The Heritage Month Project: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

Hispanic Heritage Month, one of the heritage months recognized by the U.S. State Department prior to 2025, runs from September 15 to October 15. For those of us very focused on traditional classifications/designations of time, mid-month to mid-month seems...wrong. However, a number of Latin American countries observe their independence days on September 15 or soon thereafter, so think outside the box, Gail.

I must admit upfront that in the past I associated Hispanic American literature with my back-in-the-day book discussion group. The books by Hispanic authors I read for book group I found difficult. Deep. Maybe stylistically outside my experience. Very literary? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos--There were only a couple of sentences in that book that registered with me, and they both dealt with Desi Arnez, who I had some previous knowledge of. Even the movie was lost on me. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez--that's pretty dramatic original material and all I could tell you about it is that everyone...... Well, that would be telling you the ending, so I won't. I think we read some magical realism, which is a big deal in Latin American literature and after that I avoided that genre. Even if you take the attitude that magical realism can exist in writing from nonLatin American writers, and I've heard that some people don't, I tend to avoid it now. Be magic...be real...be one or the other. 

In short, I wasn't looking forward to my Hispanic Heritage Month reading. But things have gone really well.

I Found Oscar

I cannot recall what led me to look into author Junot Diaz's work, other than I'd heard his name. I often say I can't recall why I read this or that, and it isn't because of some kind of mental lapse. Though would I recall it, if it were? No, it's because I juggle reading a great many things, as well as thinking about them. 

Pardon me for obsessing.

I became aware that Diaz has published in The New Yorker, and flash fiction, too! I could get a short sample, and I did with the lovely The Books of Losing You.

And so I went on to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think I chose because it was available at a library I was in. Yes, I have crap reasons for reading the things I read. I shouldn't even mention them.

This is not one of the Hispanic-related books I was used to, even though it has markers of what some people would think of as a "literary" book. The story moves around a number of twentieth century periods, and a number of points of view. Much of the book has a narrator who remains unknown for a while. (He's Oscar's college roommate and his sister's sometime boyfriend.) There are footnotes. There's a lot of Spanish. There's what might be a curse.

On the other hand, though, there is Oscar, a sad, Dominican-American nerd who might be living under that family curse and who wants love so badly. His story is extremely engaging. Of course, everyone who has watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory thinks they know nerd culture. Oscar Wao reads as if author Junot Diaz really knew it back in 2007 when his book was published. Or I should say, knew it in the '90s, the period when Oscar was living. Who doesn't love a nerd, wherever he comes from?

A Little Bit of What We're Dealing With Here

A lot of footnotes. Footnotes were a thing in fiction for a while. I have a family member who intensely dislikes them used that way, but I enjoy them. I liked what Diaz did with them here. He uses them to explain the Dominican Republic world that earlier generations of Oscar's family lived in under the Trujillo regime there. I had actually heard of Trujillo, probably because I'd read In the Time of the Butterflies, which Diaz mentions. Meaning I got something out of that book. I realized he was bad news, but I couldn't have told you what country in which he was bad news. Meaning I didn't get very much out of that book. Diaz places the bulk of his Trujillo history in footnotes, but he handles that history with wit. Could readers skip the footnotes, which is probably what many readers of nonfiction do with footnotes there, and still get a story in Oscar Wao? Probably, but the footnotes are fantastic. It's hard not to compare our own times to the Trujillo era, which most readers probably weren't doing in 2007 when this book was published. As grim as things are now, they are not Trujillo grim.

A lot of Spanish. I've read that there are some objections to the amount of Spanish in this book. I don't feel you had to understand it to follow the story. What's more, this is a story about Spanish speaking people. Wouldn't a book about Spanish-speaking people with little or no Spanish be a book about Spanish-speaking people for nonSpanish people? What am I trying to say here? Would it be a book about Spanish-speaking people that English-speaking people would be comfortable with? I read a book about Spanish-speaking people but they weren't Spanish enough to speak Spanish? 

I have to admit, though, that I did wish the Spanish was French. Because I study French, de temp en temp, and I would have looked up what I didn't know, and my French would have improved so much! So I was patient with the Spanish. Someone's Spanish probably improved as a result of reading this book.

The curse. I am not a fan of curses, but this one provided a connection between characters. It was a sort of storyline. A recurring theme, perhaps.

In short, there is a great deal to like about this book.

Has Oscar Influenced Another Book?

Earlier this year, I read The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao brought it back to mind. The books' titles are similar, both in terms of how they're structured and in terms of them tipping readers off to the fates of the main characters. Both books deal with an ethnic group in America, Dominican Americans in one case, Franco-Americans in the other. Both make use of a language other than English in the text, Spanish for Oscar Wao and French for Babs Dionne. (There's far more Spanish in Oscar Wao than there is French in Babs Dionne. I'm going to make a wild guess here that Diaz is more fluent in Spanish than Currie is in French, but that may just be me overidentifying with another Franco-American author.) In Oscar Wao we have the nightmarish Trujillo back in the Dominican Republic. In Babs Dionne we have a pretty terrifying criminal back in Canada. Both books also have a touch of the supernatural. In Oscar Wao there is that curse. In Babs Dionne there is a character who suffers from hallucinations in which she communicates with the dead.

I should be writing an undergraduate paper, shouldn't I? 

Yes, my Hispanic Heritage Month reading is off to a good start.