This book was given to me by Jimena, a Mexican woman who attended the English PEN ‘Free Speech: found in translation’ night-class course I finished a few weeks back. She looked apologetic as she got The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao out of her bag and handed it over.
‘I’m not sure if you’ll want to include it,’ she said. ‘You see, he writes in English.’
A discussion ensued about whether Junot Diaz, now a creative writing professor at MIT, was an acceptable Dominican Republic choice. My classmates wanted to know where he was born (Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic), where he lived now (the US), and how much of his childhood he’d spent in the country (four years plus holiday visits to relatives from what I can make out). It seemed each one of us had slightly different criteria for judging Diaz’s pedigree.
Personally, I wasn’t sure I would include Diaz. I had several other names in the frame for the Dominican Republic and, excellent though I was sure the Pulitzer prize-winning novel was, I was intrigued to find out about them.
Then two things happened: quite by chance, our course leader Sophie Mayer referred to Diaz’s novel during the session, a coincidence which appealed to my sense of serendipity, and I discovered that the prose work of the other Dominican Republic writers on the list, including Arambilet and Pedro Mir, was by no means readily available in English. Time being of the essence, I decided to give the Diaz a go. It would be a sort of test of where that mysterious boundary line of nationality goes in literature, I thought.
Roving back and forth between the US and the Dominican Republic, the novel follows Oscar, a sci-fi and fantasy nerd and son of a Dominican mother, growing up in the eighties in a rough neighbourhood in New Jersey. Overweight, lonely and desperate for attention from girls, Oscar embarks on a series of excruciating attempts to win the favours of the local beauties, watched first by his rebellious sister Lola and later his college room-mate Yunior.
But it turns out that Oscar’s misery is by no means a one-off. As he unfolds his family’s backstory, Diaz reveals an intricate tale of torture, betrayal, murder and shattered dreams that stretches all the way up to the Dominican Republic’s erstwhile dictator Trujillo and will, quite literally, blow Oscar’s mind.
It’s interesting that a discussion of nationality nearly turned me off reading this book, because the relationship of the individual to cultural identity is one of its central themes. Right from its Derek Walcott epigraph, ending ‘either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation’, the novel explores how heritage informs, shapes and constrains our choices. Everything from the family fear of being under an old Fuku (curse) and the fact that ‘in Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow’, through to Lola’s fraught relationship with her mother and Oscar’s relatives’ scorn at his failure with girls can be traced back to a sense of what Dominican life is or should be.
The threads weaving together the personal and national are further tightened by a series of zestful footnotes that run through the book, giving the narrator’s personal gloss on history. Describing aspects of Trujillo’s reign of terror, ‘one of the longest, most damaging US-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere (and if we Latin types are skillful at anything it’s tolerating US-backed dictators, so you know this was a hard-earned victory, the chilenos and the argentinos are still appealing)’, they present a furiously witty engagement with the way politics impacts on individual lives. Feisty, shocking and only occasionally annoying, they grab the predominantly American readers Diaz clearly has in mind by the scruff of the neck and make them acknowledge what has happened, often giving them a parting jab in the ribs – ‘You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the US occupied Iraq either’.
Although Jimena was worried that the fact the novel was written in English rather than Spanish might weaken its DR claims, the language of the book is shot through with a sense of Dominican heritage. Packed with Spanish slang and even complete sentences in the language, the narrative is raucous with the richness of its cultural references and the conflicts and contradictions these create.
The result is a powerful, irreverent and thoroughly engrossing exploration of identity and how the particular time and place we are born and grow up in shape who we are. If anything, Diaz’s exposure to both US and Dominican society sharpens his perception of the DR. It is as though for both him and his characters, the transition between the two cultures is only truly possible once they have immersed themselves in, understood and made peace with their Dominican heritage. As Lola puts it, ‘you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.’
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Faber, 2009)
Nice review. You catch the essence of the book. I would definitely consider this a book that qualifies for your challenge. When I read the book I learned a lot about the culture of the Dominican Republic.
Thanks – good to have a perspective from someone else who has read it.
I’m Dominican, raised in the US, still somewhat in touch with my culture. Your descriptions are very good! I’ll have to look into this author, never heard of. I’ve also just started to write and publish myself. I have this book idea I want to write in Spanish, and every time I work on it, by the third or fourth paragraph, I am unconsciously writing in English. Maybe Diaz also struggled with this? I’m in a limbo when it comes to my identity. And after reading this, it sort of helps. It also makes me wonder, I guess only time will tell if I’ll be considered a Dominican author (in the future) or what exactly. Thanks for sharing!
Great to hear from you – and very interesting to hear that the identity question resonates with you too. I like your point about English and Spanish – it must be a strange experience to switch between languages like that. Best of luck with your writing.
I read Oscar Wao a few years ago- excellent writing and very informative- also incredibly sad.
Yes, it is sad, isn’t it? A great book.
Dominican Republic is my homeland. I live in Santo Domingo. Personally, I didn’t like the book. Junot Díaz has always lived in the U.S.A. and, although some of the things he says are accurate, he told his story from a foreign point of view… a bit vulgar if you ask me.
Interesting – thanks very much for your comment. What would your top Dominican Republic recommendations be?
My pleasure!
These come to mind rapidly: Juan Bosh, José Alcántara Almánzar, Julia Alvarez, Salomé Ureña, Pedro Mir, Joaquín Balaguer…
Great stuff. I wonder how many of these are available in English translation?
Sorry, but you didn’t read a Dominican book in 2012. Oscar Wao is an American book by an American writer.
Thanks Eric, I’m sure many would agree with you. My experience has been that the line can often be hard to draw and this was an interesting test case.
Hello.
I would like to recommend two contemporary authors that pretty much live all their lives in DR and currently translated to different languages.
Rita Indiana Hernandez &
Frank Baez
Good luck in everything.
Interesting – thanks. I’ll look into these when I nest update the list.
I just found out about this wonderful project, something that I’ve been think I want to do for about 10 months, not in a year more like spread out through my life. So I came to your blog and of course the first thing I did was look for your selection from my homeland.
I admit I rolled my eyes when I saw your selection, I would not qualify this as a book from the DR, his knowledge and understanding of it are wrong and superficial, so much take place in the US, and it was not even written in spanish (why use the spanish tag?), availability is a big issue with books from my small country, and this one has a pulitzer, but I agree with the others a Dominican book this is not.
Thanks. Yes, it was a controversial choice. What would your top recommendation be?
I would recommend some of the the ones mention already, Salome Ureña and Pedro Mir are great poets, but I don’t know if there work have been translated, same for Juan Bosh and Joaquin Balaguer, this two are famous for their political life, but both have great literary merit.
Julia Alvares is my safes bet of you finding her work in english because like Diaz she is really a US writer, but live longer in the DR at a crucial point in our history, she gives a good focus on women and immigration, my favorite from her is one of her children book How Tia Lola Came to visit Stay.
I’ll try to find out wish books are translated to english and maybe sent you one.
Interesting – thanks very much
Hello Ann Morgan.
I am from Dominican Rep. I just watched your Ted Talk a few minutes ago and felt inspired. I am a good and diverse reader also, and I identify with you with the fact that translations are indeed a big obstacle in trying to read from remote countries.
Definitely you can find more titles translated to English than to Spanish, so sometimes I am obliged to read in english, although I feel I am missing some escences, because, as you can read me, i still have some language limitations eventough I am continuously working on my english skills. Junot´s Choice was an excellent one, I would had recommended you that same book too if I had had the chance. Your words about the novel are perfectly accurate, you understood with great sensibility the intention of the author… by the way, i read both versions, in english and spanish and the translation to spanish is very good also, even though is missing the Spanglish resonance that is so fun to read.
Thanks a lot for inspiring me in such a beautiful way. I will include more books from countries that i have not read yet in my list for 2016… I will for sure use your list of recommendations… so please keep it on line.
Thanks Yulissa. Glad you liked the choice. I will certainly keep the list online. Happy reading!
Just finished it. Nice succinct yet detailed review.