Our Brief, Wondrous Lives: A Review for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (o2)

     It's been awhile since I last devoured a book like a death row Thanksgiving meal.

     "The Brief Life of Oscar Wao" is one such book that requires such devouring.

     For those among more literary circles, this book won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and was a New York Times bestseller. The summary in the Library of Congress classification in the type 8 font in the front of the book simply reads "Dominican Americans - Fiction." In many ways, this book is much more than that. But perhaps ultimately, that is truly what this book is about.

    The central character, as you may have guessed, is Oscar. A de Léon hailing from Paterson, New Jersey, Oscar is introduced to us as a "Ghettonerd". Born of domincanos, Oscar is heavyset with absolutely no chance at ever even getting a date, let alone anything else, while being attached to any and all fantasy or science fiction outlets available. Living a rough existence with his passionate and leather tough sister Lola, and spitfire mother Balí, we get a sense of his world. At first all seems fairly peachy, until our narrator takes us on an epic narrative where the history of Oscar's family stuns us all.

    The narrator, a fellow dominicano named Yunior, digs deep through Oscar's lineage, offering the stories of Oscar's mother, grandmother, sister, grandfather, as well as Yunior's own. What gets painted, without giving away too much, is this: Beginning with Oscar's grandfather, a terrible fukú (or curse) was placed upon the family, for defying the terrific and all consuming Trujillo, dictador of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961. This curse, marked by specific condemnations and salvations alike, is what marks Oscar's family, that is, if you believe in that stuff of course.

    The real reason this book got me hooked was the pure honesty of it. No detail is spared: no description, adventure, reference, setting, nada. Yunior accounts for the many exploits of various natures from all characters, himself included. Aside from detailing the lives of Oscar's family members, avid descriptions of life under the Trujillo dictatorship and in the Latin American communities of New York and New Jersey opened my eyes as Yunior breaks all down in digestible fashion.

      I find it rather shocking that while European history is flaunted repeatedly through my education, there is brief mention of any of Latin America's. After the discovery of such countries, and perhaps their exploitation as plantations for mother countries, and the liberators of Latin America, nothing is made mention until the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Yet here, in these pages, was a front seat to a lecture about a dictator who could have shared the helm with Hitler, someone who had a whole nation in his hand, letting everyone scurry in fear as rape, genocide, torture, murder, propaganda, prostitution, and more raged for decades.

     This book is rough around the edges, but to sandpaper it down would be a sin. Why? Because this book is a picture of life. People suffer. They leave their homes, move to a less hotter hell, and try to break from their old  fukús. Yet the family sticks together, giving every ounce of their emotion to survive the circular recycling of bad and good luck, of making the same mistakes and the same success. In the end, as Oscar proclaims at the end of his brief, yet truly mysterious and wondrous life, "The beauty! The beauty!".