Ok Gente,
For Poetry Friday, I just want to save the LA Taco Trucks and street vendors (mmmm esquites). Sign the petition and I'll love you forever.
After all, some of my favorite poets are The Taco Shop poets.
The round-up today is being hosted at The Well Read Child, thank you for hosting!!
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1594489580
ISBN-13: 978-1594489587
I was in New York this June for Book Expo America and was walking through a crowded aisle on my way to a meeting when something caught my eye and made me stop dead in my tracks. The name Junot Diaz on a simple white cover was enough to stop my fast moving walk to a meeting a had about a minute to get to clear on the other side of the Javits center. I not only stopped, I gasped and then I grabbed. I held that book like it was the Holy Grail and enraptured, carried it to my meeting which I couldn’t concentrate on because all I could think of was the book, the long awaited book burning a hole in my book bag.
That night on the balcony overlooking the Empire State building at my friend Joe’s place in Hell’s Kitchen I reverently opened the book by Junot Diaz. It was early morning with a muggy sun coming up before I put it down again. There were pages that I read once, twice, thrice just for the pleasure of them. The footnotes in particular were wonderful. I read them again and again out loud to myself just for the pleasure of saying them. I re-read the book on the plane home and found it to be equally entertaining and great. I got into the office and shared footnotes with people reading them out loud at random times.
I waited and waited to review it. Why? Because sometimes a book is so damned great that it defies reviewing. I mean what do you say? Everything will sound canned. It’s great, it’s wonderful, it’s fantastic. Whatever. It’s all that and more but how to say it? How do I describe what is essentially a masterpiece so eloquent that it almost defies description? Think Britney Spears following Janis Joplin at a concert. Yeah.
Well, I chickened out and put the book to sit on my shelf for a couple of months just to sit there and glare at me. Well it’s time now – the book, the glorious book is tired of waiting. I read it again last night and two months haven’t changed its beauty.
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao begins with a history of fukú (a curse of both gargantuan and subtle proportions) outlined in its gorgeous footnotes that reveal a plethora of Dominican history and political information with a deft and almost musical talent. The footnoted description of fukú was hilarious and I read it again and again. You get the sense that this story about a sci-fi addicted, desperately lonely fat boy Oscar is doomed from the start but you can’t help hoping for him all the time knowing that the fukú is gonna get him.
The book flips back and forth with information about Oscar, pitiful Oscar, his sister, mother, grandparents and peripheral people in his life. The whole Dominican Republic past and present is also a character as is the evil Trujillo. The 30-year reign of terror of one President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was particularly bloody. Shit, us Mexican girls grew up scared of Trujillo. That vato made the massacre at Tlateloco by the Mexican government look like a Sunday outing. (I’m NOT trivializing Tlateloco by any means – just showing how horrible Trujillo was. Sol ducks looks around hoping the fukú doesn’t get her).
Oscar’s life story is an amazing one – he is a hero just by virtue of being so pathetic and his first generation immigrant status. You feel his pain, his loneliness and want so badly to help him but you can’t. There are 500 years of pain and abuse stored up in that boy. The way I saw it Oscar became the colonized Latin America/indigenous peoples all rolled up into one fat nerd.
The book switches back and forth from English, to Spanish, to indigenous slang, to insults, to an almost hip hop feel, a sing-song rap about cultural genocide, abuse, pillage and politics all caught up in the life of one young man. It reads like a song and makes no italics or apologies for switching back and forth between languages and slang. It’s saying understand me or don’t – my prose is so gorgeous I don’t need to translate for you. Just deal. Just read. Just absorb. And you do. You breathe Junot Diaz’s words. You learn more about the DR and politics than you’d ever learn in a history class taught by the best teacher. You’re captured, captivated, you’re sucked in, your singing along with him and your singing in his style. At the end of the book you’re changed and you’ll never be the same.
Book Description from the publisher
This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time
About the Author
Junot Diaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown, was a publishing sensation of unprecedented acclaim, became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and is now a landmark of contemporary literature. He was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and now lives in New York City and Boston, where he teaches at MIT
A week ago, I finished Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez for the second time in five years. The book is an epic story spanning three generations of women from two families, one rich and the other poor. It is more than just the story of these two families, it is the story of the brutal massacre of indigenous people, the story of the conflict and bloody history of El Salvador, the battles of rich and poor, of tradition , against so called progress.
The women in this story are strong, determined, vibrant survivors. There is love here between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. There is betrayal and anguish, the loss of children, loss of life, loss of a way of life. Ms. Benitez speaks eloquently of El Salvador’s beauty and the brutality against the indigenous. I ached when I read of the massacre. I cried bitter tears when the melodic language of the Pipil was silenced and when I read that they had given up their beautiful rainbows of color in their indigenous dress so as not to attract the attention and brutality of the Guardia.
At times, this book was so brutal in it’s truth; the violence and death were so senseless that I had to put it down for a day or two just to get past it. I wanted to hate the rich family that made their money on the backs of indigenous workers picking their coffee, working their fields but Ms. Benitez made them so human, so likeable that it was hard to find a villain. I sympathized and agonized with both. I wanted to stop things, make them see the inevitable disaster and got so involved with the story that I felt I was there. To be so involved in a book is a blessing no matter how hard the subject matter. Sandra Benitez is such a wonderful storyteller that for the days I read this book and long after, it absorbed me and changed me. It made me think. It made me want more. It made me educate myself more about El Salvador and its history.
How many books can do that? How many books can you retain so much of for such a long time? The second reading was just as hard to digest. Brutality, violence, terror, war and injustice aren’t meant to be easy. It is, after all these years just as hauntingly beautiful as when I first read it. Maybe more so now than before. I remain torn between the families, torn by the violence and injustice, want to work harder than ever for social change, for promoting peace and tolerance, more motivated than ever to protect my culture, my native language, the costumes my family wears for our Aztec dances, our traditions. I don’t know what else I can say about this book other than to encourage everyone to read it. It’s not some new buzz book – the publication date on my old copy is 1998 but look it up, buy it, borrow it, read it. Don’t leave it in the darkness of some old library shelf. It deserves much better.
For those of you that wouldn’t think about reading a book like this, that it wouldn’t be interesting and maybe too much like reading statistics or a schoolbook, stop thinking and read it anyway.
When this book first came to my attention, I knew I had to review it but dreaded doing it because it seemed so studious and dry. I wondered if I could do it justice or that I’d become bored and not write a good enough review of it. I dragged along for a few months just avoiding doing it. However, upon reading the first page of the introduction, I became so fascinated and enthralled that I finished the book on the train ride into work.
Nicolas Vaca explores the political alliance between Latinos and African American as supposed by White America. It was amazing to me. He also explores racial tensions, population growth and unveiled hatred between the two groups. The statistics that Mr. Vaca quotes are astounding in terms of population growth among the Mexican American community. I couldn’t believe how much our community had grown in twenty years. Mr. Vaca also delineates points of conflict and issues that he feels will arise. He cites the L.A. Riots and how many of the incidents that occurred were African American against Mexicans, not Caucasians.
I’m a Xicana women and have always known about the racial tensions between these two groups because I have lived but I never really got a good sense of just how deep and hw damaging those tensions are to both groups until I read this book. It’s a controversial book and bound to incite a lot of bad feeling and anger among many groups, not least White America. I think as Xicanos, we are obligated to read this book and see how potentially powerful we can be politically and economically. The statistics and numbers are simply powerful. I know I felt tremendously empowered just reading the percentages of us in different states across the union.
It is important to understand these tensions and challenges that present themselves to us. We must educate our children and ourselves for the future. Hispanics are the fastest growing minority in the United States and the numbers are mind numbing.
Nicolas Vaca, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and also holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley is a Mexican American practicing attorney in the Bay area.
