“Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin unless you start changing.
Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you someone tries to name a church after me.”
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
There are books that land unexpectedly in your hands only to transform your reality forever. Themes such as longing for the past, hating where you live, as well as your courage being the one thing you need yet the easiest to be torn down is what The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao did to me.
For about ten years the concept of “geek is cool” has permeated pop culture. The Big Bang Theory showed how videogame, Sci-Fi, and math lovers can reach the status once reserved for rebels, nonconformists, and even the illiterates who chose violence instead of words. But this novel proves that’s not entirely true.
“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary US ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
Several Anglo-media outlets have deemed this book as one of the best the best works of writing in the twenty-first century’s brief life, along with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The story centers on Oscar, an overweight youth living in the New Jersey ghetto, obsessed with science fiction, writing, board games, and role play. His greatest fixation is love, yet nothing seems good enough to the Dominican blooded teen. Like any other boy his age, the primal desire to have sex could convince him to settle for any woman. But adolescent lust seems to come with a need for true love.
Oscar is all of us during our teenage years. Brimming hormones transform us into bizarre beings that don’t fit in with their families, feel insecure, quiet, pathetic, and fantasize about sleeping with every person from the opposite sex who isn’t a blood relation and talks to us. It might appear to be a YA novel, but this is only the description of one of the protagonists. Oscar Wao is a book in the vein of A Hundred Years of Solitude. Junot Díaz shows the title character’s family tragedy through the stories of those around him. His older sister Lola is a confident young woman with a one mortal enemy, her mother Beli.
Díaz brings us into the dynamics of a dysfunctional and fatherless family. But rather than inspiring pity towards this immigrant family, he presents the reality of a group of people who are a product of their environment. Beli suffers from a broken childhood, Lola from a lack of identity and abusive mother, while Oscar is a strange Dominican-American immersed in his own version of reality.
“She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I’m not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.”
Díaz has a unique narrative voice that uses Spanglish to provide incredible literary strength to the text. While some might consider this as a desecration of language, the several awards the novel received (including a Pulitzer) only back the idea that Díaz is giving a voice the new generations of American who embrace their Latino roots by showing the good, the bad, and the awful:
“His tío Rudolfo (only recently released from his last and final bid in the Justice and now living in their house on Main Street) was especially generous in his tutelage. Listen, palomo: you have to grab a muchacha, metéselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y metéselo! Tío Rudolfo had four kids with three different women so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident méteselo expert”.
Through Oscar Wao, Díaz forces us to delve into the otherness of characters that due to their immigration status don’t seem to belong anywhere. The story jumps between the Dominican Republic and the United States throughout four generations. In the same way as García Márquez and Tolstoy, the author shows us how narrative can still be revolutionary in the way we bends the rules to transcend them. This is one of the few reasons why this novel is considered the current century’s best novel so far.
Oscar Wao is the reflection of a society looking to the past in order to reach its future. It’s the story of a people marked by tragedy. It’s magical realism, science fiction, epic, and, without a doubt, a work of literature that will grab your attention from the first page only to change your perception of the written word forever.
Translated by María Suárez
