final thoughts on Oscar Wao

Some news.... I'm just back from a weekend in Montreal.

Where I bought these:

Not, mind, for their high literature-ness so much as their easy-to-read-ness and my own renewed sense that I'm not really being terribly true to my French Canadian heritage si que je ne peux pas parler francais. (Excuse the horrible, horrible French.)

I'll keep you posted on my progress....

Meanwhile, I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I was recently asked why I would read something so very depressing, and I didn't quite have an answer.... For all its hip-hop new American prose (which, Erin, I thought was poetry, but more importantly I think it carried a level of reality that makes the story more accessible to an entire generation or two--this is how people talk, eh?), the story was almost like a Russian tragedy. One of those tales that wends in and out of history, putting forward the idea you are your past, and you are your parents, and you are your family's history, too....

Sort of a scary idea, really.

At the end of the day, though -- SPOILER ALERT -- the story is hopeful.

Yes, Oscar is a tragic figure. Yes, perhaps a great deal of the story is dedicated to the question of whether this tragic figure will ever lose his virginity.

But the image Yunior paints of Lola's daughter, of the little girl who he hopes to one day walk through her family history, as if he is some sort of keeper of all things de Leon, is enough to carry the tale into a sort of optimism. Will the little one avoid the fuku? No, that's not really the point. But will the narrator help her understand her past? Maybe, hopefully. And maybe it's understanding your past that can help you to a happy future? Maybe that's why Lola is so very much the survivor?

Sorry, this is very scattered. I'm playing off book club discussions I only half-understood a week ago, and I suppose just a little bit of jet lag.

Closing arguments, not really related to this argument at all, but to media and democracy:

"No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years!.... Maybe you'll ask, Why was there no outcry in the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo." (p. 247)

Poor Oscar

Ok, I'm racing -- RACING -- through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in time for tomorrow night's book club.

Yeah, baby, I'm going to get this thing read. And learn lots of Spanish. Like muchacho. And portato, which I think means "act like." Also, I am learning lots about science fiction geekiness.

An excerpt for your perusal this.... grey.... Saturday morning:

"Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women.

"Perhaps."

(p. 41)

another snippet of Alias Grace... and Mr. Darcy isn't real

I haven't really gotten going on Oscar Wao yet, because I've been locked into Alias Grace for weeks now.

(Ok, I admit I took a wee break from Atwood last night to re-read favourite bits of Pride and Prejudice. I couldn't help myself. I had just watched the Keira Knightley version, and was all loving Matthew Macfadyen even though I fell asleep in the middle and then woke up at the end when he's all, "Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy." Sigh. He's imaginary, Trish. Imaginary.)

Anyway, I love how Margaret Atwood manages to weave a murder mystery into 19th century class struggles.

You know from the start Grace will go to prison in connection to the deaths of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear. Montgomery being her coworker, if you will, and Kinnear being her boss. But this is the early 1800s, and really Kinnear is everyone's master and they all share a single roof.

"Mr. Kinnear said I was very inquisitive for such a young person, and soon he would have the most learned maidservant in Richmond Hill, and he would have to put me on display, and charge money for me, like the mathematical pig in Toronto." (p. 267)

"becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien...."

"No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since." -- p. 1

So, friends have selected the new book club book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I keep mistaking for a book about a long-dead and hilarious poet, but which is actually, apparently, the tale of Oscar, "a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love." (Says Time magazine. And we all know Time magazine is always right.)

Or, as my friend describes it: It's a fictional account of a sad-sack Dominican-American boy named Oscar that traces his family's path through the history of the Dominican Republic. It's also a love story. Furthermore, it won a Pulitzer Prize, so if you find yourself not liking it and want to quit, say to yourself "Self, have I ever won a Pulitzer Prize?" and the answer, I think, will be no, so soldier on.