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.