For someone who has often wanted to become a person with no history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a crushing tale of the self, a heartbreaking bit on geekdom, the inescapable social unit called family, a nation’s becoming and unbecoming, US-backed dictatorships, diaspora and beyond.
Though less so if, like in this case, it’s going to be narrated by someone who ought to be a rockstar or a pop culture journalist, or someone who can comfortably tell the tale of national amnesia without the readers actually vomiting their lunch.
I bought the book because of my friends (they have that hold on me, the literary kind), and because much has been said about this Mr. Diaz, who actually looks dapper on the back cover photo. It is beyond me now to say something useful about the book, something that would delve on its literariness, but from page one onwards I was able to taste the violence and grief and despair in my mouth.
Oscar’s sister Lola puts it so sadly yet ruthlessly, “If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.” No fuku, no supernatural Trujillo, just life as you have it.
And there’s Oscar, the kind of sensitive, well-meaning guy geek who broke my heart to smithereens yet chose to deal with the whole fuku thing until the end, who, in his moment of catharsis or something, knew there’s life as it is and life as you decide it to be.
Now I can’t wait to get my hands on Drown and be seducted by Diaz’s prose all over again.
