Book of the Week: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

It's that time of the week again, folks! To be honest with you, this is the very first time where reading the B.O.W. actually took the whole week, and I was scrambling this morning to get through the last 85 pages or so. I would like to think that this lag has something to do with either the sudden flurry of activity in my life now that I have a job starting Monday, or perhaps the general day-behindedness I've been feeling the whole week, but it's definitely possible that the book itself was a large part of the issue...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz's first novel, is vibrant and raw and cacophonous, much like the Dominican Republic the book portrays. Through the narrator's strange mixture of rough candor and brilliant rhetoric, we come to know not just Oscar's brief and wondrous life, but the life of his ancestors, a slice of history in the DR, and a new lens for understanding America's heterogeneity today. While I did deeply love these aspects of the book, it was not an easy one for me to get through--perhaps because of its grittiness, or because of its thick references to Dominican dictators and cult fantasy characters. Of course prevalent use of the Spanish language didn't help much either (I studied German in high school and college, so am completely clueless when it comes to the romance languages). This story was also challenging in its intimate portrayal of tragedy, as it unflinchingly traces through the particulars of a multigenerational family curse ("fuku").

Now, not to be a spoiler here, but as you can guess from seeing the title (or reading more than 10 pages of the book), Oscar Wao doesn't make it to old-agedom. Interestingly, this sense of mortality, of a finite timeline, made me connect even more with the hapless hero, rooting for him to get up, start living, gain experiences while he could. This clever device, combined with the narrator's achingly honest portrait of Oscar as "a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd" make for a story that is at once high-energy and intimately emotive. While not an easy read, this one is definitely worth the struggle!

As an interesting foil to The Brief Wondrous Life..., this week's B.O.W. is On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. It is also about cultural collisions, family dynamics, and generational gaps, but having read Ms. Smith previously, I can guarantee that this novel is definitely going to have a distinctly different lilt to it than Diaz's work!

Also, the following week's B.O.W. will be: Man Walks into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. Now, for all of you out there who have previously considered participating in the BOW challenge, THIS is the one! It's relatively short, written by one of my very favorite contemporary authors, and (as if that weren't already enough!), has a superbly bizarre plot: it is the story of a brilliant professor who suffers from amnesia, forgetting every memory beyond the age of 12. "Here is the story of a strikingly intelligent, sensitive man returned to a world in which everything is strange and new. An emigrant in his own life, set free from everything and everyone who once defined him..." I think it is going to be wonderful, and I really do hope you'll join me! PS-Don't you just love the cover? Delish!