Sauron in Santo Domingo

What, you didn't know the U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic twice in the twentieth century? "Don't worry," says Junot Diaz, author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, "when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either."

I just finished reading this fantastic novel about the struggles of a RPG-playing otaku Dominican adolescent from New Jersey and the family he swears was cursed during the dictator Rafael Trujillo's regime. The book was number one on Time Magazine's list of the ten best books of 2007, and the New Yorker published a 15-page version in 2000. I've owned the book since September of last year, when a class on Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Literature at UCSD left me craving post-modern works like those of Elena Poniatowska, G. G. Márquez, and Rosario Castellanos, but I hadn't started reading it until winter break. Sometimes I wonder if a college student shouldn't have the time to read more.

Fortunately, this book has exactly the right mix of history (the story is peppered with footnotes detailing the political escapades of Trujillo and his followers ), unrequited love and cheeky, know-it-all first-person narration to keep me far away from my winter quarter course syllabi. It follows the brief life of Oscar de León, "a smart bookish boy of color...weighing in at 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often)," whom his college dorm-mates nicknamed "Oscar Wao,"( a Spanish corruption of the name Oscar Wilde) for his prodigious bouts of novel writing. The story also pieces together bits of his sister Lola's coming of age and the tragicomedic life of their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral.

But you can expect a lot more from this book than a fierce excoriation of one Latin American dictator through the lens of a complicated and intensely likeable Dominican-American family, though Diaz does have a lot to say about "Trujillo, also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface." As Díaz describe him in a footnote characteristic of the whole book's tone: “At first glance, [Trujillo] was just your typical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator.”

What makes this novel truly delightful, and distinguishes it from other Latino novels that get their culture and color from weaving English, Spanish slang and spanglish phrases, is how it takes advantage of an even more mysterious language: the language of fanboys, role-playing gamers and Lord of the Rings buffs—essentially, the world of sexually-frustrated supernerds like Oscar who our narrator, his roommate Yunior, swears will only be getting game from fantasy characters.

What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? Oscar asks himself, trying to make sense of how his Dominican identity and not so hombre demeanor fit into the world. In one anecdote, Yunior recalls with sarcasm and affection the time when Oscar informed "some hot morena, 'if you were in my game I'd give you eighteen charisma!'" Qué muchacho, what a guy.

I think it's moments like this that make the novel just magic, and right in-step with the concerns of American-born, globally aware and intensely self-involved children of the twenty-first century like Oscar, Yunior and Lola. I'll add in some of my favorite quotes to this post as I find them.


*"At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron's evil was taken away by "a great wind" and neatly "blown away," with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after his death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok--fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo's son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, an orgy of terror funeral goods for the father from the son."