Written by Junot Diaz, and published in 2007, this book couldn't help but raise expectations.

In 2015, a group of US critics voted it the best novel the century had produced up to then. It beat out Wolf Hall, Atonement, Americanah, My Brilliant Friend, and The Corrections (which predates my blog, but is remembered in my diary as "a horrifyingly believable account of old age and generational misunderstandings... A very moving book").

Nor was Oscar Wao a five-minute wonder that went away. It came in at No. 11 on last year's NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list (and made it onto the equivalent readers' list, too).

The back cover and first few pages are awash with laudatory quotes. Oh, and it won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

Yet I... just wasn't blown away...

So this post kind of goes full circle. From initial bewilderment (seriously, what were they all on about?), to cogitation, to an admission that yeah, OK, this is really a pretty good book, with something unique and memorable to say.



1.

It's certainly very readable. That was never a problem. Swept along, I definitely wanted to find out the end of the story (which chronicles -- in non-linear fashion -- three generations of a family of Dominican Republic origin, who appear to be under the power of a curse, or fuku). Yes, I learned tons about the country that shares an island with Haiti, and about the reign of terror to which it was subjected by Rafael Leonidas Trujillo from 1930 to 1961 (and beyond -- because, as is the way of these things, his death didn't immediately end the problems his era had caused).




The infamous Trujillo

Nor did I see as problematic the things that others have complained about: I loved the racy style Diaz gives to his various narrators, especially Yunior (a young man who's possibly the author's alter ego, but whose misogynistic and self-destructive promiscuousness makes him a troubling figure); I don't feel the need to comment on Diaz's use of the n-word (that's definitely a discussion that should be left to persons of colour); I'm very happy to have chunks of Spanish scattered throughout the text (I live in a country where people code-switch ALL the time); it didn't bother me that I didn't get all the fantasy and sci-fi references; and I wasn't put off by the footnotes (which, still in the same irreverent and ironic style, offer lots more information about the background; the first begins: "For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history...").

I can't even complain about the magic realism (a mysterious faceless man heralds bad events, and a golden, mongoose-like creature exercises some level of protection over the family's fuku victims). I'm not a fan of this kind of thing, but there wasn't much of it; it was done in a questioning, sceptical, convince-me kind of way; and it all cohered nicely with the cultural background.

So far, so OK.


Bohol, 2012. The Philippines is another set of tropical islands that suffered more than one wave of colonization and a US-backed authoritarian ruler

But somehow...

Part of the problem was the violence. Really horrible things happen to members of all three generations, and -- it's no spoiler to say it, because it's in the title already -- our titular lead dies a violent death. But, then again, it was an exceptionally violent era. You can't expect rose petals. And it's my bad luck, not the author's fault, that I happened to be reading this and another violent book at the same time, and therefore felt distinctly over-exposed to accounts of people doing vile things to each other.

But the major stumbling-block was that I found Oscar an uncomfortable protagonist... He and his sister have grown up in the US. Their mum, Beli, fled the Dominican Republic after a rash liaison with a Trujillo connection that nearly got her killed. Their dad exited very early on, leaving Beli to soldier on as a single mum. Exiled in a strange new culture, she actively embraces "the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination".

Oscar is presented to us almost from the beginning as unable to fit in. He's nerdy and odd. His fatness is repeatedly emphasized. He loves fantasy and sci-fi, and uses them as a refuge (at one point he nurses dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien). He's the kid who desperately wants friends -- and, more specifically, desperately wants a girlfriend -- but who just can't find any sort of comfortable place in society. He falls in love, time after time, but his feelings are never requited.

You feel sorry for him, definitely, and you really want people to be nicer to him. But he somehow doesn't endear himself, and you wonder if you yourself would have been nicer, or would have run a mile. You're almost embarrassed by him. You wish he would bear his rejection in a more dignified fashion. Then you think: That's a terrible way to react. So you're perplexed.



Eventually, there's a suicide attempt. He's rescued, but nothing gets better. He's still in "a world of hurt": "He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork..." He's bone-weary depressed, angry with everyone, unable to work on any of the stuff he longs to create.

Then, during a trip back to the homeland with some other family members, he falls in love yet again. With Ybon. She's an older woman, a semi-retired sex worker. There's nothing physical going on with Oscar, but she listens to him, and treats him as a human being. The problem is that she has a client who won't admit any rivals. So Oscar is viciously thrashed in the cane fields, just as his mother was, and heads back to the US, barely alive.

You'd think he would stay safely out of the picture for a while. But no, he insists on returning. There's another brief idyll with Ybon. And then the inevitable happens. The rival's henchmen kill him.

So it looks as though the fuku has struck again. This is, as Diaz tells us right from the start, a fuku story. "They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved..." -- but for the purposes of our family's history, it first struck with grandfather's Trujillo-mandated imprisonment and resultant death, which was followed by the deaths of his wife and two of his daughters. Beli is the only one to make it out of that first fuku assault, and that was only by the skin of her teeth. Having been rescued by the indomitable La Inca, a relative of grandfather's generation, she's later almost liquidated, as we said. And now it's Oscar's turn. (All three times, be it noted, there's a misogynistic women-as-objects driver in action: Grandfather is trying to protect his beautiful daughter from Trujillo's insatiably roving eye; Beli's tormentors are putting her in the place that women are supposed to occupy, ie, subjugated and in pain; and Oscar is killed because the object of his love is someone else's object, full stop.)

But the counterspell to fuku is zafa, which is something you do to mitigate the evil. In Beli's case, prayer was a very effective zafa. And Diaz asks: "Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain't a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell."

But what was Oscar's apparently pointless death supposed to demonstrate? That if we're subjected to a curse, we should just walk straight along into its mouth? Proving what? How could that possibly be zafa?

A posthumous letter reveals that Oscar finally did have sex with Ybon. As personhood in ultra-macho Dominican society is directly related to sexual prowess ("it's against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once," Yunior told Oscar), this is obviously a step forward in status terms. But is it worth ending up dead for? Is it worth subjecting Ybon to such obvious risk? How does this make sense?

So I finished reading, thinking: Yeah, it's a good story. But I don't get the hype. And I somehow can't make it add up.



***

2.

Then, as you think about it, and read others' views of it, things start to emerge more clearly.

There were two articles that I found particularly useful.

First, Diana Pifano explains how all the references to fantasy literature, science fiction, comics and general pop-culture don't just serve to fill in the background of Oscar's imaginative life. They also have a descriptive function:

"In particular, they describe cultural and historical elements specific to the Dominican Republic of the Trujillo era... The framework created by those references, or the gestalt of knowledge to which they allude, acts as the supplementary language that allows for the diaspora and all its complexities to be (re)presented to a reader lacking any previous knowledge of the matter.

"The most salient examples are the descriptions of the historical figures related to the regime, all of whom are characterized by association to the genres’ famous villains. For example : Johnny Abbes García is touted as 'one of Trujillo’ s Mogul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM).' ; Félix Wenceslao Bernardino is described as '[O]ne of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar'; and of course the best example is the description of the dictator himself, '[h]e was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful, that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up'. In fact, the most clear and concise description of the regime is presented by means of pop-culture. In a section entitled 'Santo Domingo Confidential' the Trujillato is compared to an episode of the Twilight Zone."

The fantastic elements such as the mongoose, on the other hand, play a role in buffering the horrific detail of the family's tragedies. And the whole magical side also allows for ambiguity. Three explanations are offered as to why our unfortunate clan came in for such a personalized pounding with this age-old curse: "So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fuku? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here." But -- given that the narrator sees his story as a kind of zafa, a counter-curse -- we have to conclude he believes, even if only a little bit. The family is certainly taking no risks, Pifano points out: "The novel’s final pages introduce the next generation of the Cabral family, Lola’s daughter, who is protected by three azabaches, protection charms carved out of a form of fossilized ebony into the shape of a closed fist. One charm which belonged to Belicia, one to Oscar and the third to the girl’s mother, in hopes that the compounded effect of all three will safeguard her from the family’s fuku."

Throughout, in fact, readers are invited to judge for themselves whether fuku is a thing.

Oscar, after his suicide attempt, has this exchange with Yunior:

"It was the curse that made me do it, you know.
"I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit.
"It's ours too, he said."

And Lola, after the death of her former boyfriend:

"The curse, some of you will say.
"Life, is what I say. Life."



Also extremely illuminating was this blog post by Abigail Nussbaum. On Oscar, first of all, and the fact that he's "an extremely unappealing character": "Yes, such people exist in geek circles, but does [Diaz] have to air our dirty laundry in public, among people who all too often assume that this kind of half-formed humanity is all that geekdom amounts to? And what does any of this have to do with the sad history of the Dominican Republic? These are the questions I asked myself upon finishing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and then I realized that the answers were one and the same. Oscar exemplifies the sad truth that people who have suffered are rarely made better, or more likely to recognize and try to prevent the suffering of others, through their pain, and that having suffered makes one no less likely to inflict suffering. And this, in a nutshell, is Diaz's history of the Dominican Republic, a nation that goes from colonial rule to tyranny to a police state that 'out-Stasi'd the Stasi,' in which neighbors inform on one another for material gain or to avenge petty slights, to the corrupt modern era in which brutality is the order of the day. And, continuing unabated through all these upheavals, a deep-seated racism that runs the gamut from the valorization of light skin to anti-Haitian genocides, and a misogyny that permeates every aspect of Dominican life."

Yeah, absolutely: Diaz doesn't soft-pedal the racism or the misogyny...

But this is part of his wake-up call, says Nussbaum, and he can tell it like it is because he's Dominican himself (albeit resident in the US from an early age), and he wants something better for his people: "Dominican is what Yunior, and Oscar and Lola and their parents and grandparents, are, a part of themselves that they can never leave behind or overcome. What's left for all of them -- and, I believe, for Díaz -- is to hope for better, for some healing of the wounds that have gone on to cause so much suffering...

"A powerful fuku, Yunior tells us, has been laid on Oscar's family, but as he unfolds the tale of that family's misfortunes we realize that the fuku lies on all Dominican society, that it is the cruelty, racism, misogyny, and most of all the inability to give without expecting anything in return that he has been describing for 300 pages. Towards the end of the novel, Yunior comes to believe that Oscar may have discovered the zafa that will heal this wound. When Oscar finally, finally loses his virginity, what sweeps him off his feet isn't the act itself but 'the little intimacies that he'd never in his whole life anticipated'... He wrote: 'So this is what everybody's always talking about!' But of course no one ever talks about it. Not a single male character -- not even Yunior, who knows that through doing so he might save his relationship with Lola -- ever talks about intimacy, ever rates it above the physical aspect of sex. That Oscar, of all people, can find the path to this deeper well of feeling gives Yunior hope that he, and others like him, can too. So, in his own way, Oscar may very well have saved the world."

Ah, that makes so much more sense now...



The closing lines of the book -- from Oscar's posthumous letter -- are worth quoting: "He wrote that he couldn't believe he'd had to wait for this so goddamn long... He wrote: So this is what everyone's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!" Which sounds like the flipside to the end of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ("The horror! The horror"). But where Kurtz pointed to a vision of brutality and darkness, Oscar is pointing to tenderness and ordinariness and light.

Of course, you can't help wishing he could have figured all that out, and lived... But hey... I guess you have to die to save the world...

Junot Diaz comments in an interview: "For me, the family fuku is rape. The rape culture of the European colonization of the New World -- which becomes the rape culture of the Trujillato (Trujillo just took that very old record and remixed it) -- is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love. Yunior, in this context, is a curious figure. He’s clearly the book’s most salient proponent of the masculine derangements that are tied up to the rape culture... He’s most clearly one of Trujillo’s children -- yet he, too, is a victim of this culture. A victim in the lower-case sense because his failure to disavow his privileged position in that rape culture, to disavow the masculine discourse and behaviors that support and extend that culture, end up costing him the love of his life, his one best chance at decolonial love and, through that love, a decolonial self. But Yunior’s a victim in a larger, second sense: I always wrote Yunior [who has appeared in other work by Diaz] as being a survivor of sexual abuse. He has been raped, too. The hint of this sexual abuse is something that’s present in Drown [a collection of stories published in 1996] and it is one of the great silences in Oscar Wao. This is what Yunior can’t admit, his very own pagina en blanco. So, when he has that line in the novel: 'I’d finally try to say the words that could have saved us. /___ ___ ___,' what he couldn’t say to Lola was that 'I too have been molested.' He could bear witness to everyone else’s deep pains but, in the end, he couldn’t bear witness to his own sexual abuse. He couldn’t tell the story that would have tied him in a human way to Lola, that indeed could have saved him."

So that's another interesting little beam of light, which explains why Oscar's recognition of the low-key power of intimacy made such an impact.



***

Closing miscellanea

-- Why Oscar Wao? When his name is Oscar de Leon? Well, Yunior decides one day that he looks like Oscar Wilde (and he doesn't mean this flatteringly). Someone else mishears, and enquires who this Oscar Wao is. The name sticks. And I'm starting to feel that Wilde is someone else who's beginning to get everywhere...

-- The Comedians, by Graham Green, focuses on the Dominican Republic's neighbour. Seen from Haiti, that neighbour feels like a refuge (it's where everyone goes: The ingenu Smiths; the rebellious Philipot; the lost-child Brown). And Greene himself, of course, fled Haiti for the (post-Trujillo) Dominican Republic in 1965.