A Wondrous Novel

I just finished reading ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Diaz last night. (Just in case you’re not down with the literary world, this novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.) This post is to emphatically beg you to go to the bookstore, hop on Amazon, or go your library and get this book. Why? Quite simply this novel is the bomb diggity. The shiz-nizzle. A freaking modern masterpiece that is on the same realm as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, except Diaz’s prose isn’t nearly as turgid as Marquez. Just as Salinger accurately imitated the slang of the 50’s in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, Diaz has at the very least equaled the master by completely nailing the lingo of my generation. Most writers overreach on this point, thereby placing an unnecessary albatross on the narrative in their desire to be linguistically clever. But not here.

From the title you can infer that there will be no happy ending. Diaz weaves his story of a cursed Dominican family with crisp, snappy sentences. Not one word, sentence or paragraph is superfluous; Diaz has crafted a masterpiece that could be the archetypal blueprint for ‘Zen and the Art of Writing’. Everything has its place here, due in large part to his liberal use of footnotes. But don’t think the footnotes are simply following in the footsteps of Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace. The footnotes in here help to elucidate the history of the Dominican Republic, therefore keeping the narrative flowing like a song from Motown.

I am thankful to my mother-in-law for two reasons here. First, she introduced me to Diaz by giving me his first book ‘Drown’ (an absolutely epic collection of short stories) about 3 years ago. When I heard his first novel was coming out last year before Christmas, I knew it would make a great gift. Since then I have searched in vain at the library and 2nd hand bookshops to find a copy. For damn near a year I have wanted to read this book, and let me tell you the wait was worth it. I was almost sad when I finished this book. For 5 days I had the pleasure of reading a masterpiece, and to know that I would not be experiencing it’s magic again for the first time just depressed me. Truly, this book rocks the casbah. Get it. Read it. Love it. And support a truly talented artist that will one day be mentioned in the same breath as Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway.