And After That She Could Never Love Again Oscar Wao
Wayne writes: During January term, Williams College conducts a program called 'Williams Reads'. One book is selected and copies are made available so that the entire college community tin can read and hash out it. The aim of the programme is not and so much a shared experience with a work of literature as exposure to a work which encourages thinking nigh issues of multifariousness and discrimination. This year the title selected was The Cursory Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, first published in 2007 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As its blurb puts it, the championship character 'is a sweetness only disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding honey. But Oscar may never go what he wants. Blame the fukú – a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again.'
To Oscar, The Lord of the Rings is 'one of his greatest loves and greatest comforts'. We're not told exactly why, simply it'south unsaid that it takes him into a world not his own, and his ain world is one of suffering and disappointment. He wants 'to be the Dominican Tolkien', to write an epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. His friend Yunior, the narrator of the book, uses Tolkienian references: for example, he compares the curse believed to follow Oscar and his family to 'Morgoth's bane', and supports this with a quote from The Silmarillion. This usage, however, is wrong: it's supposed to hateful that Morgoth was the bane of Arda, but 'Morgoth's bane' = 'the blight (or doom) of Morgoth', but every bit the balrog of Moria was 'Durin'south bane'. After, Oscar's mother is said 'to diminish, like Galadriel after the temptation of the ring', but in The Lord of the Rings Galadriel diminishes, or rather her ability diminishes, non because she was tempted by Frodo offering her the Ring of Power, only because the Ring is ultimately destroyed and Galadriel's elven-ring fails. I don't know if these misstatements were adventitious past Díaz, or intentional to show that the narrator doesn't know Tolkien likewise as his friend Oscar did.
Considering Oscar Wao contains Tolkien references, I was asked to be on a panel discussion about the volume with five members of the faculty. First I had to read it through to get the big movie, and so again for particular. My immediate response was that I'1000 clearly out of step with those who review gimmicky fiction and are quoted profusely on the covers and outset pages of the paperback of Díaz'southward book. It certainly did not 'burn down its way into [my] heart and sizzle [my] senses'. Although I understood the historical and cultural issues involved in the story, I couldn't generate much sympathy for characters whose distressing lives accept more to do with their own choices than with indigenous circumstances, or with fate. The best I could manage was a tangential kinship with Oscar, having read many of the same scientific discipline fiction and fantasy novels and comic books and seen the same films and television shows.
That being so, and peculiarly since I recognized the exact source of the opening epigraph of Oscar Wao – 'Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??' – earlier I read the accompanying citation, I decided to concentrate, in my designated 6 or seven minutes on the console, on the wealth of popular culture references in the volume. Dejah Thoris, D&D, Ultraman, Apokolips and New Genesis, the Bene Gesserit, Cosmo DNA, the works of East.Eastward. 'Md' Smith – Díaz uses these, among many others, to define Oscar, Yunior, and friends, and sometimes to describe a place or situation. (The Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo is compared more than one time to Tolkien'south Mordor. Trujillo is the Sauron of the DR, its vicious counterpart to Marvel Comics' Galactus, who devours worlds with no business for their inhabitants.)
I had time merely to mention a few of these references, catastrophe with ii in particular: the Watcher (Uatu), also from Curiosity Comics, and Alan Moore's brilliant comic book series Watchmen. The Watcher is a being from another milky way devoted to observing Globe and its solar arrangement. Oscar is said in Díaz'due south volume to be a watcher, living on the fringe of society, and Yunior calls himself a 'Watcher', having watched over both Oscar and his sis Lola. Watchmen as well has to do with watching over, protecting, and is said to accept been one of the 'top three [books]' that Oscar loved.
For props, I brought original copies of Fantastic Four (kickoff series) no. 48, with the Watcher prominent on the embrace, and Watchmen no. 12, which Díaz quotes almost the finish of his story. I suspect that these were too geeky for some who attended the word, peculiarly in contrast to the more scholarly talk from the faculty, virtually ethnic identity, Díaz's use of vulgarities in three languages, and the concept of fúku. The panel was video-recorded, so perchance it will show upwardly on the Web sometime.
Image: Galactus, from Fantastic 4, original series no. 49, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Galactus isn't actually evil, information technology'southward merely his nature to swallow planets.
Source: https://wayneandchristina.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/williams-reads/