Junot Díaz Is Back And He Brought His Freak Flag

Eleven years ago, Junot Díaz wrote a collection of short stories called Drown that, to quote Wikipedia, (something we try to do everyday), “became an overnight literary sensation.” To be honest, we read the book back then and were kind of, meh, another set of “I’m poor and I live in the barrio” stories. Not to say they weren’t beautifully written, but you know, been there, done that. Eleven years later, however, Díaz seems to have tapped into a more original way to tell a Latino story with a science fiction novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And just like eleven years ago, the early buzz is all that and a bag of chicharones. We are not ones to heap praise, (no!), so we’ll reserve judgment until we read it, (it drops Sepetmber 6), but we do have to say that we are intrigued by the originality of form. As our friends over at Sound Taste point out:

[…] what a risk it was for him to mix Dominican history with science fiction and comics (the intersection of readers who can follow both sets of references is about five people, including me). His response, which I won’t quote […] had to do with how we cannot limit the resources we draw from because we’ve fallen for the notion that our stories can only be told under a certain structure (in novels, the multi-generational family drama is the default). Why NOT describe the terrors of Caribbean history as the most out-there science fiction story ever written? Why NOT use the likes of Sauron and Darkseid to describe Trujillo?

If you don’t know who Sauron and Darkseid are, don’t feel dumb. Feel cool. We looked it up and apparently, they’re Lord Of The Rings and DC Comics characters respectively. Which means we may not fall in that group of five people, either. Jessica Alba will definitely be into it, though.

Junot Díaz [Wikipedia]
Aesthetic underdevelopment [Sound Taste]
06-21-07: Junot Díaz Explains ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ [This Just In...News From The Agony Column, 3rd Item]
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