E3W Literature | University of Texas

Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Riverhead, 2007

352 pages

$14.00

Reviewed by Lauren Gantz

When it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was only the second novel by a Latino to receive the honor. The first was Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). While Díaz and Hijuelos’s novels have certain similarities—love-sick male characters, immigration stories, and popular culture references—Oscar Wao is drastically expanding the literary territory envisioned in Mambo Kings. Díaz’s work is remarkable for its ability to painstakingly depict the cultur­ally specific (i.e. the communities of Santo Domingo, Do­minican Republic, and Paterson, New Jersey), while simul­taneously gesturing towards an increasingly globalized pop culture via its incorporations of science fiction and fantasy.

The novel is narrated by Yunior, Oscar “Wao” Cabral’s former college roommate. Through Yunior, we learn that Oscar’s story is one of awkwardness and alienation. As an overweight Dominican American “nerdboy” obsessed with all things sci-fi and fantasy, Oscar “[c]ouldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.” Incapable of living up to his fam­ily and friends’ standards of “Latin hypermaleness,” Oscar struggles to define a place for himself in both the diasporic Dominican community of New Jersey where he grows up, and in his ancestral home of Santo Domingo. His life is thus marked by a sense of loss and an endless search—particu­larly in his earnest but oft-frustrated quest for romantic love.

Yunior attributes Oscar’s bad luck to what he calls fukú: “a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” Fukú stems from the vio­lence that occurred during the colonization of the Antilles, and manifests itself in various forms, most frequently in family curses or in brutal governments such as that of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930-1961. As readers learn about the lives not just of Oscar, but also of his mother, Belicia, and grandfather, Abelard, it becomes clear that the two forms of fukú are intertwined. The history of the Cabrals is a microcosm of twentieth cen­tury Dominican history—marked by physical violence at the hands of the Trujillo dictatorship and by the psycho­logical violence of the Diaspora. For Yunior, telling the Cabrals’ stories becomes a form of zafa, or “counterspell,” designed to free future generations of the family from fukú.

As other reviewers have noted, the novel is stylistically im­pressive. The brusquely conversational yet deeply insightful voice of Yunior, along with Díaz’s elaborate and often hu­morous footnotes, make Oscar Wao an engaging read. How­ever, what is perhaps most remarkable about the novel is the richness of its content. Díaz gracefully weaves narratives of Latinidad and diaspora into the Cabrals’ stories, making Oscar Wao a complex and thought-provoking work. Charac­ters are haunted by questions of how to define themselves in terms of race, ethnicity, and citizenship; of how to embody the gender roles assigned by their ethnic community; of how to exist in the US versus the Dominican Republic; and most of all, of how to overcome generations of trauma. That the narrative never feels over-burdened by so many weighty and unresolved questions is a testament to Díaz’s skill as an author.

Further proof of Díaz’s talent lies in the fact that, while Os­car Wao is deeply rooted in Dominican experiences—the majority of the footnotes offer lessons in the history of the Dominican Republic—it is simultaneously a transnational text. Indeed, Díaz makes it immediately clear that his novel is both a Dominican and a pan-Antillean narrative. Fukú stories, as Yunior puts it, “just keep coming in. And not just from Domos.” Other groups in the Caribbean have their own versions of such tales; and in recognition of such shared history and beliefs, Díaz reaches out to the differ­ent literary traditions of the Antilles. For example, while he narrates much of the novel in his own playful version of Spanglish, he also references Francophone writers such as Edouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire, and begins the novel with an epigraph from Anglophone poet Derek Walcott.

Yet Díaz’s novel can be called transnational on another lev­el, for perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of Oscar Wao is its deft incorporation of “nerdboy” culture. Using clever references to sci-fi and fantasy—genres which have become increasingly globalized with the aid of mass me­dia—Díaz makes Oscar’s story accessible to audiences with minimal knowledge of the Caribbean. For example, Trujillo is often referred to as Sauron, and his henchmen as Ring­wraiths—terms which anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) can immediately grasp. Díaz, in effect, performs an act of translation in such moments. Without sacrificing cultural specificity in order to pander to a main­stream audience, he offers readers a way of understanding the Cabrals’ experiences that is not entirely contingent upon national boundaries or ethnic communities. Díaz manages a balancing act that is truly difficult, and The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao is thus a novel truly to be admired.