The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, byJunot Díaz
Let me start by stating that I have made a wonderful new discovery. In my personal hierarchy, I have four great loves: my goob, my cats, my books, and my jewelry. And I have found a great new way to combine two of them! That’s right, little jeweled collars for the cats!
Oh, wait, that’s a different post. No, I’ve figured out how to combine books and jewelry making. Audiobooks! I have to admit that I was extremely reluctant to try audiobooks initially, because my hearing, or my auditory comprehension, I’m not sure which, isn’t always the greatest. (Seriously, if there’s such a thing as auditory dyslexia, I have a touch of it, to go with the large basket of other dyses I’ve been handed.) But one of the women at my book club constantly raves about how much she likes them, so I figured that, since I’m always looking for a something to occupy my brain while I’m beading, I’d give them a shot. I have to say, the experiment has been successful.
I picked up The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on, as usual for me, a recommendation from Amazon (there is something extremely satisfying about having a computer program tell me what science fiction books I should read, there really is.) It was recommended as a companion to Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. I’m not really sure why, other than the fact that the two books are narrated by men almost reluctant to enter their own story. It’s a good book, an interesting book. It is not a speculative fiction book, it’s proper genre is ethnic fiction. It explores, in excruciating and loving detail, the culture of the Dominican Republic and the culture of the American male geek. If you’re a geek, read it for the geek culture. If you aren’t a geek, read it for the history.
To me, the book read as a treatise on the psychology of escapism. Each of the characters whose lives are explored spend a good portion of honestly unpleasant lives desperately trying to get to be somewhere else, somewhere better purely by the mechanism of wishing to be there.
Interestingly, in a book about two such very male-dominated cultures, it is the women in the book who both learn and teach that change, real change, is an action, and not a reaction.
