BookOpinion

Powell’s published an exclusive interview with Junot Díaz, who will be at the bookstore Sept. 25. Diaz recently finished his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a decade after his collection of short stories made its sensational literary splash, winning awards and becoming a bestseller.

Diaz fans won’t be disappointed by the novel. It has received superb reviews from the L.A. Times, N.Y. Times and places in between. Publisher’s Weekly says, “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.”

Here is an excerpt from the Powell’s interview:

Spend a bit of time in the book business — no, don’t bother, just read a few litblogs — and soon enough you’ll stumble into an evangelist for the story collection Junot Díaz published in 1996. Indeed, Drown delivered ten nuanced, highly original short pieces of fiction. Eleven years ago.

“I don’t write enough,” Díaz admits.

To say that readers have been eagerly awaiting his first novel would be an understatement of significant proportions. Finally, here it is, and — if you can you believe it — The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao arguably exceeds expectations.

Leaping back and forth between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, pouring across pages in a “combustible mix of slang and lyricism” (quoth Booklist), Oscar Wao bridges several generations and distinct cultures with exhilarating doses of Caribbean history and old-fashioned pulse-pounding drama. Politics, corruption, romance, fantasy, faith, despair — the novel, as Díaz explains, contains multitudes. Kirkus, in a starred review, called it “a compelling, sex-fueled, 21st-century tragi-comedy with a magical twist.”

A few weeks prior to his reading in Portland, Díaz talked about Oscar Wao, bright lights, dialogue that sucks, and the silences that draw writers in.

Dave: Yunior narrates The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with contributions from Lola. Lola’s mother, Belicia, is a force of nature. So why is Oscar the title character?

Junot Díaz: For Yunior, Oscar is the key that unlocks the whole family. It’s his relationship with Oscar and with Oscar’s sister, but explicitly with Oscar, that makes Yunior’s involvement in the narrative possible.

The other thing is that Oscar is the last victim of the curse, so it made sense to me. He was the life through which I was viewing the entire family’s history.

Dave: The first chapter starts with the curse. Fukú. The curse bridges old world and new, one generation and the next. It gives a cohesion to the various storylines.

Díaz: When I think about this type of curse, I’m thinking about my exposure to them in the Dominican Republic. They’re ominous because of their ability to work generation after generation after generation, and I was always curious about what happens to a generation that doesn’t believe in these sort of narratives.

Can a generation that doesn’t believe in them really understand a generation that believes? Can they understand a generation that used the narrative as a way to understand its personal history?

If Belicia had been the one telling the story, the curse would have gotten a lot more play. Or not even Belicia; La Inca would be a more perfect example. Here you have as a narrator Yunior, who is more skeptical. He’s conflicted and ambivalent about it…

Read Full Interview