Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

[bibliogramma]

Junot Diaz's remarkable novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is one of those books that leaves me not at all certain of how to talk about it. I could talk about the characters, who are memorable and vibrant and clearly drawn, even those that would be caricatures in a lesser work. I could talk about the language, which is a mix of English, Spanish, and the evolving form of speech known as Spanglish (Wikipedia informs me that it is neither pidgin nor creole, but is more than just code-switching or jumbling phrases from both parent languages), which is engaging and creative and wholly apt. I could rave about the wide range of multi-cultural references from genre novels to literary classics, and how they mirror the same kind of rich amalgam between cultures that the use of Spanglish does. This is in many ways a novel of the post-colonial world in that it is a mosaic of multiple influences.

I could talk about the novel as an indictment of what Junot (in an interview in The Boston Review) calls:

The rape culture of the European colonization of the New World—which becomes the rape culture of the Trujillato (Trujillo just took that very old record and remixed it)—is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love. (http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/paula-ml-moya-decolonial-love-interview-junot-d%C3%ADaz)

I could try to convey the plot - or plots - of this complex novel. There's the life of the young American-Dominican man who is steeped in popular culture and longs to be a writer, told by another young American-Dominican man who longs to be a writer, and the curse on his family and how that has shown itself though three generations, and then there is the story of life (and death) in the Dominican Republic under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, and all of this is tied together in a narrative that doesn't let you go even after you've finished reading.

Or I could just direct you to some more coherent reviews that will tell you that this is a great novel and one that deserves to be read, like these two:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html
http://www.thenewcanon.com/wondrous_life.html