The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz’s first novel, is a powerful, funny, off-putting, crazy, cantankerous, sweet, sexy, violent, crazy bit of prose. It grabs you and refuses to let you go, jamming on politics and cultural stereotypes, ruminating on curses and craziness, asking questions about what it means to be a Dominican, an American. to live in diaspora and what the long-term impact of a brutal, violent dictatorship is on the people who live through it, their children and their children’s children.
It is a novel of many voices filtered through one (a la Faulkner), written in ghetto slang, Spanglish, Dominican Spanish, literary English and mixed throughout with the mythologies of science fiction, comic books, bits of history — a raging stew of a novel with a core so sweet, so tender and so painful it is hard to believe.
Read it and then read it again.
Here is a link to my story on Diaz in Time Off and here is a great interview with him from The Progressive magazine.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Hank Kalet 