Junot Diaz’s “The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao” - Creative writing at its best.

Junot Diaz’s “The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao” - A literary work of fiction

What most of us often get to read in history books is this : ‘Christopher Columbus discovered Americas in 1492’; and after that, in a short few paragraphs, pages or chapters (depending upon who is writing the book), the focus shifts to formation of the Union centuries later, its civil war and all the rest of it. What is largely left out of these narratives is the wonderful account of Santa Domingo, the oldest European city in Americas and the first Spanish establishment in the new world; and the first stop of Columbus on his fourth voyage sponsored by the Catholic royalty of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The city was christened after its patron Saint Dominic. Rich in gold and fertile with abundant alluvial plains, it was a milking cow for the ailing Christian monarchy; and within half a century, the unbridled avarice and voracious appetite for much needed gold to replenish the impoverished royal coffers caused by ruthless, ideological and costly wars of Crusades caused the flamboyant and calculative Spaniards to seriously ruffle the native rhythm and lives of the indigenous population, pushing them to work under excruciating circumstances of Slavery and material bondage. The result: The local Taino Indian population dwindled from a million in 1492 to an abysmal count of less than twenty thousand by 1550’s. The founding settlers in their new found exuberance of discovery systematically disintegrated a culture that had subsisted on this land for over a millennia, and Columbus, a reserved and God fearing by nature, was not a very happy man. For an explorer like him, nothing can be more painful than watching a civilization crushed under his very nose. But none can stop the flow of history; and over the centuries Spanish, English and French invasions bought in cheap labor from Africa and nearby Caribbean Islands, populating the Dominican Republic with biological and cultural injections from various genetical syringes. In 1844, Dominicans fought their own war of independence, and wrenched themselves free of all political obligations to become free citizens of Dominican Republic, a curious country on the fringes of North America with a rich history and Santo Domingo as its Capital. But the curse that descended upon them four centuries ago had not yet abated. The twentieth century bought in its wake a host of internal Rebellions, power struggles, external intrusions (especially by USA), a powerful hurricane that nearly destroyed the city, followed by merciless dictatorial rule of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo - creating a kind of people, who were quite unsure of their origins; displaced in many ways, and seriously beginning to contemplate migrating to other countries, mostly to neighboring United States of America.

Junot Diaz, the author of “The brief wondrous life of Oscar wao” came to USA as one such immigrant. A precocious boy, voracious reader; worked his way into college in New jersey to study creative writing; published his first short story in the prestigious Newyorker in 1996, in which he fashioned his alter ego in the character of Yunior, a Dominican-American, who is to appear many times more in his stories and novel; Joined Cornell and later MIT as a professor of creative writing; published two collections of short stories and one extraordinary novel ( the subject of this essay!!!); awarded the distinguished MacArthur fellowship in 2012 of $500,000 to be spent without questions asked, on furthering the boundaries of fiction - Junot Diaz has come a long way from his family’s humble origins in the terrible times of Trujillo in Santo Domingo.

It took eleven years for Diaz to write his literary Novel - The wondrous life of Oscar wao; and when it was published in 2007, there was an air of disbelief in critic circles and educated readers. The story and the style of its narrative was quite out of the ordinary. In the footsteps of James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe, who wrote in early twentieth century and David Foster Wallace later, Diaz captures the life story of young fictional Dominican named Oscar- an immigrant in New Jersey; juxtaposing and tracing his ancestry through tumultuous times during the dictatorial era of Santo Domingo; probes his intellectual and sexual identity, his compulsive need for a firm anchor in an ever shifting world of conflicting values; his disillusionment with deeply inherited social and cultural beliefs and its complete contrast to what he finds in his adopted country. Diaz’s writes with compete abandon, pouring out his legacy and feelings in a torrential flow of paragraphs and chapters, mixing licentiously English and native Spanish, slipping into sentences of indescribable beauty and shifting gears instantaneously to mouth profanities that his characters need to voice without pretensions; or flashing insights into life’s dilemma’s - “….It's never the changes we want that change everything..” or “…Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one…” - in the eight chapters that constitute this novel, Diaz rips open his heart and intellect in a prose that is at once mercurial, unconventional and many times utterly poetical..

What I love the most though is Diaz’s deep understanding of the medium of words and its ability to evoke vivid images in the reader’s mind. In many cases, Diaz seamlessly slips into Spanish, but one never notices the difference. The absolute lack of any artificiality in the narrative and its striking honesty in telling a story without any frills and paraphernalia, is perhaps the most absorbing feature of this work. If creative writing means expressing oneself without inhibitions and boundaries , then this book is a perfect example of what I would call as ‘literary exuberance’. In a single publishing year the novel won the Pulitzer, the prestigious National critics’ award and seven others of equal magnitude. It was, simple put - a publishing and literary phenomenon of the first decade in this century, and probably will hold that place there for a long time to come.

I enjoyed reading this book (infact twice!!!). It reminds me of Salman Rushdie in his early days, when he could bend language into any mold that he wished too. There are paragraphs in this book that run into a page and half without pause, only punctuated with semi colons and dashes. Like the magnificence of cascading waterfall, Diaz words roll down in a majestic flow, leaving the reader no time or inclination to pause at inconsistencies. They are swept away by the sheer force of his narrative brilliance. Junot Diaz summarized his views on writing during one his interviews in 2010, when he said:

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. Also, there are writers who write for writers, and there are writers who write for readers. I prefer to belong to second bunch…” - One cannot articulate a vision better than this

Ladies and gentlemen, for all my readers who love literature, this is a book that deserves to be read… Buy it, lose yourself in its luscious writing and pass it on.

God bless…