The short wondrous life of Oscar Wao

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , original title The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , is the first novel by the American author Junot Díaz , published in 2007 , who had already earned a reputation as an outstanding author with his short stories. The novel is a three-generation family saga about immigrants from the Dominican Republic who are building a new life for themselves in the US state of New Jersey . The focus is on Oscar De León, an overweight young man with a penchant for science fiction and fantasy whose main concern is becoming the first Dominican man to die without sexual experience.

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In flashbacks and from a changing narrative perspective, Diaz tells the story of Oscar's family, over whom the fuku curse lies. Oscar's Dominican grandfather is a successful and educated doctor, whose misfortune is that one of his three beautiful daughters is noticed by the dictator Rafael Trujillo . Not ready to sacrifice it to him, he is thrown into prison, first driven out of his property and then driven out of his mind with perfidious methods. Finally he dies. His two older daughters do not survive either. Only the third, who is still a little girl, survives the misfortune that lies upon the family. However, her further life lets her become a person who can only return hatred. She is enslaved, scalded with hot water and is finally taken in by a great aunt. Her family's fate finally catches up with her as a young woman, when she is so beautiful that men are ready to kill for her. She falls in love with one of Trujillo's brothers-in-law, becomes pregnant and is so abused by Trujillo's sister's thugs that she loses the child. She eventually flees to New Jersey, where she becomes the mother of two children: the rebellious and ambitious Lola and the overweight Oscar, who is the tragic antihero of this family saga. He lives in literary fantasy worlds, in which he reinvents himself as the Dominican Stephen King and longs to find a wife. Only at the end of his short life did he manage to do this during a visit to the Dominican Republic, but the curse of fate caught up with him too.

Background information on the author

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo , capital of the Dominican Republic, and grew up with his mother and grandparents for the first six years while his father worked in the United States. It was not until 1974 that the family followed their father to the USA. The experience of migration, poverty and fatherless childhood shape the literary work of Junot Díaz, which he had published before the publication of his first novel. Díaz had established himself as an outstanding author even before the publication of his first novel. In the annual anthology The American Short Stories Best (dt., The best American short stories ) had been included works by him in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2000.

Reviews

In his review for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Martin Zähringer names the short, wondrous life of Oscar Wao, a family story that is told in an artfully nested perspective and that is at the same time resistant and rebellious memory work. Christopher Tayler also sees the charm of the novel in the review for the British newspaper The Guardian in the changing narrative perspectives and flashbacks: the moment the reader wonders whether Oscar's hopeless infatuations could carry the novel, his sister Lola suddenly moves in the focus, only then do you learn about the experiences that shaped the mother of the siblings, and finally you also learn about the fate of the grandparents.

In his review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Georg Diez points out that the magic of this wonderful novel lies in the snotty casualness with which this tragic story is told. Also thanks to the translation by Eva Kemper , the language of this novel has a rhythm and a beat that is due to the English elasticity, but is driven by the Spanish Padamm, Padamm. Klaus Brinkbäumer also shares the praise for the translator in the Spiegel criticism: Eva Kemper managed to transform the wild English-Spanish mixture into a German-Spanish adventure just as precisely and casually as Díaz did with the original.

From Christian Seiler's point of view, which he explains in his review for Die Zeit , the novel is a furious mix of trash culture and magical realism and Junot Díaz is a fantastic narrator who, through the Spanish words and fragments “baked into” the story, becomes an authentic one Find immigrant language. Seiler is of the opinion, however, that it is the characters that make the novel great and extraordinary and cites Oscar's mother Beli, who consists of defiance, will and curves, Oscar's great-great aunt La Inca, who does not give way to the constraints of dictatorship, and as examples Oscar's sister, who is at constant war with her mother.

In his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tobias Döring can not share the general euphoria about this novel. From his point of view, it is about adolescent cranked testosterone prose in the overdriven tone of a cocky narrator, in which the reader only longs for the end of the novel. From Döring's point of view, Junot Díaz was hailed too early as a multicultural model author, and the simple plot structure could not hide the exotic backdrop and American ghetto idyll.

“In addition, there are talkative footnotes in the manner of David Foster Wallace as well as literary allusions which the author thinks he owes to his position as associate professor at the renowned MIT . However, his eagerness to serve all hopes for street credibility as well as for postmodern narrative fiction only leads to confused changes in narrative chronology and characters and repeatedly drives out style blossoms. "

Awards

Oscar Wao's Brief Miraculous Life has won a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize , the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award . In 2015, this novel was voted the most important literary work of the early 21st century to date in the BBC's selection of the 20 best novels from 2000 to 2014 .

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Single receipts

  1. ↑ Jacquelyn Loss: Junot Díaz .. In: Alan West-Durán (Ed.): Latino and Latina Writers. Charles Scribner's Sons , Detroit 2003, pp. 803-816.
  2. ↑ Hao Ying: Writing wrongs. (No longer available online.) In: Global Times. April 14, 2010, archived from the original on December 12, 2013 ; accessed on May 27, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.globaltimes.cn
  3. ↑ Martin Zähringer: The Great American Disaster . Review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, published July 8, 2009, accessed on May 29, 2015.
  4. ↑ Christopher Tayler: Performance Art , published in the Guardian on February 23, 2008, accessed May 30, 2015.
  5. ↑ Georg Diez: Nice, fat meat in tight satin trousers - Review of the novel in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on August 3, 2009, accessed on May 29, 2015.
  6. ↑ Klaus Brinkbäumer: The grammar of love in Der Spiegel from March 23, 2009, accessed on May 30, 2015.
  7. ↑ Christian Seiler: This wonderful mess . Review in Die Zeit on March 13, 2009, accessed on May 29, 2015.
  8. ↑ Tobias Döring: Don't just die as a virgin . Review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 25, 2009, accessed on May 29, 2015.
  9. ↑ Laurie Muchnick: Junot Diaz's Novel, 'Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,' Wins Pulitzer , Bloomberg. April 7, 2008. Retrieved April 8, 2008.