Oscar de León lives in New Jersey, weighs over 300 pounds, reads and writes copious amounts of science fiction, and falls deeply in love with nearly every girl he meets. He is a comic anti-hero in the tradition of ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, but with an important distinction: Oscar is Dominican, and this story is as much about Dominican history as it is about Oscar himself.
In ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’, Junot Diaz seamlessly blends humour with devastation, celebrating life even as he acknowledges that things can get bad, and usually do. Oscar’s life may seem mundane, but he is in fact haunted by the family curse, the fukú, placed on the Cabrals generations ago by Rafael Trujillo, former dictator of the Dominican Republic. The deceptively freewheeling novel moves forwards and backwards, changing narrators and subjects. It follows Oscar’s runaway sister Lola, cancer-suffering mother Belicia, and the men who are attracted to them both. The Cabrals were once a prominent Dominican family, but were brought to their knees by Trujillo’s violent attentions. The family’s resounding suffering makes its way down the line to Oscar’s tragi-comic situation, so that by the time the book ends, it is impossible not to see his narrative as much weightier than it first appeared.
Diaz writes in an incredibly fluid style. His sentences sound spoken, shifting between Spanish and English, referencing Stan Lee, Shakespeare, Sargent, and dance clubs. He even includes conversational asides. Nearly a third of the book is written in interrupting footnotes providing highly detailed historical accounts of Trujillo’s bloody reign. History, in this novel, is the unavoidable backdrop to what should have been personal events. Diaz also implies that Dominican history has been kept as a mainly unknown footnote to the history of the United States.
To call the novel magical-realist would be to simplify the originality of Diaz’s approach. Yes, there are Dominican curses and recurring supernatural beings. These elements are carefully met, however, with their non-Dominican equivalents: ‘Lord of the Rings’ quotations, apocalyptic fantasies, role-playing games.
‘Oscar Wao’ is simultaneously celebratory and heartbreaking. It succeeds in packing an enormous and unique universe into a relatively short and extremely readable space. It is technically breathtaking, undeniably funny, and filled with something many novels lack: an enormous amount of love, and heart.
