix and create some truly good shit that seemed unconcoctable. Here is a scene where Junot Diaz writes about Oscar’s best friends getting laid (without Oscar):
It killed him that they hadn’t thought to include him in their girl heists; he hated Al for inviting Miggs instead of him and he hated Miggs for getting a girl, period. Al getting a girl Oscar could comprehend; Al (real name Alok) was one of those tall Indian prettyboys who would never have been pegged by anyone as a role-playing nerd.
And this scene where Oscar falls in love (for the hundredth time):
She wore tight black stirrup pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous putter-on of make-up, an intricate bit of multitasking for which Oscar never lost his fascination. She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl…
And this scene from the perspective of Oscar’s mother:
Let’s just say that she finally understood why the other boys had given him the name Jack the Ripio; he had what even she knew to be an enormous penis, a Shiva-sized lingam, a destroyer of worlds.
Back in the Dominican Republic Oscar’s mom used to work at a Chinese restaurant owned by a Chinese man named Juan:
Juan, the short-sighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese).
I was born in Skokie. I found it beautiful that this novel had a Chinese-Dominican living in a predominantly Indian and Jewish suburb of Chicago. That’s the kind of stuff that makes a brilliant novel. In addition to the references above, the Dominican-American narrator (whose identity is not obvious until the book’s second half) makes several references to his Indian girlfriends. This leads me to believe that Junot Diaz either has a lot of Indian friends or has/is dating an Indian woman. At the very least we know who to thank for getting him his current position as a writing professor at MIT. He thanks her in the book:
Anita Desai (who help land me the MIT gig: I never thanked you enough Anita)
Anita is the mother of Booker Prize winner Kiran. Manish from UltraBrown also tipped me off to the fact that the current NewYorker features a story by Diaz that you can sharpen your teeth on:
You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special…Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness. Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertible knowledge that she will never forgive you. You stare at her incredible legs and between them, to that even more incredible pópola you’ve loved so inconstantly these past eight months. Only when she starts walking over in anger do you finally step out. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüenzería. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter?… [Link]
The man can write. I need to go back on some non-fiction for a while until I can get myself right again.
