February 6, 2010

What a depressing book. Diaz is a talented writer, I'll give him that. But boy does the book end badly for Oscar.

About half of the book isn't even about Oscar. It's about his family history. The narrator is Yunior, a friend Oscar meets in college. He traces the path of Oscar's demise and the history that leads up to it, all the way back to his grandparents.

It's all about fuku. Fuku is a curse laid down upon Oscar's grandfather for denying the then Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo access to his wife and daughter. He was thrown in prison for more than a decade then killed as Trujillo was being overthrown. His wife was pushed in front of a truck and one of his daughters drowned, along with other tragedies. Yunior says Oscar's grandfather brought fuku upon his family by defying Trujillo, who some believed had god like powers to impose his terrifying will on the people of the Dominican Republic. The result was a broken family, riddled with tragedy.

Diaz creates a likable character in Oscar but Yunior (who I believe is a thinly shaded representation of Diaz) tells the story with a sense of doom. Yunior is always alluding to this great future tragedy.

Oscar's fuku is he's overweight, socially incompetent, and a sci-fi nerd. (And by sci-fi nerd I don't mean my type of sci-fi nerd who occasionally enjoys an orc and an elf battling it out in the forest. I mean that's ALL he reads. I mean he even TALKS like the characters from those books.)

Oscar's one purpose in life from puberty to the grave is to get laid. Which his fuku complicates. The whole story of Oscar is one failure after another to get the woman he's fallen in love with. He seems doomed to die a virgin.

If that's all this novel was about then I would have tossed it when I first started reading. But its more than Oscar trying to get laid. He's alone and suffering. All he wants is someone to share life with, but he's frustrated at every attempt. Oscar feels like he is collapsing in on himself, like some internal gravity is sucking into him into his own personal black hole. Life, for Oscar, gradually spirals further and further into his own dark abyss.

I won't tell you how it ends, except that he does die and its really sad. But I will tell you that Diaz creates a terrifying world. He creates characters whose one hunger is to devour the person next to them. In Diaz's world, Oscar is the solitary virgin and everyone else is sex-crazed and starving. It isn't just Oscar who is collapsing in on himself.

So I recommend the book. Sort of. It won a Pulitzer so its a safe bet you'll like it. As long as you're ok with a depressing read, go for it.