Oscar Wao installment two

I was a bit perturbed before starting chapter three, as you may well have guessed. Then chapter three went and completely blew my mind. I'm almost done with the book, and I must admit that chapter three is the highlight. It's the kind of writing that I fell in love with in college: uber-personal, mini-Marxist press type of stuff that no one was reading or had even heard of. It's like the clandestine shit that was being snuck out of the dictatorial southern Americas in people's asses, but of course Diaz won the Pulitzer so I guess we're 'dealing' with that wicked part of our history that still tends to be largely ignored by everyone except over-educated leftists.

A while back, Dave Eggers edited one of the books in the Best American series. It was something like Best American Non-Required Reading, and I'm pretty sure that it still comes out annually and Eggers is still probably the series editor. That fucker has his hand in just about every pie these days, which is starting to make me suspicious. But I digress. In the one that I read, there was this absolutely insane article about all the horrible things that Saddam Hussein and his sons did to people in the country - things like kidnap the hot daughters of just about anyone they wanted and then do horrible things to them. And when I read this (I was on vacation of course), I was completely terrified by the article, and actually happy for about six months that the Iraq war was in progress because I was convinced that the Hussein family needed to get assassinated or blown up.

So then I go and read and chapter three, and it's this really beautifully written piece that could easily stand on its own, the centerpiece of the artwork that is the book, in my opinion. And it's basically a narrative from the perspective of a family that gets horribly fucked over by a tyrannical dictator who has completely lost all touch with reality, morality, sanity, and has quite clearly embraced solipsism in the worst possible way. And in reading it I'm terrified and traumatized all over again - "it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. --- and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name." But then there's the prayer scene which has all the physical anguish of a marathon, only in words, and it probably saved me from putting the book down, but I was still reading with every intention of quitting because I have enough traumatic shit to deal with on a day-to-day basis in my own life without being horribly depressed when I'm home with my family. And then Junot Diaz does something quite brilliant and possibly of the highest nerd order ever. He resuscitates Beli in the name of the comic-sci-fi-miracles that have always occupied a separate part of the literature section of my brain. And I could feel all these synapses connect in that moment, synapses that had never before even conceived of connecting with one another in ways that I thought impossible, if I ever thought of them at all. And it all made sense because in that moment Beli had to be a comic/sci-fi/fantasy superhero. She had to be Superman who lost his entire planet and was orphaned millions of light years away, and she had to be Batman who watched his parents die in front of him and then deal psychotically with the aftershock the rest of his life, and she had to have an animal daemon (Phillip Pullman) that was her soul outside her body act to save her, and I understand now why Diaz uses fantasy literature to describe a person completely oblivious to the world of fantasy literature: "a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you'd need the whole of Mordor to overcome it." So it was worth it.

And Diaz writes this completely amazing chapter using the nerd lexicon he has established early in the book, which is creatively about the coolest thing I've read in eons. And I envy him, because I think I could've pulled something like this off myself, only I never in a million years even conceived of such a thing, which makes Diaz all the more brilliant because I don't think anybody thought of doing something like this, or if they did, I've never heard of it.

So now I'm having trouble ending this email, because I finished the book between when I started writing and this moment, and I really just wanted this to be about chapter 3 which is my favorite part of the book.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao...

An update in installments...

I spent an inordinate amount of time as a young writer developing
voice. For essays I came up with a very personal one-on-one voice,
which utilized a lot of contractions, direct address, and even
footnotes to establish a rapport with my readers. Probably the best
compliment a teacher ever gave me was when one of my thesis advisers,
the one who didn't particularly like my thesis mind you, suggested I
send one of my pieces in to McSweeney's for publication. I mention
this because the introduction to Oscar Wao accomplishes all the
writerly-type things that I spent hours trying to figure out so long
ago.

I have been arguing with a mentor for the last two years on the merits
of both first-person and narrative. He is of the opinion that
first-person is a selfish, solipsistic style of writing that leads to
the egomaniacal tendencies of liberal-democratic heads-of-state (and
Dick Cheney). Furthermore he believes that narrative is a leftover
relic of the Victorian era that offers nothing substantive when it
comes to storytelling. I, of course, end up being the conservative in
our arguments when I say that first-person is as reasonable as
third-person or even stream-of-conscious because it is the only truly
legitimate encounter a person can have as they walk the earth -
face-to-face that is. And then I usually go on to argue that
narrative is an absolutely essential characteristic for all humans,
whether it be in storytelling, religion, or even the way in which
one's brain helps one to get through the day. It is how we create
order out of chaos and find beauty in what I believe are ultimately
empty existential realities (depressing I know). And I mention this
because the introduction to Oscar seems to strike a fairly nice
balance between first-person, where the narrator is present but is
telling a story about someone else which is then interspersed with the
first-person perspective of Oscar's sister, and narrative, in that we
get (through the first 75 pages of Oscar's life and his sister's) a
narrative that is not necessarily chronological or even trustworthy
but highly reminiscent of the fragmented way in which most people tend
to walk the earth and encounter others.

So, basically, I enjoyed the shit out of starting the book last night.
It was great. I immediately fell in love with the narrator and the
characters. I liked the hints about the political tones that will
eventually influence the story, but even more I liked Oscar. He has a
good heart, and the older I get the more I look to that one thing -
having a good heart - as the only criterion I use when I think about
the people around me. Some of the kids I knew in high school remind
me a lot of Oscar: they were lonely and thoughtful and many of them
read a lot of 'genre,' because it was a more rewarding relationship
than seemed possible with the ugly-hearted sons-of-bitches around
them. It was an escape from the ugliness that tends to be ubiquitous
if you haven't yet trained yourself to find beauty in the obscure
little spots that beauty tends to hide in. Hell, that was me half the
time too. So I feel a kinship with Oscar right from the start, and it
doesn't really matter that we are separated by race, language, family,
geography, etc, etc.

I wasn't expecting the jump from the narrator of the first chapter to
Oscar's sister in chapter two. It threw me off, and I sort of had to
work my way through the second chapter in a more blue-collar-like
effort than the ease with which I floated through the first 50 pages.
It wasn't that the second chapter was bad (except that the male writer
of the book doesn't seem to pull off female consciousness quite as
seamlessly as I would like), it was just out of the blue and
unexpected, and basically I'm wondering what the fuck happened to
Oscar? And is Junot Diaz just being a narrative cock-tease for
awhile? Because I can handle it, if that's the case, but if the rest
of the book is gonna jump around like this, then I need to prepare
myself.

So that's where I'm at as I head off to read a shorter chunk tonight.
All told I read like 150 pages of text yesterday, only half of which
was Oscar, so I'm a little burned tonight, and if I knew the chapter
one narrator was coming back I'd be ready for another 75 pages, but
I'm predicting some
crazy-backwards-chronological-

character-jumping-shit and I don't want
to miss anything