The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao New Yorker Book Review
Our Oscar Wao is the son of a Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey, an overweight child who is obsessed with sci-fi and comic books and function-playing; he is a "ghetto nerd" who dreams of being the Dominican Tolkien and who finds he doesn't fit in anywhere – not with other geeks about town and non with the Dominican community, which heralds the reputation of its virile, macho men. The fantasy worlds that Oscar lives in is juxtaposed with the chaotic, couldn't-make-it-up trajectory of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century – dominated by diaspora and the capricious, nonsensical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo -- every bit well as the magicked moments left in the wake.
One of the great sources of profluence in the novel is that we actually don't spend a corking deal of time with Oscar. The text moves among his tough-minded sister, his amazing mother, his sister's lustful lover, the grandfather of his that was tortured under Trujillo at mid-century. The voice of the novel shifts from close-third person to first-person, choosing different characters to embody. Oscar, notably, never speaks to us in the showtime-person; it is fascinating to run across that he seems to exist in the margins not only of his communities, but in the book that bears his proper noun. There is one narrator who gives cohesion to the book of many voices, one that we return to, one that only gradually takes shape, one whose identity nosotros suspect but who, finally, is affirmed only late in the novel – at a gentle moment that feels like an exhale.
In a move that creates a linguistical hybrid of the text, the language of the novel is heavily marked by Spanish, past dialects unique to New Jersey in the 1980s and Santo Domingo at mid-century, by idioms, past the voices of fantastical tales and by political essay-writing. Besides bringing great buoyancy to the text, this textual mixing mirrors both the Dominican diaspora experience and Oscar's (seemingly) opposed identities. In that location is one foot in either identify, and no easy categorization. The language of the novel might have felt unwieldy subsequently a few hundred pages, simply because of its necktie to the plot that information technology contains, the hybrid linguistic communication really brought cohesion to the volume.
On a wholly different note: I was surprised when the novel elevated the urgency of Oscar's desire to lose his virginity. An obsession with having sex for the start time is the driving forcefulness of untold teen film comedies, and information technology seemed to grate confronting what I expected from a thoughtful, joyous Pulitzer-winning novel past an author I admire. I set that discomfort bated, though, as I read the book – and was pleased to discover, only pages from the very ending, that Díaz resolves this virginity plot trajectory in a simple, beautifully nuanced way -- if information technology was somewhat disjointed with what came before, peradventure this difficult-to-believe dissonance as well connects with the novel's interest in fantasy, in curses, in the truth of the unbelievable. My tension virtually the weight given to Oscar's sexual frustrations was ultimately disassembled into a grateful, somewhat awed catharsis -- which is in turn a smashing parallel.
After I finished the novel, I constitute out that an excerpt of Díaz's novel appeared in The New Yorker, with the Hernandez brothers contributing uncredited illustrations. The novel makes much of references to the brothers' Love and Rockets saga (which, having experienced information technology for the first fourth dimension just recently, I delighted in). Merely fifty-fifty aside from that, the friction match seems perfect. Like Love and Rockets, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waotakes assuming risks -- not just in style, but in its willingness to tell stories of murder, torture, suicide attempts, sex, corruption, fearfulness, rape, runaways, immigrants not just in a vague haunting implication sort of way, but facing it straight. And it does this not with the jaw firmly clenched -- it comes among stories of humor and school, comic books and flirtation, rescue and magic. It takes courage to take on so many tones of the human feel. And nosotros are lucky readers indeed to find them tethered here in Díaz's sweeping, multi-lingual sentences.
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Source: https://isak.typepad.com/isak/2010/06/book-review-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao.html