THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO
Junot Diaz Faber $38

This is the title I reviewed on Radio New Zealand National earlier this morning.

This is an astonishing novel. Back in the mid 90’s a young unknown Junot Diaz burst on the scene with a collection of short stories published as DROWN and he was acclaimed as one of the most original and exciting writing talents to emerge in the US in years.
Since then there has been a stunning silence and his fans had almost given up hope when along came The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Oscar Wao by the way comes from a mishearing of Oscar Wilde.

This is like no other novel I have ever read. Partly I think that is because it is set within the Dominican community, both in New Jersey where there is a significant Dominican immigrant community and in the Dominican Republic itself, partly because the dialogue lapses quite often into Spanish words and phrases, and partly because this guy writes like no one else I have come across.

It is the story of a family – the de Leon family who three generations back were a prosperous and respected family living in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, but their good fortune and their good life all fell apart when they ran foul of the hated Rafael Trujillo and his despotic dictatorship. Contained within the story are descriptions of some unspeakable atrocities and torture, In a way the book contains a potted history of the Dominican Republic from the late 1930’s to the present day but this is skillfully woven into the family story and is not at all intrusive, in fact it is a key part of the family’s story.

The story opens however in the 1970’s when Oscar is a young boy living with his sister Lola and their terrifying mother, Beli. They are the surviving members of the de Leon family living in Paterson, New Jersey.
There is actually nothing about Oscar that makes him special except for the way that Diaz writes about him. Oscar is obese, he’s a computer nerd, he’s often depressed, he has no success at all with girls, although he’s always falling hopelessly in love, he has a massive vocabulary, an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction books and fantasy films, and the writings of J.R.R.Tolkien. He is himself obsessed with writing and he sees himself as becoming the Dominican Tolkien.

The book moves backwards and forwards between the three generations of the de Leon family and the amazing thing, and this is the author’s great skill, is that although it’s largely a pretty sad story about a pretty sad guy and his pretty sad family all tied in with the pretty sad history of the Dominican Republic, the book is actually very, very funny. Diaz deals with subjects in the book that are basically grim, often complex and yet he does it in a way that is always entertaining and exuberant.
I liked it very much, in fact I was bowled over by it, and I hope that Junot Diaz does not leave it so long this time before he delivers us another.

I should just mention something about Diaz. He was born in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, (I had to get out my atlas just to remind myself where it is – closest neighbor Haiti, then Cuba and Jamaica), emigrated with his family to the US as a child, was bused to a mostly white high school in New Jersey, later graduated from Rutgers University and then went on to Cornell where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree.