“You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.”

Drown by Junot Díaz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just finished reading Drown (signed copy, YAY), Junot Díaz's debut short story collection, and have confirmed that he is ever-reliable. In it are 10 stories that revolve around Yunior, the son of an immigrant family and also the protagonist of all Díaz's works. The immigrant experience is anything but smooth, and we see this at all stages of Yunior's life in terms of his family situation, relationships and work life.

Primarily, abuse - mental and physical - never leaves the pages of the book. In the first story, Ysrael, we learn about a boy who was attacked by a pig when he was a baby and thus has a partially deformed face, the reason why he is ostracized and bullied. Abuse, in the form of drug, physical and psychological abuse, is particularly potent in Aurora, in which Yunior and his girlfriend "hurt too well to let it drop." Violence and suffering weave their way into the characters' daily life and stay there. Yet as Yunior says at one point, "I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber." Toughness and machismo are tied to masculine identity.

Yet perhaps heart-leather is what you'll need in order to achieve the goal all immigrants-to-be are after - escape.

Back then I didn't have a clue what she was thinking but now I know what to pencil into all those empty thought bubbles. Escape. Escape.

Yunior's father - as the 'man of the family' - bears the unspoken responsibility to facilitate this escape for his family. Due to this, however, Yunior spends 5 years of his childhood father-less while his Papí goes to New York, works two jobs to support his family, starts a new family, becoming a U.S. citizen through that marriage, and eventually returns, abandoning his aforementioned second family - the second act of abandonment he commits. Abandonment and betrayal run their course throughout the short story collection, denting all relationships.

Despite all the difficulty the characters experience, however, Yunior puts it best when he says,

“Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.”

That is why I love how Ysrael comes back to us in No Face, this time as somebody who can yell FLIGHT, STRENGTH and INVISIBILITY (yes, all in caps) and keep running, still an outcast but at least hoping for a better future. That is also why young Yunior's frequent car rides as a child are terribly poignant - time and time again he is forced to sit in the car and try to not vomit, although time and time again, he does. When one is drowning, the fight for survival becomes desperate gasps for air and a frantic scramble of limbs. Even when "life smacks everybody around," you must still try to get back to the surface.

Drown is not as explosively entertaining as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or spot-on witty as This is How You Lose Her, but it puts into words the frustrations, pitfalls and experiences of immigrants in a way that is accessible, memorable and strikingly personal. It's always a pleasure to read anything by Díaz (on a side note, he has a fabulous Facebook page).

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“Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.”

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When life gives you lemons, read anything written by Junot Díaz. I thought This is How you Lose Her was good, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao hits it out of the ballpark with infectious wit and 335 pages worth of what Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times aptly called, “adrenaline-powered prose.”

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz traces the family history and life story of Oscar de Léon, an overweight "ghetto nerd at the end of the world" who is fluent in Elvish, spews out words like "copacetic" in everyday conversation and is obsessed with, but sadly hopeless at wooing, women. Oscar is later nicknamed "Wao" because of his apparent resemblance to Oscar Wilde. I'll never know how Yunior, Oscar's roommate/best friend and the boyfriend of his sister (Lola) ever drew that comparison. While the novel is mostly set in modern-day New Jersey, its characters' stories often take us back to the time of Rafael Trujillo: the ruthless dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961.

Before we even meet Oscar, our narrator announces that his whole family is victim to fúku - "a curse or a doom of some kind" - that was cast on Oscar's grandfather, Abelard, after he upset the Trujillo. We are offered compelling evidence, such as the cruel deaths of Abelard’s wife and his daughters, that suggests fúku has indeed plagued the de Léon family for centuries and continues to work its voodoo on poor Oscar.

The main reason why Oscar is so unpopular with the ladies is that he defies the traditional qualities of masculinity. As our narrator informs us, “he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.” Unlike Yunior, whose muscle mass and success with women make him an alpha male of sorts, Oscar is an absolute nerd whose “commitment to the Genres had become absolute” by high school. Such nerdery is exemplified by the countless allusions to nerdfare throughout the novel: Yunior and Oscar’s exchange of “Mellon” (I was over the moon when I read this), the fact that the Gangster  "wasn’t no ringwraith but wasn't no orc, either," the X-wings and TIE-fighters hanging from Oscar’s ceiling… Oscar and Yunior would have nothing to do with each other if it weren’t for Lola and their mutual, Santo Dominican-love for women.

Yet it is fitting that Oscar is obsessed with the fantastical, for he himself is often submerged in his own fantasies. For example, he believes that “La Jablesse” is “the one” although, ironically enough, La Jablesse (which means “Devil Woman” in French) is infamous in Caribbean folklore for seducing men and luring them astray. Similarly, Oscar wholeheartedly believes that Ybón will leave the police for him, although his relentless attempts to win her over eventually lead to his death. Fúku at work?

The very existence of fúku reflects the deep-rooted historical context and tradition in the novel. On the one hand, Díaz reveals the Trujillo’s tyranny through the extensive footnotes that recur every few pages. (The size 8 pt font was unbearable at first, but grew on me.) More effectively, Díaz sheds light on the dictator’s omnipresence through the characters’ stories. For example, there is a comic juxtaposition between the casual and fatal in Beli and the Gangster’s affair: she is naïve and infatuated while he is part of the Trujillo’s ruthless and dictatorial family circle.

Furthermore, a strong sense of cultural identity penetrates the novel. There is frequent mention of diaspora and the idea of running away from home; Lola, of course, tries to do this many times. Yet the motherland will always call you back. The pungent and familiar smell of home hits Oscar hard when he returns to the DR to find:

 "... the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, [...] the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, [...] the mind-boggling poverty ..."

That’s the most fabulous run-on sentence I’ve read in a while.

Of course, Díaz’s style contributes most to the indelible mark of culture in the novel. Our narrator is well versed in Dominican lingo, hitting us with “homeboys” from the very beginning. Thanks to Junot Díaz, I’ve learned my fair share of Spanish swear words. On a more serious note, however, such coarse language also mirrors the undercurrent of violence in the novel.

The brutality that increasingly emerges towards the end can be so shocking that you almost don’t believe it. We move from reading about LoTR in one page to Oscar’s beatings in another. Yet Díaz has a way of effortlessly planting dark humour in the midst of the horrific: “We’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.” The storytelling way in which the novel unravels itself and the everyday naturalness of the surreal events that occur (e.g. the appearance of the mongoose) reminded me of the magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s The 100 Years of Solitude. What you read seems impossible, but – on mere pages – becomes utterly believable.  

Although the narrator of the novel is almost invisible, a seamless and flawless transition reveals Yunior to be our the storyteller. Perhaps this is why the title is not The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar de Léon, but rather The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – after all, Yunior came up with that nickname.

Just as when I read This is How You Lose Her, I'm struck by how effortlessly I support the protagonists. I mean, if I met anyone as stalker-ish and gaming-obsessed as Oscar in real life, I'd most likely make a run for it. Yet I wait impatiently for him to reappear in the novel as I read on, my fingers crossed that he will lose his virginity before his brief, wondrous life is over. I suppose this is the power of literature: it connects readers and characters, relays the impossible and elicits sympathy for the hopeless. Although Hong Kong and Santo Domingo are 22+ hours apart by plane, I was actually able to see a sliver of myself in Oscar:

“He read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and comforts since he’d first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favourite librarian had said, Here try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line “and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls” and he had to stop, his head and his heart hurting too much.”

There is much respect for the written word in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Early on, Yunior tells us that writing the book is his zafa, the counterspell to fúku. Indeed, when Oscar writers 15 pages in one sitting, is he not also writing to save himself? Yet regardless of whether or not fúku truly exists, “that’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”

So, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an extraordinarily funny and moving tribute to nerds, the culture of the DR and – of course – “the beauty!” of life.

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The half-life of love is forever

After dragging myself through All the Names and July's People, I decided to read something more contemporary with a fair bit of cussing (joking about the latter). I first spotted This Is How You Lose Her in an airport bookstore, read the line "the half life of love is forever" in the blurb (mind you, I was studying radioactive decay then) and have hungered to read it since.

It took me a while to realize that I was reading a collection of short stories, not a novel - Diaz's narrative tone is so autobiographical throughout and his characters recurrent that the stories, like Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, string together effortlessly.

This Is How You Lose Her revolves around, Yunior, a reckless yet innately sensitive womanizer who goes around breaking hearts but always eventually gets his fair share of karma and learns that he's become prone to "losing 'her,'" whoever 'she' may be - his high school teacher, his fiancee, or maybe even just some 'sucia' he met at a club.

From being subconsciously aware of his father's dishonesty (I may be wrong but it was heavily insinuated) to watching his brother recycle helplessly stricken girls, Yunior finally becomes the fickle, mercurial "Dominican man" most girls in the stories come to stereotype and avoid; he is left in adulthood, suffering from stenosis and sour.

The best in this collection are: The Pura Principle (the funniest), Invierno (the tenderest) and The Cheater's Guide to Love (the most confessional and heartfelt one of all).

Sadly, one story - Otravida, Otravez - fits uncomfortably into the collection because it is written in the perspective of a woman and trammels the otherwise continuous flow of Diaz's narrative; nonetheless, This Is How You Lose Her is a quick and hilarious read.

I'll definitely read Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; from what I've heard, they embody the same, if not more, explosive literary energy Diaz pours into This Is How You Lose Her.

“A father is a hard thing to compass.”

“In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

“Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”