VC Book Club: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

[j4lackey]

I just finished it, too, and figured I'd be behind in the discussion.

 

Get crackin', people!

[Three dollars and 63 cents]

I'm still plugging away but am hoping to get caught up in the next few days.

 

I saw one of my friends last night who teaches at a college here in New York state. She just started her job this semester, and part of her duties is to run the visiting writers series. She managed to book Junot Diaz for sometime in April, even though his agent charges $12,000 for a reading. She said Diaz himself seemed embarrassed when he told her that, and that he's been very friendly and quick with his emails so far. But $12,000!

[gogo]

OK, I really want to dip into this book again before I'm going to be able to discuss properly, but for now, everyone who's ready, go ahead and start talking!

 

Some suggested topics:

 

Language: I did not go on-line and try to find translations of any of the Spanish words and phrases in the book, I just went by context, using my shaky grasp of French and Latin to find cognates, etc. How did the rest of you handle this? Any Spanish-speakers want to fill us in on what we might have missed by not having those translations, or maybe did Diaz expect that we'd just gloss over those?

 

Bodies: what did Oscar's size have to do with his story? There are plenty of skinny nerds who don't get laid. And what about the female characters' breast sizes? There are plenty of references to the size of Oscar's mother's breasts, and that her daughter did not inherit that trait. Were the women's relative sizes meant to reflect something specific about their characters?

 

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: I think I did a little better with the sci-fi/fantasy references than I did with the Spanish, but I'm sure there were some that I missed, too. Anyone get any overarching sense of Oscar's life as analagous to a classic fantasy arc? What are the deeper analogies that we might have missed?

 

Aspects of magical realism: what abut the fuku? The mongoose? Interpretations, please!

 

I had a few more that I wanted to talk about, but I'm drawing a blank right now. Don't be bound by these though, discuss freely. I know there's a ton of ways to approach this, so have at it. These are just some quick starting points.

[Mystik Spiral]

Language: I did not go on-line and try to find translations of any of the Spanish words and phrases in the book, I just went by context, using my shaky grasp of French and Latin to find cognates, etc. How did the rest of you handle this? Any Spanish-speakers want to fill us in on what we might have missed by not having those translations, or maybe did Diaz expect that we'd just gloss over those?

 

I did the same thing, Maudie. I kept thinking that I really should get a translation, but I didn't want to interrupt the story! I felt like I got the basics in context, but it would be interesting to know if I missed anything major.

 

Bodies: what did Oscar's size have to do with his story? There are plenty of skinny nerds who don't get laid. And what about the female characters' breast sizes? There are plenty of references to the size of Oscar's mother's breasts, and that her daughter did not inherit that trait. Were the women's relative sizes meant to reflect something specific about their characters?

 

I think Oscar's body size really just added insult to injury in this case. I mean, skinny nerds would be able to shed the sci-fi part of their being and maybe be able to pass as "normal" in the world, but even if Oscar did that he would still be very overweight, which is taboo in our society. As for breasts, and maybe a bit with Oscar's weight too, could be just a Dominican thing. As Junot Diaz mentioned, it's not uncommon that I know nothing about DR culture...

 

I do want to mention that at first I thought the footnote style writing of this book would be overly annoying and distracting to me, but I found that I really enjoyed it!

 

[edited b/c I realized I said Puerto Rico & not Dominican... sheesh. I read the book, really. ]

[gogo]

I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately, so the footnotes are no problem for me!

 

I'm re-reading now, and I'm thinking that even the second time around, I have a hard time getting a grip on Oscar as a real person. I feel that the female characters breathe much more deeply than he does. I'm just in the section about Ana, the girl he meets in the SAT prep class, and I can picture her so clearly. But I've never had a clear picture of Oscar in my head. Anyone else feeling that?

 

And back to the breasts... I think maybe Lola's the character who manages to escape the curse more than any other. She doesn't have a perfect life, but she's the only one who manages to move forward, make some real choices, and become a functioning grown-up. I may be stretching an analogy here, but I'm thinking that maybe the connection to their tragic Dominican past is expressed in the character's fleshiness. Oscar is trapped in it, his mother is in many ways defined by her body until eventually she loses her breasts to cancer, and Lola is the only one who is putting that past behind her (literally, with her swingin' ass, but without her mother's boobs).

 

Anyone want to mock that interpretation? Feel free.

 

Any other comments at all?

[gogo]

Bump.

 

Anybody?

[gogo]

Damn, people. Thank god for Bridget, or I'd be in here talking to myself!

 

OK, the man with no face: what is going on there? He's not a good omen, obviously. But how is he related to the real men in this book, who are faceless and nameless: for one, Oscar and Lola's father, we know almost nothing about him. Or what about the man who molested Lola? Later she says that she doesn't even remember now what he looked like.

 

And when Lola runs away to live with the scuzzy boy and his father at the shore, she sits next to a man on the bus, who says that she's beautiful and reminds him of a girl he once knew. She breezes right past him, it's one line and he's gone, but was he that same man? Was he maybe even her father? Or is he just a symbol, another example of the man with no face, who represents bad times to come?

[Mystik Spiral]

Yeah, where is everyone??

 

Maudie, my interpretation of the man with no face was as a physical manifestation of the fuku. I don't remember the man on the bus, and the book is back to the library. I wish I'd at least skimmed it again before I returned it...

 

I agree about the women being much better developed as characters than Oscar. In my opinion, their stories plunged deeper on an emotional level, whereas what we know aboust Oscar is that he's a nerd and he falls in love too easily. Sure he was dumped by a couple of girls, but who isn't? On the other hand, Beli and Lola survived true physical and emotional trauma much more severe than a simple break-up. To me, though, Oscar did become more of an empathetic character with his relationship with Ybon - perhaps because Diaz told us more about how this relationship progressed and we could therefore understand why Oscar fell in love with her.

 

I really wish I had renewed the book.

 

Someone else? Anyone?

[gogo]

I really wish I had renewed the book.

I know! I'm about halfway done on my second time through, but it's due back tomorrow. And I just checked, there are 124 holds on the 70 copies in our library system, so unless I want to be a total scofflaw and just keep it an extra couple of days, I don't know that I'll make it through to the end (again). Yeah, I always feel that I get more out of a book the second time around.

[jimmyjimmy]

Damn, people. Thank god for Bridget, or I'd be in here talking to myself!

 

 

Yeah, where is everyone??

Someone else? Anyone?

 

Guys:

I actually just started this book last night (pg53 at the moment). Past few weeks have been kinda hectic. It should be cold and rainy here in VA this weekend, + there is currently a wide assortment of relaxing adult beverages @ the house. This means I should be available for discourse early next week (although I may be somewhat incoherent due to aforementioned foreshadowing).

 

Until then, I'm not reading the content of your posts....

[miss jayne]

wow what a wonderful book. I really thought the character development was astounding. As for Oscar vs the ladies I thought my miss with him was that I don't know that much about gaming. Although I once knew a guy who was a huge DnD player and a writer. He was not that heavy but prone to depression as is so aptly described in the book. As to the fuku I believe many cultures have a personification of danger but that was truly a creepy one. I am off to the nursery today so can't chat much here...gogo java beach on sloat? . I will check in later. Really loved reading this and that says alot considering how hectic its been with the election etc.

[gogo]

I should be available for discourse early next week

Yay! I'm just now considering going scofflaw, and not returning the book for another couple of days.

 

 

wow what a wonderful book. I really thought the character development was astounding. As for Oscar vs the ladies I thought my miss with him was that I don't know that much about gaming. Although I once knew a guy who was a huge DnD player and a writer. He was not that heavy but prone to depression as is so aptly described in the book. As to the fuku I believe many cultures have a personification of danger but that was truly a creepy one. I am off to the nursery today so can't chat much here...gogo java beach on sloat? . I will check in later. Really loved reading this and that says alot considering how hectic its been with the election etc.

I think in a lot of cultures it's a black dog. I've heard people in Ireland say that someone died because they met a black dog on a hill on a dark night.

 

Also, the mongoose with the lion's eyes? (Oscar's last name is DeLeon; does that actually mean lion in Spanish?) The argument over whether Beli was cursed or lucky, when she was beaten in the cane field, comes down to the battle between the man with no face, and the mongoose. And then Oscar sees the mongoose just before he jumps from the train tracks. This may have been what saved him, that he was somehow protected, but the narrator (Yunior) also notes that Oscar had waited his whole life for something like that, wanted nothing more than to live in a world where it was possible for a Golden Mongoose to appear in his hour of need, but by then, he was too far gone. He jumped anyway.

 

Java Beach on Sloat! I haven't been to that one yet, but I'm a fan of the spot on La Playa. It's a nice walk from my place, grab a coffee, then hop on the N home. I bet the new one's going to get a good crowd in that location.

[Mystik Spiral]

Yay! I'm just now considering going scofflaw, and not returning the book for another couple of days.

 

Well, I hope you have a spare $0.50 just laying around, missy!

[gogo]

I just returned a bunch of books to the library, but I kept this one. I'll be looking over my shoulder all weekend!

[Elixir Sue]

I finished reading last week, and I'm sorry for not chiming in sooner! I have to admit, I enjoyed the book but definitely didn't LOVE it. I never really had an emotional connection with any of the characters. I apologize in advance for my disjointed, stream-of-consciousness comments.

 

Anyway, I agree with what has been said so far about the fuku (personified by the man with no face) and the mongoose (as good luck).

 

What stood out for me were the relationships; each woman ended up with men who showed them no respect (except maybe La Inca, whose marital relationship wasn't really fleshed out from what I remember)...Beli and the Gangster, Beli and the father of her children, Lola and the scuzzy beach guy, Lola and Yuni. Then you have Oscar, a new type of male character, who has low self-esteem and frequently gets called out for not showing enough machismo. He's kind of a "hyper-romantic"...falls in love at the drop of a hat, puts women on pedestals. Because of all this, he not only doesn't fit in at school/at college, but he doesn't fit in with his own family or with DR culture. Not sure where I'm going with this...I guess Oscar's isolation from family AND friends really highlights the shift between the family's roots in the DR and their new life in the US.

 

Some suggested topics:

Language: I did not go on-line and try to find translations of any of the Spanish words and phrases in the book, I just went by context, using my shaky grasp of French and Latin to find cognates, etc. How did the rest of you handle this? Any Spanish-speakers want to fill us in on what we might have missed by not having those translations, or maybe did Diaz expect that we'd just gloss over those?

I took Spanish in high school and a couple years in college, and I think I was able to figure out what the Spanish phrases meant (or at least, I think I got the gist).

 

I also thought I'd get sick of the footnotes, but I really started to enjoy them. Kudos to Diaz for teaching me about Trujillo!

[miss jayne]

I loved the footnotes and agree with E.S. that it was a prompt to look at history for me. I wish I could put a bit more action to words around that but good on Diaz for a little history lesson. And perhaps Oscars isolation is a USA cultural thing. I loved the way that the island/nature rejuvenates each character even though they have spent their lives getting away from the horrors that occurred there. Kinda a PTSD thing. Wasn't the violence experienced so evident in everyone's daily lives. Tragic and sad to think that exists in most ever countries history. Which really gave me pause.

[Three dollars and 63 cents]

I'm still reading, but I wanted to chime in a little. So far, I'm enjoying it, but like ESue said, I don't love it. I'm stumbling through the Spanish a bit, but I think not including it or explaining it more would've taken away from the authenticity of the novel. The narrative is disjointed, which has been frustrating in places, but I wonder how much that has to do with the fact that Diaz spent eleven years writing the book. Could a narrative that took that long to write not be disjointed? If he's as good a writer as I want to believe he is, all the layers and fragmented narratives will make sense in the end, and in a way I'm reading as a writer wanting to see if he can pull it off.

 

And as far as the footnotes go, some of them I found helpful, and some of them felt a little too tangential for me. I do like that they're in the narrator's voice, though, since it kept them from being too dry. I'm already somewhat familiar with the political history of the Dominican Republic. If it's a subject you're interested in reading more about, I highly recommend Edwidge Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones.

[gogo]

I don't know if I would have said that the narrative is disjointed particulary, but the shift in narrators did catch me up a couple of times. In a few spots, I had to go back a few pages to the beginning of a section when I realized who it was that was talking.

 

Also, there are a few things that just don't compute. Oscar and Lola have an aunt and uncle, but who are these people? We know that Beli's family is all gone, and it seems unlikely that they'd have their absent father's relatives hanging around the house. And then during Oscar's final return to DR, he says that Lola introduces him to a boyfriend from when she lived there as a teenager. But the section where Lola's boyfriend is killed on his scooter is a fairly major, when she's returning to the US. And that section is in Lola's voice.

 

So I was wondering if any of that was intentional, if part of the mystery of this family is that secrecy that's mentioned as an effect of living under Trujillo, that people's stories aren't always what they seem, people telling each other family histories that might not be 100% truthful. Or, maybe it was just sloppy editing!

 

I also didn't catch the first time around that Beli's father died in prison just days before Beli was beaten in the cane fields, in those final days before Trujillo's death.

[Three dollars and 63 cents]

I think part of the disjointedness of it for me was that I wasn't reading it every day. In fact, I read the novel in four chunks--the first 90 or so pages about three weeks ago, and the rest over the last three nights. I didn't expect to finish it last night, but I couldn't put it down once I got to the last 60 pages or so.

 

Diaz definitely brings everything together in the end, in ways I never would've imagined. For instance, in any other book I think the letter arriving after a character's death would come off as hokey, but it was not only believable but exactly the right ending.

 

I did notice some of the inconsistencies. The uncle is a little puzzling; at first I thought he might've just been a friend of the family, but since he travels back to the DR with them, he seems like he really is family. In a way, I think that's one of the advantages (from the writer's perspective) of having a narrator outside of the family--you can get away with inconsistencies like this, because Yunior may not know every detail of the family.

 

What did everyone else think of Yunior as the narrator? What does he bring to the novel that an omniscient narrator or a narrator within the family couldn't have?

 

There's a lot I'm thinking about that I'll come back and post about later--the fuku, gender roles, and especially how ugliness and beauty factor into the novel thematically.

[poppydawn]

It's been three or four months since I read the book, so I haven't chimed in.

 

I spent a lot of the novel trying to figure out who was narrating. At the time it bothered me, but when it unfolded and I realized it was Yunior, it made sense. It's unusual to have a narrator who might not be 100% reliable or accurate, and I liked it. Instead of taking the narrator's word as absolute truth, I found myself considering all the other possibilities.

 

I loved the footnotes, even though I thought I wouldn't.

[poppydawn]

I'm re-reading now, and I'm thinking that even the second time around, I have a hard time getting a grip on Oscar as a real person. I feel that the female characters breathe much more deeply than he does. I'm just in the section about Ana, the girl he meets in the SAT prep class, and I can picture her so clearly. But I've never had a clear picture of Oscar in my head. Anyone else feeling that?

 

I thought the vagueness was to make Oscar seem somewhat mystical. Even the book's title gives that feel, I think. I kept waiting for Oscar to rise up as, I don't know, some kind of savior for his family, but in the end he couldn't even save himself.

 

What stood out for me were the relationships; each woman ended up with men who showed them no respect (except maybe La Inca, whose marital relationship wasn't really fleshed out from what I remember)...Beli and the Gangster, Beli and the father of her children, Lola and the scuzzy beach guy, Lola and Yuni. Then you have Oscar, a new type of male character, who has low self-esteem and frequently gets called out for not showing enough machismo. He's kind of a "hyper-romantic"...falls in love at the drop of a hat, puts women on pedestals. Because of all this, he not only doesn't fit in at school/at college, but he doesn't fit in with his own family or with DR culture. Not sure where I'm going with this...I guess Oscar's isolation from family AND friends really highlights the shift between the family's roots in the DR and their new life in the US.

 

I didn't think about this when I read the book, but what you said just made me think of this, Elizabeth. Oscar's a dramatic shift away from the traditional DR male ideal, which makes his life miserable. But at the same time, most of the women in the book would have been spared a lot of misery if they had moved past what was socially acceptable and favored men more like Oscar. In the long run, Oscar adopts some of the more traditionally-accept behaviors with his relationship with Ybon, and it costs him his life. I'm not sure how to articulate where I'm going with this. Maybe this is all a metaphor for the struggle of immigrants to find a balance between old culture and new.

 

While reading the book I kept thinking that, if Oscar could socially move beyond the DR community, he would find a place where he could fit in and be "normal". That frustrated me to no end.

[gogo]

I really liked Yunior as the narrator. I loved the language, I thought he sounded like a real person, with just enough of Oscar's genre references tossed in to reflect the time he spent with Oscar and Lola, and that he's still thinking about Oscar. I also liked that he could be a reference, often in the footnotes, with his own take on Dominican history and culture. Because he was from a family like Oscar's, he could show us Oscar's life through that lens, through the Dominican-American experience.

[gogo]

Maybe this is all a metaphor for the struggle of immigrants to find a balance between old culture and new.

 

While reading the book I kept thinking that, if Oscar could socially move beyond the DR community, he would find a place where he could fit in and be "normal". That frustrated me to no end.

This is kind of what I was getting at with Lola's body, representing both halves of the immigrant experience. Lola was involved in all the political groups at school, did not deny that she was Dominican, enjoyed her time living with La Inca, but still was not defined by that alone. She was able to move beyond the fuku, even while the rest of her family was trapped by it.

[Mystik Spiral]

I really liked Yunior as the narrator.

 

I did too. Though I agree with whoever said it was a bit frustrating trying to figure out who was narrating, once the pieces fell into place it was really great. And even though Yunior was the prototypical Dominican male, I couldn't help but hope for Oscar to LISTEN to the guy already!!! I know there's more I want to say on this, but I've spent an afternoon playing Cranium & drinking beer so the mind is a bit muddled...

[jimmyjimmy]

Really quickly