As you know, I'm reading solely Hispanic/Latine books for Hispanic Heritage Month. This one had been on my radar ever since it blew up in the late 2000s. I bought it from a thrift store a few years ago and I hadn't read it until now. The thing about non-children's (and even some children's) Latine books is that I know they're going to talk about sad and hard things, because the reason we're Latin America is because of colonization and all the hard things that entails. There isn't a single LatAm country that isn't still feeling the effect of colonization. Diaz realizes this, and the narrator realizes this, and so we are told not just Oscar's story, not just his family's story, but the Dominican Republic's story, including the long shadow of Trujillo. Oscar and his family's stories are impossible to tell apart from that.
For this book ostensibly being about Oscar's life, we don't dwell on it much. Oscar grew up steeped in machismo and was a pint-size Casanova until he got his heart broken when he was 7. He discovered science fiction and fantasy soon afterward, and became the kind of geek who says "hail and well met" unironically to obviously non-geeky people. Oscar's weight gain, desperation, depression, low self esteem, not being able to see women as people, and heavy incel energy keep him from finding love or getting laid. Like the narrator, Oscar's roommate Yunior, you want to shake him by the shoulders. Snap out of it! It is difficult to understand an undateable person's despair and loneliness if you have not experienced it yourself. We are told nearly from the beginning that Oscar dies young. It is not from his suicide attempt, but being murdered after falling in love with a taken woman.
Oscar's sister Lola is a Dominican goth and the only daughter, which should give you a window into her suffering. Her mother is incredibly cruel to her, and she rebels by cutting out the criada stuff and then running away. She's the nicest to Oscar, and has a short thing with Yunior at one point. I felt for her, as hers was not an easy life. I know she's not real but I really want her to be happy. She ends up with a husband and kids, but we don't learn about them.
Beli is Oscar & Lola's mother, and her life is harder than her children's put together. Her family is assassinated by Trujillo's people for a minor reason, and she's basically a slave as a small child until her father's distant cousin adopts her and acts as her mother and as Lola & Oscar's grandmother. Beli becomes very attractive and curvaceous during puberty, incurring lots of male attention, including that of a married gangster she falls in love with. His wife has her beaten in the same cane fields her son will be beaten and killed in years later, but she's saved by a guardian spirit mongoose. She's sent to the US to escape, and meets her husband and has her children there. She gets breast cancer later, but outlives her son. She loves her children, but her hardships made her a hard person.
The writing in this book is superb, lyrical and slang-y and conversational. There's a lot of Spanglish and untranslated Spanish words, so I feel like you can't really get this book if you don't speak Spanish. There's probably stuff I didn't get because I'm not Dominican. This book has a lot of footnotes, especially in the beginning. I like footnotes so I don't mind this. There's constant N-word use, which seems to be part of Dominican American slang (used the way I use 'dude'). There's also mention of racism against Haitians (which is wild to me because they're both on the same fucking island. How are you going to hate your sibling-neighbors.). While it was difficult to read, this book was just so interesting and well-written that I couldn't put it down. I literally read it at work instead of working, which I never do. This book's Wikipedia page has a good breakdown of the themes, motifs and parallels in the stories. I learned a lot about Dominican history and the Trujillo regime, which I hadn't known much about.
I want to talk about the misogyny in this book. Obviously there's a ton of machismo in Latin American countries and culture (reminder: I am latina). Oscar gets tons of praise for being a womanizer in 2nd grade or whatever, and he has an inability to see women as whole people, putting them on a pedestal and getting disappointed when they don't fall in love with him even though he's there. I've mentioned the incel energy, although Oscar doesn't feel like he's owed sex or romance and doesn't hate women. He does have a tendency to stalk them and ignore boundaries. Just about every female character, no matter how glancingly mentioned, has her body and looks discussed in a very specific and objectifying way. Yunior is a cheating womanizer and definitely sees women as objects. He's very flippant about the fact that Trujillo raped whoever he wanted. Both he and Oscar are deeply influenced by the machismo of their culture and upbringing. There's also rape culture, sexual assault, and a lot of talk of very young girls dating (being groomed/statutory raped by) much older men. For example, Beli is 14 or 15 when she gets together with the middle-aged gangster. This was very difficult to read. Junot Diaz has been accused of past sexual assault and sexism. I considered not reading this book, but I felt that I might identify with Oscar (I kind of did). You'll have to make the decision to read this book yourself.
Trigger warnings: rape and sexual assault, child abuse, murder, characters beaten to death, suicide attempt, grooming, domestic abuse, assassinations, police brutality, misogyny, objectification of women and girls, miscarriage mentions, racism, colorism, genocide mentions, stalking, explicit sex, sexism, slavery (including child slavery), domestic slavery, gun violence, alcohol abuse, whorephobia, infidelity
Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: October 5
From: thrift store
Status: giving away/selling
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