Book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Krishna
This book should have been called ‘The Brief And Ordinary Life of Oscar And A Lot More About His Family of His and Two Previous Generations’ if the author was honest. Oscar just seems to have a cameo here. Yes, I know that the author is using his over the top narrative device in the title too and it is not to be read seriously. But my main beef with the story is the narrative style, and I wanted to make this complaint upfront.
Anyway, let us move on and look at the story.
Oscar’s family has been afflicted with fuku or ‘The Curse’. “The Admiral’ was thus afflicted a long time ago and so even saying his name brought the fuku upon you. Trujillo, a dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist from 1930 to 1961, was its high priest. He named all the landmarks in the country after himself.
People believed that he was the master of fuku and even thinking bad thoughts about Trujillo will invite disaster on you and your family for generations.
Fuku is a powerful weapon. Just before his death JFK visited Dominican Republic – and carried fuku back with him, resulting in his assassination. Remember Vietnam? It is Lyndon Johnson’s fuku, caused by Lyndon Johnson’s illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. The fuku caused the greatest military nation in the world crash to a humiliating defeat in Vietnam – a poor country that should have been no match for the mighty power.
The belief in fuku is entrenched in the country and any misfortune – including having twelve daughters and no son – is blamed on it.
So much for the preamble. The story itself is over the top. The book is full of profanities – not that I am disgusted by it. However the tale wanders and does not seem to take itself very seriously and so you, in turn, do not take the story seriously. Oscar was a typical Dominican boy interested in sex and crime(?).
He was lewd and crass. (Like a typical Dominican boy, as per the story). He had two girlfriends simultaneously when he was seven. Yeah, no kidding. (So far, you don’t see a story at all, and if it does not move, you think you should save the effort and close the book). One of them, the prettier one, Maritza forces him to choose and he chooses her and breaks up with Olga, the other. (Sounds like Archie comics so far, only with plenty of swearing)
He grew very fat in high school; he was not good at games; he was an intellectual but that counted against him. A fat nerdy loner he was
When he gets a girl interested in him, he is thrilled but it turns out that she likes him for his intelligence but she has an abusive boyfriend Manny with whom she is in love. And does not hesitate to share personal details about their relationship with Oscar, who is her Big Fat Friend.
If you are into description of a regular life of a guy who does not seem to be able to get any breaks, this book is for you. If you want a story, something, anything at all to happen, do not waste your time on this one. (It won a lot of kudos and awards but I do not see what is in the book that got people excited.)
Meanwhile the story shifts to Oscar’s sister, who decides to go punk style, much to the chagrin of their controlling mother.
Then one day she runs away and stays with (who else?) an abusive boyfriend and his wild father. When she makes one phone call to Oscar out of nostalgia and offers to meet him in a neutral place, she is trapped by her mother and sister and forced back home. She is sent to Dominican Republic to stay with relatives and attend school there. Another of those loose episodes which is why this book feels like a string of (very) short stories threaded together. Not one of my favourite kind of books at all.
And on top of it, there is a lot of Spanish – not just the place and food names which is OK and brings some ambience into the story but actual Spanish phrases without any English explanation whatsoever. Since I don’t like to read stories for entertainment with a Spanish English dictionary by my side, the whole thing was extremely intrusive and therefore irritating.
There is Beli – we now go to another timeline and the story of the mom – stuck in Dominican republic. She was from a rich family but had lost her parents – a doctor father and a nurse mother – early in life and was brought up with La Inca – her aunt. (Actually you learn more of the people around Beli later) She is restless and feels suffocated in the island. And you wonder why you are reading a string of meaningless and disjointed vignettes. And wonder again why people like this book.
Beli attracts the eye of a white boy whose father is a big man in Dominican republic. Anyway, Beli suddenly becomes a beauty. How you ask? By growing enormous boobs. The whole male part of the island, young and old, salivate while they see her. And you wonder why the author has completely forgotten the titular Oscar Wao. But not so. Beli is the matriarch of Oscar’s family.
She gets pregnant by Gangster aka Dionisio. He had promised to marry her and take her to Miami to live in flashy wealth. But in reality he was married to the sister of Trujillo and too late she finds that she has been royally cheated. When the wife tries to forcibly arrest her with minions to get her aborted, she escapes.
Yes, things happen to people that briefly flares your interest but soon dies due to all the reasons quoted above. Very weird slant to the descriptions and the whole story comes out as over the top. Not my cup of tea.
The story continues with how she was caught again and was beaten to an inch of her death. La Inca, her aunt sends her to US. Coincidentally, Trujillo is murdered as she is being beaten (in a cornfield, as it happens)
There she marries a man and gives birth to Oscar and Lola, as we saw in the beginning of the book, but the man runs away after a short period.
Oscar himself has no luck with girls but is girl crazy. So when finally a girl shows him compassion and even goes to a movie with him, he is head over heels in love with her and when she runs away, he tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train from a bridge. He is not successful and recovers after injuries – broken leg etc.
Yunior, another cool playboy cat, befriends him. See? All jumbled up mess.
One lesson you can take to the bank – that is if you believe this story is typical – is that every Dominican boy and every Dominican girl are sex crazy and screw around indiscriminately – either for fun or money. Of course, I don’t think it reflects reality at all, but stating this as another example of the over the top narration that grates.
We now go one generation up to the grandfather of Beli and the surgeon with a nurse wife. When one of his daughters Jacqueline who had brains and ambitions to study medicine in France, became a great beauty. (Which in DR means growing a large pair of breasts and an ass in addition to the customary definitions elsewhere – according to the author). Abelard, the surgeon, knew that he had a great danger from Trujillo who wanted to bed anything that looked good and saw the entire island including the people within as his personal property to be used and abused at will. So he concocted a story of his wife suffering a nervous breakdown and hid his daughter in the house, away from all Trujillo’s functions. That came back to bite Abelard!
But he says ‘no’ when a specific invitation came to Abelard from the great dictator himself to bring his beautiful daughter Jaqueline. In just four days he is arrested for ‘treason’ and thrown in jail.
He is mercilessly tortured and beaten, which is described in gleeful detail in this book until his wife comes to see him – a broken man, tortured and barely alive.
The wife died in a truck accident shortly thereafter, the mistress died too (of cancer of the cervix they say), the elder daughter Jacquiline drowned in a shallow bathtub and the middle one Astrid (who figured so little) was killed by a stray bullet. All this happened within a short time after Abelard’s arrest in a string of curses (fuku?) or amazing coincidences. Abelard served 14 year sentence before he too died. But the last years he went insane due to torture and lived with almost no consciousness.
Enough of a sob story?
There was a daughter born after Abelard went to prison. (His wife discovered she was pregnant. That child grew up to be Beli, Oscar’s mom. She was taken away by a relative who did not want to look after her. Beli was the darkest in the family. She was then sold to another family and when finally La Inca, a cousin of Abelard shook herself free from mourning for her husband of four years who died (of natural causes before the arrest of Abelard) and went looking for the remaining daughter, they told her that she was dead.
But she was not, but was abused (boiling oil on her back, locked up in a chicken coop all night) and when La Inca finally heard the rumours, she went and brought Beli back with her. This ties into the earlier part of the story.
Despite the wanderings all over the place and the crazy over the top way of saying things, all of which I have ranted about earlier in this review, the story kind of draws you in and you sort of see why people like it. My dislike for the narration has not melted away, but now I see that there is indeed a multi generational story buried in all this gunk.
The books title is definitely misleading: It is not just about Oscar at all. In fact Oscar himself comes very rarely as a cameo in the book. It is all about Oscar’s family going up two generations – every life with the exception of poor Astrid, an aunt of Oscar – is examined in detail.
The story finally moves forward. Oscar comes back to live with his mom, who is glad to have him. He still is alone, no girl would look at him. No publisher wanted his stories. So he goes to the same school he studied as a teacher and finds that the kids mock him every turn and he cannot gain control. His life is spiralling down.
Still fat. Still nerdy. He goes to DR with his mom. And feels alone there too. (Wondrous Life?)
In Santo Domingo, he falls for a neighbour a middle aged prostitute, much to the alarm of his mother and La Inca. He does not care, not even when that lady Ybon warns him that her police boyfriend had heard about him and is very jealous.
The underling cops take him to the same cane field we met before and beat him to within an inch of his life but a friend Clive, who was watching him being taken away goes after and saves his life.
His mom forces him to go back to USA.
There is a suggestion of a guardian angel (a mongoose?) in some parts of the story.
Thn Oscar does something incredibly stupid or incredibly brave, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, Oscar dies young, justifying the ‘Brief’ in the title.
From one angle it is a brutal description of the messy life of the family. From another, it is an exaggerated over the top writing style which makes it difficult to get into the story.
Will leave it at that.
4/10
— Krishna