The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Read: February 2008

Oscar is a fat, Sci-Fi fanatic, Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey. Spends his days writing epic space opera novels, playing RPG’s, and reading comic books. Couldn’t get a girlfriend if his life depended upon it. And Oscar is a hapless romantic, a “passionate enamorao who [falls] in love easily and deeply.” And repeatedly. Unrequitedly.

And when you are born a fat nerd into a Dominican immigrant family whose community image basis itself on “Atomic Level G” pulling powers, a macho culture where sex is a status symbol, it all combines to make life rather difficult. "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of colour in a contemporary US ghetto."

Then one night at college Oscar goes to a party dressed as Doctor Who. Oh dear Oscar. He looks like a “fat homo Oscar Wilde” – Wilde pronounced in a Dominican accent becomes Wao and a nickname is born. “And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.” Dude had his own superhero identity, just without the powers. Or the respect. Or the women.

And when you have all these problems the last thing you need is a family curse looming over you. But such is the family lot. Ever since Oscar’s grandfather made a drunken joke about the Domincan dictator Trujillo, the family have careered from catastrophe to catastrophe. They are burdened with a first rate fukú – “It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since” – and it shows no sign of skipping a generation. With occasional appearances from a golden eyed mongoose and a man with no face, the Cabral family, and Oscar in particular, fight against the fukú with all their might, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, that their fate is not already determined. But it is all to no avail. “No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.” And now it has its grips on Oscar and it seems that there is nothing he can do to get his life back.

So while the narrative travels back into the family history of the Cabral’s, two questions hang over poor, lovable Oscar Wao: how will his brief wondrous life come to an end? And will he will ever fulfil his hearts desire and finally get his end away?

In a family epic to end all family epics, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao traces the Cabral family through the ages. From Oscar and his loving runaway sister Lola, through their beautiful, wasted mother Beli and their grandfather, Abelard, who brought the fukú of Trujillo upon the family. It is a tale which encompasses both the turbulent history of the Dominican Republic, and the experience of the immigrant Diaspora. In the epigraph Diaz quotes Derek Walcott on the experience of immigration: “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” And this is perhaps the crux of the book. Through the Cabral’s we tour a distilled version of Dominican history over the past 50 years: from the draconian dictatorship of ‘El Jeffe’ Trujillo – “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor” – to the everyday of its people. The Cabral’s are nobody’s, emigrants from their homeland, seekers of the better life abroad. But they are also representative of the nation, perhaps, in their struggles and joys, their adventures and outlooks, there diaspora. For this is, above all else, about the immigrant experience. About the insidiousness of the ‘other,’ the experience of being different.

Junot Diaz’s use of polyglot language is fantastic. He combines as much Dominican slang and dialect as you could possibly fit into an English language novel with the sort of sci-fi references usually reserved for Games Workshop on a Saturday afternoon. It is an immigrant nerd novel set amid a macho Latino community whose love of sex is so completely unfulfilled in its hero. Rarely do you read a novel and know you will not read another like it this year. Already voted by Time Magazine and the New York Magazine as the best book of 2007 it has been greeted with the same rapturous praise this side of the Atlantic. And you can see why. The prose is faultless: fast paced, insightful, concise, and with a touch of the wondrous to boot. Junot Diaz unquestionably has a very bright future.

Eleven years in the writing, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is worth the wait. It is both a mature and well planned novel and a stylish, contemporary soaked, romp through cultures you would never have imagined could mix. Anyone who can read will find something to enjoy in this writing. Junot Diaz has a created a book with something special in it, perhaps you could call it the Wao factor.


8 out of 10

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. DIck

7 out of 10

Welcome to the futuristic, post-apocalyptic Earth of the year 1991! The planet is dying under the radioactive fallout of nuclear war and most of the human population has already emigrated to other planets. Those who remain inhabit a decaying world, where amazing technological inventions sit side by side with dilapidated buildings and run-down humans. They watch Buster Friendly’s non-stop talk-show and control emotional wellbeing through the Penfeld Mood Organ. Occasionally they fuse with others in a virtual reality journey with Mercer, a collective means of religious expression which places empathetic involvement with others at the heart of human existence.

Across this scarred Earth animals and vegetation have virtually been wiped out. Such is the destruction of the planet that owning a pet has become at once the ultimate status symbol for the wealthy, an aspirational project for everyone else, and the most important emotional investment one can make in a barren world. Those who cannot afford a living animal buy a mechanical one a hope the secret will not be discovered.

To encourage emigration from Earth, the U.N. provides everyone who emigrates with a free android: a robotic slave and companion all rolled into one. Thanks to technological developments, these new androids are nearly indistinguishable from their human counterparts., with realistic skin and eyes and limbs. The only means of identifying an android is an empathy test which the logical brain of an android cannot pass. But occasionally they rebel against their slavery and escape to Earth, to try and live out normal lives.

It is in this world which we meet Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job it is to hunt down, identify, and ‘retire’ these rogue androids. And when one of a group of eight rogues attack another bounty hunter, Rick is called in to complete the job.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? fulfils almost every sci-fi stereotype I know: it is written in clunky, barren prose; littered with redundant sentences; packed with too many invented futuristic products; and populated with burly two dimensional characters with guns. In prose terms, it reads like a teenage boy wrote it in his bedroom. BUT, and here is where the imperative BUT comes in, it is also one of the most intriguing and important works I have read. Few books can contain quite so many ethical questions per column inch as this book. It is crammed full of philosophical quandaries about the nature of life, our role in the universe, what it is which makes us human. At its heart, it questions the basis of Descartes enlightenment ideal, ‘I think, therefore I am’, and investigates the ethical and spiritual dilemmas of imbuing technology with sentient thought.

It is also a book in which the search for meaning occupies the minds of many of the characters. In Mercerism, they have a religion which brings people together around human empathy, but outside of the religion, this is a world of destruction and decay. Kipple, the useless amalgamation of once useful things, is the constant enemy of human need for order and beauty.

If you’ve seen and loved the movie Blade Runner then read the book it was based upon. They may have very little else in common, but in their own ways, they are each fantastic invocations of the science fiction genre. It’s just a shame the film decided to change what is, to my mind, the best title ever. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is subtle, thought-provoking, beautiful, haunting; everything a title should be. And the book itself is one of the rare and treasured things, a work which truly makes you think. Read this book. Read it now.