The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz.

Another one from Junot Diaz.  Same punchy, authentic, no holes barred writing style as This is How You Lose Her, we even meet our old friend Yunior again.  (In fact Oscar Wao came before Lose Her but this is the order I read them in, so there you go...).  There is a lot more political stuff in Oscar Wao and we get to go to back to the Dominican Republic and feel what it must have been like to live under Rafael Trujillo - the country's infamous dictator. 

Diaz delves back into the history of the main characters so much so, that sometimes I got a bit bogged down (although I'd like to have read this book when I was less chronically tired!!!) and lost sight of how it all related to Oscar. 

Oscar Wao. Poor old Oscar is everything a typical "Domo" is not.  He's an uncool, unsexy, overweight, nerdy lover of scifi and a failure with women.  He is trying to find his way in the world, aching for his first experience with a woman and coming to terms with all his failures as a Domo man, his family history, and the fuku that has plagued them.  Fuku?! - Fuku americanus actually. An ancient "Curse of Doom of the New World", unleashed on the world with the "arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola".  Oh and it seems that Trujillo is inextricably linked with fuku - although whether his is its victor or victim is unclear.  Oscar's fuku is also tangled in Trujillo's web.  It's a messy business!

Diaz is unique.  He is funny, edgy and fearless in his depiction of Latino America. He has a way of highlighting the difference between mainstream (aka white) America and it's minority groups, specifically Domos and Latinos.  He doesn't shy away from these differences (eg describing a time in the history of a particular neighbourhood in New York, pre-gentrification as "before the whitekids started their invasion, when you could walk the entire length of Upper Manhattan and not see a single yoga mat".  In the same way he does in Lose Her, Diaz uses Spanish and street slang to get his point across.

"That is good to hear, El Jefe said, I was afraid you might have turned into un maricon. Then he turned to the lambesacos and laughed.  Oh Jefe, they screamed, you are too much.
It was at that point another nigger might have, in a fit of cojones, said something to defend his honour, but Abelard was not that nigger.  He said nothing."

To really get the the whole gist of some of the writing, a grasp of the Spanish language is useful, but some knowledge of local slang more so.  I like that Diaz is sort of sticking his finger up at middle white America - leaving them out of the in joke.  A sort of Fuck You.  Or perhaps fuku?

 

 

*please note I have not been true to Spanish grammer simply because I can't work out how to type accent marks in!