Wao-za

Now deeply entrenched in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Making me miss graduate seminars and the assignments where one student would have to prepare a brief presentation and several discussion questions for the text of the day (I know, how dorky). I just have so many questions, and I'm afraid of alienating my fledgling book group.

First--and obvious, okay--who is the primary narrator? I have a hunch that this will be revealed in a body-slam conclusion and I'm willing to wait for it (I've never been one to purposefully anticipate plot twists, and I dislike the pleasure other readers take in getting all Dupin on a text), but I'm getting a little tired of all of the "Watcher" nonsense. I get the allegory--well, actually, that might be another question.

So far the novel cleaves most tightly to the Lord of the Rings, but there's Star Trek, Buffy, and some video game, D&D, and genre fiction references I'm too mainstream to fully appreciate. The narrator positions himself as the Giles to the de Leons' collective Slayer, but these aren't redemptive characters. And their troubles, for all their primacy and focus in the novel, are just a part of the ebb and flow of the loud, poor Dominican communities that dominate the upper, upper westside and I guess parts of New Jersey. It's not that what happens to the de Leons isn't epic, but that a lot of poor bastards from third world countries who come to live in the slums of the U.S. live lives of just such immense proportion and little importance. Is it fuku, as Lola asks, or just life? Life is fuku; life in the diaspora and life in the motherland. Life in one's body. So maybe the Buffy relation is accurate: the de Leons live on a shifting Hell Mouth and need all of the ferocity and violence of a vamp killer to maintain, if not seguridad, then simply being.

Okay: another two questions. Why the footnotes and much more interestingly, why the Dominican Spanish, which alienates the non-Dominican reader from the text, building a barrier, preventing full disclosure of the lives and events of the characters? It's a prose simulation of the invisible storm-proof windows between cultures. I read Spanish and have trouble deciphering the slangy verbs and unusual syntax of Diaz's characters. The narrative feels foreign, like the trip to Guatemala where T and I wandered around, talked with indigenous Guatemalans and Antigua Guatemalans, ate rice and beans, climbed a volcano through thickets of coffee plants, and at the same time seemed to occupy a second country, where we got the tastes, smells, feel of Guatemala, but nothing of its essence. That's how I feel reading this book. Like I can see Beli's luscious and immense t&a, but I don't get their beauty.
I feel so white.

And finally, though this question may be a function of where I am in the text and so unnecessary, where the hell is Oscar? For an eponymous antihero he takes up a fractional portion of the narrative.

I like Junot Diaz, and I like this novel. The sentimentality I was worried about, coming from the cuteness (which loses its toothache sweetness in the shadow of the twin terrors of Trujillo and self-hatred), is not present. This is not a walk through the post 9/11 city with Foer's Oscar and his "heavy boots." This is not a self-satisfying rumination on love or even ruin. Through devices that could grate--dialect, abruptly shifting perspectives, nonstop nerd allusions--Diaz manages to create a cultural universe of playas (not the beaches, the Romeos), sunburn-mean Dominican mamas, Catholic viejas, gangsters and dictators, longing and anger and dreams that (I suspect) is real. And really, really sad.