The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Uh, I made this blog because I was confused about the requirements for posting on someone else's blog, but now I'd like to actually post thoughts on it. I'm hoping most of them will have to do with books I read. I used to have a crafts blog, but now that I don't have internet at home, I'm never able to post pictures and that seemed silly to sustain. I do like the blogging community and plan to continue contributing.

Thoughts for today:

I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for a book club of which I'm a fairly delinquent member. This month I was meant to host the discussion, which meant several things:
- I could choose the book selections
- I had to read whatever we picked
- I had to show up

So the choices I offered were the following thinly-veiled attempts at incorporating my school work into my social life (hey, at least I suppressed my usual need to incorporate physical activity... jogging book clubs aren't as popular as they should be):
1) Pedro Paramo-- Juan Rulfo
2) El Aleph-- Jorge Luis Borges
3) Conversation in a Cathedral-- Mario Vargas Llosa
4) The Savage Detectives-- Roberto Bolano
5) The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao-- Junot Diaz
6) In the Time of the Butterflies-- Julia Alvarez
I still want to read all of these; I chose them because they are seminal works that (to me) are fascinating. The first is a classic work about the Mexican identity, the second is a collection of short stories by the master of 'magical realism', the third is by one of the more prolific Latin American authors (especially of those translated into English) who also dabbled in politics, the fourth I have actually started and is not only an interesting tracing of Latin American literature but also a fun experiment in format, and the sixth is a historical (fiction? i think? but based on a true story) account of the Mirabal sisters and their rebellion against Trujillo.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, besides winning some prize called the Pulitzer or something, was recommended to me by a Dominican friend and by another fellow student of Latin American politics. At first I had a hard time getting into it. Being interested in immigrant identity and in Latin America, you'd think it'd be right up my alley, but the gangsta narration couched in sci-fi/fantasy allusion seemed a little gimmicky to me. Combine that with a helpless and somewhat repulsive protagonist and a conflict-laden slate of other characters, and you've got an unpleasant book. By half-way into the book, I was a lot more interested. The development of Oscar's sister and mother really turns the story around, makes it less about Oscar and more about the family; less about the family and more about Dominicans; and less about Dominicans and more about resilience.

How does this novel stand out from other books on the Trujillato, Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic? First, by not being *about* the Trujillato. Like other recent novels set in the DR, the Trujillato forms a backdrop, a lens through which all of the events are to be understood. A lot of this book takes place in the U.S., and it never presumes an understanding of Dominican politics-- the footnotes and exposition are more than enough to grasp the situation. I'd say that of the books I've read, this is a sort of cross between La Fiesta del Chivo (Feast of the Goat) and Papi, both of which are worth reading and supplement an understanding of the DR.
Second-- and this is actually a separate thought I had, but it follows as reasoning for my point above-- this book manages to go beyond the situation of the DR or the idea of dictatorship. I can think of a lot of books with similar endings, which I won't give away, but in particular this book made me think of The Stranger. Frustrated with the "ironic"-cum-apathetic-cum-noncommital attitude of most of my generation, I see this book (maybe only by wishful thinking) as a confirmation or promise that people want to feel passionate, and that when they do feel that passion it will fuel them through anything. The most unlikely of events can spark a fire within that draws people to it, even on the brink of society, with a kind of magnetism that shows just how rare and special that fire is.