The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Scarred by a nightmarish dictatorship, Dominican immigrants try to adapt to a cold society

Oscar, the nerdy chubby son of a Dominican immigrant family, gets his entire family, tragic mother, adopted grandma, hot sister and best friend Junior involved, when he falls in love/lust with a Dominican policeman’s sexy girlfriend. This story is interspersed with the escape story of Oscar’s mother and the love story between Junior and the hot sister. All the parts add up to a mosaic of the evil Trujillo years.

I was really disappointed. Junot Diaz’s strength is his voice, and the voice here was flat. At the beginning the voice even felt strained, explaining everything in Oscar’s world with unneeded juvenile footnotes. Also I don’t believe this was a novel. A novel is not just beautiful language, a novel must have a structure, preferably beautiful, and Oscar Wao lacked any semblance of structure. The layout was Chapter One, Chapter One, Chapter One, Chapter One, and then the book ended. This wasn’t even one of these novel-in-stories deal.

Part of the problem is I didn’t care about the characters, and I felt I should have, especially for Belicia, Oscar’s tragic mother. But I had to wade through  lots of paragraphs describing her tits. I felt the book was attempting to be an emotional history of the Trujillo years and how the festering corruption infects an entire society. The entire thing was stunted.

Justine by Lawrence Durrell

By

An expatriate writer is torn between two lovers in 1920s Alexandria

Our unnamed narrator, in the exotic outpost of Alexandria, is torn between beautiful suffering Melissa, a poor inept club dancer, and beautiful suffering Justine, wife of a rich man. The three make their way, drinking, sightseeing with other expatriates and even a few colorful natives, a pervasive feeling of melancholy infecting every scene. Both Melissa and Justine have other men who hate the idea that their woman is seeing someone else.

The lush first person narration creates a unique ambiance, but the plot, what little there is of it, moves forward in dollops, never quite ending up anywhere. As a reader I got it, Melissa, Justine, Justine, Melissa, sweet sweet womenhood. But I needed something to happen, and grew impatient with all this sitting around making goo goo eyes. I wanted to slap the narrator sometimes he seemed so world weary.

Jan Morris’s prologue was very dismissive leading me to expect the worst, but it wasn’t that bad. The descriptions were strangely compelling. Although every action is taken so very seriously. There is no hint of humor in the book. Tragic events are here, buried beneath the narrator’s self regard, such as the missing daughter, the dead mother. Perhaps that’s the point.

Love stories have inherently low stakes. See Junot Diaz. I couldn't bear sticking around for three more books with these twits.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

A guy keeps trying but can’t get love right

The point of this short story collection is the voice, readable and funny and vulnerable. The lyrical voice pulls you along, the reader identifying with the smart smartass narrator Yunior. The dialogue is also incisive. I read many of these stories separately in different magazines and loved them, however, reading them one after the other, I felt the power was dissipated. (Perhaps that is the case with all story collections) There was a sort of sameness to them. The stories are about romantic love, unrequited love for the most part. I began to see that maybe the subject of love is slight and one note. 

The stories are also about machismo, the Dominican variety, and how Yunior both identifies and is trapped by the family expectations on how a Dominican man is supposed to behave. His cruel tomcatting father is one thing but his beloved doomed older brother, Rafa, who also treats women terribly and whom Yunior adores, is another. Are you less of a man to be faithful to one woman? To give your power away? And what about the brotherhood? Fidelity is not looked upon honorably. I loved The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, in which a guy realizes he really blew it when he cheated on his fiancé. She won’t forgive him. Miss Lora, in which precocious high school student Junior becomes the (unwilling) lover of a skinny older teacher, was also wonderful. And The Cheaters Guide to Love – regret imparts an instant spine to this story.