Junot Diaz

So, today we started reading "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz.

I've read Diaz before; his short story collection "Drown," and as I read I found myself having such a severe emotional response to the text that at one point I threw the book across the room, swearing I was finished reading it!

And then, a few minutes later I went over and picked it back up and began the process again.

I just couldn't stop reading. 

This sort of duality in my own effective connection to Diaz just makes his work that more intriguing. I've seen interviews with him and each time I hear him speak I swear I fall more and more in love with this man!

Going into "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," what struck me the most was Diaz' narrative choice. The narrator is a character himself, but what's weird is that he is also at the same time omniscient to Oscar's life, describing memories and feelings that only Oscar has experienced.

The narrator utilizes a combination of formal and informal language and style, between the convention of footnotes to the conversational tone.

The reader is constantly reminded that we are outsiders in this story, and that this is a story we are being told.

What is also interesting is (obviously!) the element of fantasy and superstition wound up in this tale.

Which got me thinking--

There are so much focused on world-making, and Diaz appears to set up tradition and superstition on one side, and navigating through an increasingly diverse and modern world on the other.

It's almost as if he builds these two up as opposing factors, only to twist them together so that the reader must rethink their relationship to each other--that is, the place of one within the other. 

Diaz appears to be defining categories and then provoking a double-check.

Where are the lines blurred between tradition and modernity?

Between history and present?

Between narrator and character?

Between race and culture?

Between reality and fantasy?

Between different languages? 

Formality and slang?

Perspective.

In a recent interview (linked here; Diaz releases his reading list for his class he's teaching at MIT...pretty awesome, and a wonderful interview!) Diaz is quoted "If race or gender (or any other important social force) are not part of our interpretive logic--if they're not part of what you consider real--then you're leaving out most of what has made our world our world..."

How would we define our world? And is my world different from yours?

Then, where would they intersect?

And how is fantasy, sci-fi, and all that is "nerdom" separate from reality?