#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Best of the Millennium
September 22, 2009 | 6

coverA few months ago, I got a poke to do one of those silly “do this now” things on Facebook. We were asked to pick up the book lying nearest to us and quote a sentence from it on a particular page–I think it was page 58. The book near me at that moment, though I’d read it sometime prior, was Junot Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I grabbed it, flipped open to the directed page–and found there one perfect sentence. I remember thinking, “Damn, you can flip this book open anywhere and find perfection. Wow.” This book has gotten tons of attention–major prizes, big reviews, bestselling status–but it’s nice to see that a novel so well-crafted, so funny, so idiosyncratic, so…wondrous, can still capture the imagination of large audiences. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

Junot Díaz’s Year in Reading.
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is the author of numerous articles and essays and of four novels. Her latest, The Taste of Salt, will be published in September. You can find out more about her work at her website www.marthasouthgate.com.

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Best of the Millennium

#9: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Best of the Millennium
September 23, 2009

Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a book I return to for sustenance, for instruction, and for pleasure. The title story is a masterpiece, a miracle of structure, character and plot, in which two teenage girls write prank letters to a housekeeper and thus set off a chain of events that changes and creates lives.

Munro is a realist of profound and subtle comprehension whose great subject is women’s lives. She is not a romantic, not sentimental, nor does she work the other end of authorial power and put her characters through excruciations and misery simply because she can. Instead, she writes with the clear, rigorous dispassion of a spiritual master.

Because literary convention so often nudges narratives toward familiar outcomes–happy endings, redemption, tragedy–Munro has retooled form to suit her nuanced purposes. Her stories have the range and depth of novels; their structures are intricate and unusual but completely lucid. Her pace is leisurely; she lingers on physical descriptions of trees, geology, and faces, and on gradations of emotions. Yet somehow the stories often span years, even decades, and cover vast tracts of ground. She makes all this seem effortless.

Alice Munro has taught us to find literary pleasure in leaping over time, in the odd swerves life takes, in the unexpected sources of comfort and sustenance, and in the idiosyncratic arrangements made for human happiness. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, she is at the top of her powers, each story, one after another, a stalwart, shimmering beauty.

Read an excerpt from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
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6 comments:

  1. I liked this book a lot, but I think I might have loved it if it had come with a Spanish/slang glossary in the back. Or is the point to not really know what these things mean, and to just let the sound of the words and their context sort of imply a feeling/image?

    Ugh, I hate talking about literature. I always feel like the one idiot who didn’t get the joke.

  2. Am I the only one who read this and thought it was pretty good, until the ending? It’s like Diaz got bored at the end and just rushed it out. It felt like a big cop out.

  4. Pingback: Coming in at No. 11 « Meanderings

  5. The ending also gave me shivers. And made me happy. I thought this book was completely magnificent. I also have Drown, a collection of short stories by the same author. Definitely reccommend it!

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Best of the Millennium

#4: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Best of the Millennium
| 2 min read

I read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 on the beach last winter, and when I think about it now, there are still children running around at the edges of the book, burying each other in the sand. It seems only fair that memory should encroach on Bolaño’s magnum opus, the novel which he left uncorrected when he died in 2003. 2666 encroaches on memory; it encroaches on reality itself.

Centered, loosely, on the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the novel creates a vast and nearly plausible planet inhabited by academics, sportswriters, petty criminals and their rich bosses, lawyers, victims, and, at the center of it all, two very tall Germans. Wait for them. Everything is how it is and everything is a little wrong: how does a little magazine in Harlem have the budget to hire a full-time boxing correspondent? Why doesn’t that house in the desert have any windows? A greater mystery: how is it that Bolaño is able to make writers seem so interesting? There’s a chilling moment near the end of the book, when Bolaño has one of his characters say, “Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. […] Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece.” I don’t know if Bolaño himself believed that, but I’m of the opinion that 2666, for all its David-Lodge-style academic hijinx and its saggy ending, is a masterpiece. Given that there are basically no books like it, 2666 isn’t especially well camouflaged, unless it’s by those children, that sand, the fronds of memory that cover up a book which seemed, for a few days, more real than the world.

Read an excerpt from 2666.
A Bolaño Syllabus
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| 2 min read
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