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January 27, 2008

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The Secret Life of Oscar Wao
by, Junot Díaz

What's more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What's more fantasy than the Antilles? I haven't enjoyed reading a book this much since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. In fact, the books have much in common. Kavalier was the story of two Old World, Jewish expatriets, who are painfully assimilated into American culture at the beginning of WW II. Over time, they turn themselves into American success stories, using the emerging mythos of American culture, which in the 1930's and 40's was populated by pulp novel detectives, cowboys, and a pantheon of winged, caped, tight-wearing, masked super heroes. They were naturally disposed to this surreal vision of life because of the arcane nature of their own religious indoctrination.

In a similar fashion, Oscar de Leon, growing up in the seedy barrios of Patterson, N.J., is re-ordained as a writer of fantasy and science fiction due to the darker elements that can be associated with life in the Caribbean, specifically the Dominican Republic, where his family is from.

"They say it comes from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished, and another began; that it was the demon drawn into creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically, the curse or the Doom of the New World."

Oscar represents a link in the chain of fukú that his family seems inextricably bound up in. But he is the one who will break the chain. This is presaged in the opening chapter when learn that because he was home sick from school on Sept. 11, 2001, his mother missed work at her job in the World Trade Center.

Still, there is some serious fukú at work in the lives of Oscar, his sister, Lola, and his Valkyrie-like mother Belicia. Like all Dominicos, they are survivors of the barbarous Trujillo legacy ("Trujillo was Mobuto before Mobuto was Mobuto.") While in DR, Belicia had the misfortune of taking up with a gangster with close ties to Trujillo. Close, that is, until she becomes pregnant and decides to force the issue on her boyfriend who (unbeknownt to Belicia) is married to Trujillo's sister. When she refuses to abort the child she is abducted and taken to a cane field where she is nearly beaten to death. She loses the baby but is saved by a benevolent spirit that appears in the form of a mongoose. Once she has recovered, she flees the country.

This brings us to the present, and New Jersey wher Oscar and his older sister grow up, the latter as a street-wise loca and the former in a fantasy world where the forces of fukú are kept at bay by Watchmen and Jedis. While this restors a vestige of sanity to his life, the downside of a fantasy life is that it is difficult to share. His tendancy to speak Elvish and his huge size (over 300 pounds) make it difficult for Oscar to have a social life. And zero dates.

His sister Lola escapes the strictures of the DeLeon's Washington Heights existance and experiences her share of fukú before she rights herself and lands a scholarship to Rutgers. Oscar, who has also graduated from Rutgers, has a different tao. While visiting the DR one summer after he tries to kill himself by jumping off a railway trestle in a drug-induced fit of melancholy brought on by his loveless fate, he meets a sem-retired hooker who lives next door to his grandmother. After that, his whole world changes. Although she has problems of her own—alcoholism and a very jealous boyfriend who is a corrupt police Captain—she treats Oscar like a real person and he falls head over heels in love with her. Throwing caution to the wind and ignoring threats and warnings from all sides, Oscar is picked up on his way to one of his trysts and taken to a cane field (perhaps the same cane field his mother was taken to) and beaten within an inch of his life.

Oscar is spared by the same creature that saved his mother, but fukú is strong and Oscar only has a few lives to spare. After recuperating at home he surreptitiosly returns to DR to claim his love. She is now married to the Captain and his retribution this time is absolute. Oscar dies without realizing his dream of being the DR's J.R.R. Tolkien. But does succeed at last in breaking the chain of fukú.

One of the surprising and joyful aspects of this book, despite it's tragi-comic ending, is that, like Let it Rain Coffee by Angie Cruz, it is a hopeful story. Despite their travails, fukú, whether real or imagined, and unmistakable racial bias, the family is successful in adapting to their adopted country. Belicia overcomes immense obstacles to make a life for her children, and though she succumbs to cancer after Oscar dies, her daughter thrives and has her very own daughter who, in her life will have the myths of the Old World and the new to sustain her.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Osacr Wao appeared on just about every list of 'Best Books' for 2007. I think it was my favorite from last year. It's a short book that packs a lot of wallop. And Junot Díaz is an author to watch.

 

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January 03, 2008

The Tourmaline

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Winter is the best time for reading. It’s cold and the clouds hang heavy, closing the world in to just the short prospect you can see out a frosted window: wind blowing through bare tree limbs, a forlorn bird feeder with an equally forlorn looking squirrel rooting around underneath. Gray upon gray.

What better to read on such a forlorn day than a good fantasy novel? What was a closed in world opens with new and unexpected horizons. Grayness is transformed into a palette of living color, perhaps with colors that are different from the ones we are accustomed to. Just think of the startling transition from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. For readers of fantasy the experience is the same; we are lifted up out of the Kansas of our doldrums and transported to an Emerald City of infinite possibilities.

Paul Park’s Princess of Roumania (reviewed June 2007) introduced readers to Miranda Popescu and her friends Peter and Andromeda. They inhabit a place and time that seems familiar but this turns out to be an illusion. Because Miranda is not, as she has been led to believe, an orphan adopted in Romania. She is the child of a deposed prince in Roumania, which is a very different country from the one we know today (Romania). Nor are Peter and Andromeda who they appear to be. They are all part of an intricate web of deception and intrigue that threatens to engulf them and wreak havoc in their homeland. At the end of book one, Miranda is transported back to her native country in order to reclaim her birthright.

The forces that are arrayed against her are formidable. Baroness Ceausescu, the widow of the man responsible for Prince Schenk von Shenck’s fall from power, has assumed the role of the White Tyger, a near mythical symbol of Roumania’s independence. The people of Roumania, though in the thrall of the Baroness’ enchantment, await the return of the real White Tyger, who is descended from the royal line of the Bracoveanu family and even, according to legend, Mary Magdalene herself.

There is also the Elector of Ratisbon who holds Miranda’s birth mother, Clara Bracoveanu, hostage. He seeks to forstall the return of the White Tyger to consolidate his country’s hold on her kingdom and in order to further his own political interests.

There is a vampire, of course, named Codreanu, as cold-blooded as Count Dracula (although no one in Roumania has heard of the latter), who Miranda faces after she is restored to her ancestral holdings, vanquishing him with the help of her Aunt Aegypta’s spirit. Miranda is betrayed by one of her father’s former allies but finds support from a race of monkey people, descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe who have been granted the right to inhabit the old growth forest which adjoin the Bracoveanu’s land. They hide her away and while she sleeps her spirit returns to the dream world of her childhood in Massachusetts, where her animal spirit, the tiger dispatches the worm which represents the Elector of Ratisbon. While she is in her trance, Peter rejoins her, himself transformed unto the great Pieter de Graz, who fought and subjugated the Hungarians alongside Miranda’s father, Prince Schenck von Schenck.

The stage is set for the confrontation between Miranda, who wears the bracelet of the White Tyger, and the Baroness Ceausescu, who has control of the country aand powers she derives from control of the Tourmaline, a jewel purported to have formed in the brain of Johanes Kepler.

Gypsies, vampires, monkey people, animal spirits, sorcery, wizardry, and a powerful stone. There’s a little of everything in this series. What keeps it down to earth, though, is Miranda. Far from her familiar Massachusetts she is rediscovering her real past and as she does so, she discovers things about herself. And as she approaches Bucharest, her powers are greater than she could ever have imagined. But in some ways, she’s the same. When she is finally reunited with Peter/Pieter she says with classic understatement, “You know, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, this princess business.”

This may be the best fantasy series since Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" (maybe even better). Book three of the series, The White Tyger, came out earlier this year. Book four, The Hidden World, is due out in April, ’08. Give those winter blahs the technicolor treatment and read a classic in the making.

 

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