celebrity writers

Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Dominican American Novel

Jul 19, 2008

Junot Diaz, a Dominican American author, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his first novel. The immigrant experience is central to his work. He teaches writing at MIT.

The story of the protagonist, nicknamed Oscar Wao as a play on Oscar Wilde, does not work along "normal" parameters, it baffles description and defies the conventional techniques found in novels.

Our anti-hero Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick GhettoNerd" who cranks out pages of fantasy and sci-fi fiction with the hope of becoming a Dominican Tolkien. Junot Diaz weaves together different perspectives (Oscar, his mother, his sister, the sister's boyfriend, his loving grandmother and other relatives back in the D.R.) and different time periods (New Jersey in the 1960s and 1980s, the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo, 1930-62) to tell a family saga of escape and starting all over, while still being haunted by the past.

Style

The story is told in a high-speed vernacular Spanglish ( mix of Spanish and English) drifting in and out of urban slang, with references to Geek culture, Star Trek and tons of footnotes consisting of political commentary on the history of the Dominican Republic. Readers who don't like the novel, complain about overuse of the f-word and other obscenities, they say it is inaccessible, if you don't speak Spanish, and agree that the author expects too much

In an interview on NPR, Junot Diaz points out that in anyone's daily life there are many things we see and hear, which we don't understand. It was his intention to expose readers to the immigrant experience, how that feels, being immersed in another language and culture, and first one only gets 5% and then maybe 15%, and even at 75% one is so far from being able to participate in a decent conversation.

Hopefully some readers will make the effort and find the Dominican Republic on Google maps or even realize that the D.R. was occupied by the U.S.from 1916-24. Junot Diaz says in an interview on NPR: "People know so little about the D.R., they don't even have stereotypes about Dominicans."

Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz (born in 1968) moved with his parents to the U.S. at age six from the Dominican Republic. He grew up (in his own words) "super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way." A voracious reader early on, he would walk for miles to the public library to get his next book.

Diaz completed is BA in English at Rutgers in 1992. His girlfriend applied for him secretly at Cornell, he was accepted and received his MFA in 1995. He started writing short stories and published his widely acclaimed collection Drown in 1996. The New Yorker magazine listed Junot Diaz as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. His long awaited novel, he wrote it over 11 years, earned him the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Diaz lives in New York Ciy and teaches creative writing at MIT.

The Immigrant Experience

Oscar's family lives much as Díaz' own family did, the author has said, balancing two lives, two cultures, in New Jersey and their native Dominican Republic. The novel wrestles with questions like:how do you pull a self together when it consists of so many disparate parts? The saga of Oscar 's brief but intense life is a multi-generational tale demonstrating with clever humor, insight and compassion how the entire history of a family, their ancestors, place of birth and history shapes each individual within it.

Hope and the Curse

Junot Diaz father was in the military: "he did bring the regime home". Atrocious crimes, rape and brutal killings make Oscar's family's story seem surreal at times. The bloody 30-year-reign of a cruel dictator ignored by the rest of the world may only be bearable with a biting,sarcastic and unbeatable sense of humor.

And last but not least there is the curse that Oscar's family may or may not be under. Fukú - generally a curse or a doom - was supposedly brought to the Caribbean in 1492. It is the reason why Dominicans still do not speak the name Cristóbal Colón. The novel is a “counterspell” of sorts to end a chain of terribly bad events, as the narrator says at the end of the prologue. It might have worked: First came the Pulitzer and then Miramax bought the movie rights.

For an excellent interview with Junot Diaz visit OpenSource.

Diaz, Junot: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Riverhead Books: New York, 2007.

Diaz, Junot: Drown, Riverhead Books:New York, 1996.

The copyright of the article Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize in Latin American Literature is owned by Christine Welter. Permission to republish Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.