I never would've finished the book if it hadn't been for the chance encounter with a Berkeley undergrad work-study student who had to tour me through the Berkeley Art Museum because I wanted to photograph the building for the first blog post; some angles in the museum require permission for some reason. Her (Jennifer's) thesis has to do with the book and its unusual use of footnotes. We didn't go into it in depth in the short time we talked, but maybe (hopefully) this post will be expanded if we get to meet about it. It would be a great book to talk about. I randomly saw her at the corner of Ashby and College, big sunglasses that swallowed her eyes and cheeks, Frenched-out (she lived in France for awhile), thin, skirt, leggings, big boots, a cigarette coming and going from her mouth, dangling, during the nonchalant movements, between her middle and index fingers. The way she leaned into her hip standing on the curb looking downstreet at the busy intersection, she brought Paris and the beautiful fashion-flowers of Madison Aveenue as they wait in the brief light for their car concretely into the day. I said hello not sure it was her; it was. We talked a bit and said we should talk about Oscar Wao, and her eyes, after she brought down the huge, dark glasses had the harried, overworked, stressed look of the passionate undergrad (N O T E N O U G H T I M E T O D O W H A T S E E M S L I K E R E A L L Y M A T T E R S, C O N S T A N T L Y I N S P I R E D A N D T R I P P E D U P B Y E C O N O M I C S O R S O M E O T H E R S U R V E Y C L A S S; Little do you know then that this is the problem of life: keep the fire burning strong in the midst of the (seeming) mundanities of living. I did a biography for the University of Missouri Journalism School's centennial celebration of probably the most all-star dean in the school's history (outside of founder Walter Williams, of course (blasphemy); note: he was scandalous; he married a younger student. In the archives during my research, I came across a handwritten note by her to a friend describing his come-ons, and her confusion and disappointment because she respected him - they eventually married) Pulitzer Prize winning magazine historian, Frank Luther Mott. His great life's motto was "Time Enough": there's always time enough to do what you want to do! Great to hear and true!).
Junot Diaz's footnotes, for the most part, fill in the reader on the central aspect of the story, the nonfiction core of the fiction - the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
The joy of the book was the poetic power-punch adrenaline of the prose. It reminded me of Kerouac's in On The Road; it was like Junot Diaz entered some entranced zone and let the story go, rife with Spanish slang words and phrases and inspired, random inter-chapter divisions. Some of the story is from an omnipotent narrator, some from the characters themselves (at least one).
Some inspired passages:
But that's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton. (Page 72): The way blood seizes cotton.
Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:
a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her
so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked
who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. (Page 78).
Shuffling back through the book what stands out is not the prose itself, but the underlying force and power and inspired telling of the story. This is obviously Diaz's soul exposed in a high form of art. Pulitzer Prize 2007. Indeed!
Note: just read James Agee's A Death in the Family, his semi-autobiographical, supra-mundane, 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Published posthumously (not a finalized manuscript by Agee), the prize must have been a life-award, because the book is remarkably bland, though it has some concrete-crushing-skull tragic overtones. It's about a sensitive 4-ish-year-old boy, Rufus (the story encircles his perspective, though told using adult language and perception, but we never lose the boy's heart)), losing his gentle, loving (to him), wonderfully loving, father in the mountainland of rural early-20th-century Knoxville, Tennessee, and his/life's intimate impressions of the event. The greatest, amazing, scene occurs near the end of the book when Rufus (or the book) flashes back to the whole family, father included, traveling to visit his great-great-great-grandmother in the rural mountainland in a loaded-down-with-family car, his uncle standing on the running boards guiding (somewhat) the way. The old woman, on a porch chair, Rufus remembering her wrinkled, minute, square-cracked, channeled skin, and after a few Rufus-gestures of hugging-hello, kissing, gloriously, her smile. And pee.
Anyhow, as disappointing as A Death in the Family was, Agee deserved every award possible for it or anything else he did, for his amazing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). One long prose-poem characterizing the Depression Era of the deep South via the intimate portrait of a couple of families. A quote:
Huge thunderheads were barely lifted on the horizon, their convolutions a scarcely discernible brain-shape of silver in the strength of the light. They were no use; they were a trick a drought sun likes to play; and get away with over and over again. They ride up looking rich as doom, and darken; the look of the earth is already dark purple, olivegreen and wealthy under their shadow and the air goes cold and waits (Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 337).
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