The Wondrous World of Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz wrote a very well received book called Drown in 1996. He's taken over ten years to bring out the follow-up novel, but it's out this month, and it's fantastic. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was described by Time magazine as 'an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas', and they made it their book of the year. Diaz is himself an immigrant, having moved from The Dominican Republic to New Jersey at the age of six, and Drown and Oscar Wao are both largely set in these locations. They're very different books though. Drown is a collection of interlinked short stories, and the Junot Diaz of Drown is a writer of short, harsh-edged snapshots of hard-luck lives. But in the present, with Oscar Wao, he's developed – or maybe revealed – other facets to his writing. The book is still harsh, and full of tragic events: rape, murder, torture, beatings, kidnappings and suicide attempts all feature. But the harsh centre now has softened edges and the book is somehow, at times, a hilarious read. And it's written in such a full and flowing style that you'll devour its 350-plus pages. Any book where (and this honestly happens here) a magic mongoose turns up, and it seems appropriate, has got to be worth recommending.

Junot Diaz on Authors@Google:

There's a certain intentional duality at work in the book, contrasting reality and fiction, America and the Dominican Republic or misfit Oscar with the rest of the world. This is signalled from the beginning, with two opening quotations: one is a fine poem by Derek Walcott, and the other is "Of what import are brief, nameless lives… to Galactus??". Points to anyone who's already identified this as the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in The Fantastic Four. The quote is in keeping with Oscar's interests. He's a geeky, overweight boy who is obsessed with women, but can't get near them, and consequently develops obsessions with what he typically terms 'the more speculative genres', devouring sci-fi and fantasy novels, movies and comic books. But he remains obsessed with women, though his chat up lines are awful – he tells one girl he'd award her 'charisma 18' in a role playing game. As a counterpoint to this, the narrator of the book is Yunior, Oscar's some-time roommate who portrays himself as a 'typical' Dominican male, with a string of girlfriends. Diaz gradually reveals through the course of the book why Yunior takes what seems an uncharacteristic interest in Oscar and his family.

The story of Oscar's family members constantly coming to grief take up a large part of the novel, evidence of what Yunior sees as 'fuku', a curse on Dominicans. This arrived with Columbus and messed up their world, and Yunior (and perhaps Diaz) sees fuku personified in the 20th century by the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who casts a large shadow over the island's recent history. The last 80 or so years of this history is explained in some detail here, often in lively and informative footnotes. If only it stayed in footnotes, because it's a tale of woe, and the sorry situation on the island can't but affect the characters in the book. There's a history lesson smuggled into this story – and it's as fascinating as it is grim.

This state of affairs informs Oscar's geekiness too. "In my youth" Junot Diaz has said, "the only people who really seemed to be interested in exploring dictator-like figures were the fantasy and science fiction writers, the comic-book artists." And he's let this influence on the style of the novel, because it allows him to show how Yunior and Oscar are able to begin to percieve the likes of Trujillo, 'our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personage so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.'

And so we have a book where the author somehow ties up the history of the Dominican Republic with the tragedy of one Dominican family, bound up by writing informed with references that run the gamut from Akira to Zardoz. Junot Diaz pulls it all off superbly, writing with a finely weighted type of Spanish-tinged English which is constantly entertaining. Simply put, it's one of the best books we've ever been sent.