I began reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with high hopes. How can you avoid it when you’re reading a Pulitzer prize winner? Though I was initially intrigued by Diaz’s frenetic narration and humor, I quickly began to feel like I was being jerked around. It was enough to keep pinballing back and forth between the text and the extensive footnotes, but as the plot kept taking left turns, I found myself wondering when it would veer right again. Even when I’d resigned myself to going with the flow, I didn’t love where it was taking me. I started dragging my feet and looking for other books to read, and in all fairness to Diaz, it couldn’t have helped my overall impression of his novel.
Clearly this is a plot with several levels, but the stories of Oscar, Lola, and Belicia are essentially the same. There is a rebellious feeling–often misguided love–inside each of them, and it nearly–or truly–brings them to ruin. (“How’s that for eternal return,” Yunior, the narrator, writes at one key point in the plot.) When this repetition is called “fuku”, a Dominican term for a family curse, apparently it’s supposed to mean more, but I couldn’t bring myself to care for these stubborn, capricious characters, or in the end, the novel.
That said, there’s still a side of me that wants to be proven wrong. Hit me in the comments.
