Well, fuck. I've read a lot this year. At least 12 books in as many weeks, plus drivel packed texts and bullshit journal articles; all that, and a bullshit output of my own peaking at something like 20 pages a week. I'm not bragging, I'm establishing how addled my mind is, how blurry the rush of words past my senses has become. Even the books I wanted to read, even the one's I lead coups to have returned to syllabi they'd been removed from, they failed to generate the emotional impact they might have, had I been reading them at a marginally more leisurely and exploratory pace. The almost exception being Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, which I took care with knowing it was one of my best friends favorite books, and which insures an emotional response by beating the reader over the head with unbridled and justified rage for most of it's pages. Still, in the blur, it could only serve to remind me of why I appreciated novels, why I valued them, but not why I loved them.
I held great hopes for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before I'd even lain my hands on the book, having heard the author Junot Diaz on the radio sometime shortly after its publication, talking passionate and coarse about literature, comics, and nerdery. From the onset, an epigraph care of Galactus - Devourer of Worlds, I knew my hopes we're not ill founded. The follow up epigraph from Derek Walcott didn't exactly hurt either, but lets stick with my older and deeper rooted nerderies for a moment.
Diaz uses such nerdery to color the narrative, in much the same way that Nick Hornby used pop-music for High Fidelity, framing characters with references the way we (nerds, I mean, but maybe everybody) frame ourselves. But a simple parade of references to J.R.R. Tolkien, Alan Moore, and Dungeons & Dragons isn't enough to make me fall in love with a book (though it is a good start for a budding romance). The pyrotechnic quality this book had for me runs deeper, deeper than Hornby ever got with high fidelity, and far beyond the fact that familiar cultural references lend the story a familiar voice, as though a drunk buddy were laying it all out on a porch somewhere as the sun came up.
Diaz weaves together a story very much about life, about the sum value of one's life, about how context defines one, about atrocities against life, and about the role the written word plays in our lives. The reference points of comic books and escapism become the binds which hold the myriad threads of the story together, as well as familiar and friendly landmarks for those who've walked similar roads. The more I talk on the details, the more I lose sight of the whole. The whole is that Oscar Wao, in the end (an end which rests much of it's coda upon a single panel from Watchmen), has reminded me, profoundly, of what it is I love about novels.
What that is, exactly, I can't say... if I ever figure it out for sure, I'll let you know, but don't hold your breadth. For the time being, I'm content enough to sit for a moment or two, toasty warm, in the knowledge that my coals are glowing again. Soon enough I'll start asking questions, spinning in the blur, going nowhere, but not today.
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2 comments:
I want to read that, I might take a class that has that as one of the books next semester. What classes are you taking now? (aka: What books are you reading?)
I'm taking a class called black writiers in the US, which is overstuffed in a desperate attempt to complete a "survey" of 200 years of writing. The best things I read for it, which were new to me, were Jame's Baldwin's Sonny's Blues and Ellison's Invisible Man (which I'm still not finished with). The other english class this semester is supposed to be a theory class, but the professor decided that it ought to be his personal soapbox instead, and whether he fails or succeeds at converting students to his view point, he seems to be equally disgusted with himself and turns his ire onto the students (I'm failing because I can't break out of my western humanist iconoclastic ideology, evidenced in the fact that I don't comb my hair, truth!). All of which is bullshit I can deal with, I'm just annoyed I now have to learn the formal bullshit I was supposed to get out of this class on my own time, as thought such a thing exists, as though I hadn't already overbooked the two weeks I'll be getting to myself all summer. Still, for all of Dr. Fuckwits deluded self importance, we read some sweet books in that class: Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got his Gun, and now The Breif Wonderous, etc.
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