The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize winner and is on the . It’s also the book I chose to give out on World Book Night, which was April 23.

World Book Night is something I only found out about a couple of months ago, and I signed up to be a Giver. I picked a book title, and was sent 20 special copies of it. These titles are to be handed out to people who are light or non-readers. We’re supposed to choose a book we loved, so that we can hand it to someone and say: Here, read this, I loved it and hope you do too.

And so I’ll go out and give these copies away to whoever will take one (I also gave some copies to coworkers to help hand out, too).

In order to be able to talk this book up, I started to re-read it. I knew I liked it but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

I do now, though. As the New York Times put it, it’s “a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus.”

I agree with that. The story itself is cool, but the writing is, too. Mr. Diaz writes like you’d imagine an energetic storyteller would talk – for one chapter. Then he switches voices, telling the story from another character’s point-of-view. He sprinkles in Dominican slang words throughout the text, and you don’t always know exactly what the word means, but you still get it.

I was looking up a couple of the words, just to get an exact meaning, and found this site, which provides definitions and annotations on things said/written in the book. I like some of the things on here – the annotations cover comic book character descriptions, in case you’re not familiar with Galactus, as well as historical figures and events, and translations. It’s a handy resource to have as you read the book, should you want to really get into the nitty gritty. And it’s worth it – there’s a lot there. But I say, save that for the second reading. Get through it once and enjoy the words, the story, the language.

There’s something to enjoying the feeling of a foreign word, even if you don’t know exactly what it means, maybe because you don’t know exactly what it means. Much of the joy of reading a book is that you can imagine whatever you can – for the characters, how they sound, what they look like, what they mean. Having words that you don’t know the meaning of here and there doesn’t mean you won’t get the idea, and they allow you to focus more on the idea of the sentence, to put a little bit of your own meaning into it. That allows you to make the book yours.

I think that’s the definition of good literature – on one level, the story is good, told well, and characters are fully-developed. You know these people. On another level, it leaves enough OUT of the story, some part of it, that you can put yourself into it, you-at-this-moment fill the holes, create the final story in your head. And it’s those works of writing that you can revisit in 5, 10, 25 years, and the story will still be good, but for some reason, it’ll be different. Because you  are different. What more can you ask for from anything? Be it a story, a parent, a lover – a good one allows you to grow, grows with you, still remains true to itself.