Bookish: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
In his Pulitzer prizewinning masterpiece, Junot Diaz manages to telescope the history of the Dominican Republic into a microcosm of one family’s struggles. His wit is street-sharp and Diaz pulls no punches, staring straight into the eyes of his oppressors and telling his cultural story straight from the heart.
His characters are beautifully crafted, vividly three dimensional and bursting from the pages. Diaz moves them like strategic pawns, playing out the story of his country without weighing down what is a highly energetic and surprisingly self-contained plot. Our protagonist Oscar is the ultimate sci-fi nerd for whom girls are his kryptonite. Losing himself in fantasy, anime and food, Oscar hides behind a force shield of distractions to protect himself from the unkind world outside.
Diaz makes me want to write like him, introspective and important though his subject is, he delivers it with seemingly effortless soul and humour. This book tells a story in the most complete sense of the word; it is the story of a people and the story of a family. I feel as though Diaz has cracked a few beers open and given up a slice of life, a magical porthole into another world I never knew existed. Truth is stranger than fiction, and the Trujillo regime’s smoke and mirrors seem so bizarre they defy their position as fact. Sometimes history is so incredible in retrospect that it feels almost dreamlike. At the end of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I awoke as if to say ‘Did that really happen?’.
If you like this, try One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Equally steeped in history, fantasy and the continuing thread of family generations. It is truly epic in the scope it covers and is spirit-lifting literature at its most gorgeous. One of my favourite songs, ‘Peng 33’ by Stereolab rips a quote directly from One Hundred Years… :
‘Across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments, while we really keep on living like monkeys.’ Magical things are indeed happening in this world.
Or See Under: Love by David Grossman.
A powerful, phantasmagorical tale where one man tries to make sense of the Holocaust.
