Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group. One of our members had read it and loved it. Also, it continues our recent trend of reading Pulitzer Prize winners.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The book follows a family back and forth from their origins in the Dominican Republic, living under the brutal dictator Trujillo, to their lives as immigrants living in Paterson NJ in the NYC metropolitan area. Oscar Wao is one of a number of characters of the family we get to know in this book, and in the process come to understand something of the culture of the Dominican Republic, the terror of the Trujillo regime, and the world of hispanic immigrants in New Jersey.  The story is about Oscar Wao’s search for maturity, love and adulthood within this cauldron of people fighting for dignity and meaning in these two chaotic and often unforgiving worlds.

My impressions:  This is a book I won’t soon forget – not like anything I’ve ever read before.  Modern, fast moving, interesting, provocative – the book cover describes  Diaz’s writing as “adrenaline-fueled” which is a fair, but insufficient description. The writing is amazing – fast moving, colloquial, clever, imaginative, evocative.  It is hard to describe what this book is about – in fact in reading it, I wasn’t quite sure – until the end.   The characters are rich and varied, and the action and stories go back and forth between New Jersey and Santo Domingo – the context is alive and chaotic.

The writing is crazy – includes lots of Spanish vernacular – some of which I understood, but that which I didn’t, the context was usually enough.  The addition of healthy amounts of colloquial and even vulgar Spanish, mixed in with colloquial and vulgar English clearly gave the intended impression – these people are products of both worlds – the barrios of Santo Domingo and the lower class gringo world of New Jersey.  The language says more than simply the words.

Oscar is a fat nerdy kid who desperately wants a girlfriend, but no girl is interested in a very self-conscious, obese, science fiction nerd.  So Oscar dreams about his fantasy girlfriends, and writes his own Sci-Fi stories – continuously.  He falls in love repeatedly, but it is never reciprocated.  Then the author leaves Oscar, and we spend quite a bit of time getting to know his mother and her traumatized childhood and early adulthood in the Dominican Republic before she emigrated to the US.   And then we get to know Oscar’s fiercely independent older sister, then we come back to Oscar, and then to his Grandmother in Santo Domingo.  And their crazy inter-connected lives.

The narrator becomes one of the characters in the book – part of Oscar Wao is written in first person and reflects the narrator’s personal perspective and role in the story.  The author/narrator is a Dominican Republic macho dude, who tries to help Oscar, but is very much a contrast to him – an athlete, quite a “player” with the women, and in love with Oscar’s sister Lola.

In thinking about this book, it seems to be about so many things. It is about the Dominican diaspora, life under the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo, the chaotic and insecure world of hispanic immigrants in the greater NYC area, the role of curses and superstition in Dominican culture.  It is about the romantic, sexual, emotional  frustration of being an isolated fat-kid nerd in a world driven by a very macho ethic, and standards of attractiveness set by  Madison Avenue.

But, the theme and thread that runs throughout this book and ties it all together, is love –  in its very many manifestations.  In this book, we see it as obsession, infatuation, purely physical/erotic, manipulative, possessive, violent, fearful, parental, protective, insecure, and finally even unconditional and spiritual.

It all comes together in the end.  While I never quite new where the story was going, it was worth the effort to make the trip to get there.   A very powerful ending. One friend in my group commented “I don’t know if Oscar was a saint or a fool.”  Clearly some of both. I felt uplifted by the book in a very strange way – which I believe is what Diaz intended.

Key Take-aways: 

• Love has many, many manifestations.   Some are harmful to those whom it touches; others are sources of great beauty and selflessness.
• Trujillo and his lackeys were a brutal caricature of what we would consider a banana-republic, self-centered, megalomaniacal Dictatorship.  He and his henchmen exploited the Dominican Republic – people and resources – purely for their personal pleasure and egocentric desires. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic – hadn’t caused so much pain, suffering, and death, and cost the world so many good and talented people.
• The world of young hispanic men and women in America is very different from the world I grew up in.

Some quotes, one-liners, and expressions that caught my attention.  I offer them here to give you a feel for the book – page numbers from the paper-back edition:

…that oh-so-famous First Nation exterminating Colt.44, heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly. 46

His head contained zero, a perfect vacuum.  47

..before he even realized what had happened, he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school:  getting no ass. 50

It’s never the changes we want that change everything.  51

Not touching because it was not their way.  Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.  Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur.  78

…<She was> as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves. 102

…in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of the Guerrilla – a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. 110

He had an immaculate head of hair and Hector Lavoe glasses and the intensity of a South  Beach dietician. 111

At first, Beli had her reservations about the Gangster. Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders. More like a third-base umpire than an Avatar of her Glorious Future. 124

We postmodern platanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.   144

In those days the cities hadn’t yet metastasized into kaiju, menacing one another with smoking, teeming tendrils of shanties.  145

Is my brother there? was all she ever said.  Cold as Saturn.  181

And I wonder: what hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be? 181

Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad.  But dead is like no-pussy times ten.  193

In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles.  But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain’t no fucking Middle-earth.  194

Of course…nobody wanted to room with him. – what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are.) 195

She’d sit alone, erect as a lectern.  198

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.  And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.  209