. Spinning .

As we move through this chapter on Beli (Oscar’s mother) as a young girl in Santo Domingo, there is a preponderance of background and history woven in, about a country in upheaval under a cruel regime. This, I believe, along with the footnotes of further explanation, is a large part of why this novel won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and a number of other awards.  The manner in which Diaz handles the atrocity and the interaction of the family and town within that environment is a bit reminiscent of Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude where there are battles on the homefront within a small arena that are just a part of the big picture.

There is also the narrative voice which is no-frills and yet sprinkled consistently with Spanish words that seem to act as a focus and a single-word often encompasses the tone of the story. The voice is one of whispered gossip, or memory, a tale that is told as a matter of fact; a matter of history.

Diaz breaks through the fourth wall with this writing, inviting the reader to agree with the narrator in his own assessment of the story. He tells it as if he’s in sympathy with the reader and himself cannot understand the actions of his characters.

While it likely assists to establish the voice, the frequent use of Spanish words within the text are starting to annoy me. When I read, I like to get into the movement of the story and while I can remember or guess at many of the meanings, I find myself unwilling to go look up the ones I do not recognize. To top it off, of the two sites I use for translation, one is screwed up with a Circuit City ad and refuses to translate, and the other doesn't know most of the words.

Now it's easy enough to skim over these and get the drift, but between these and the frequency of long footnotes establishing some background history of the country and the politics, I find the halting of the story too intrusive and have taken to ignore them.

Not a great policy for one dedicated to close reading.

Clearly nonlinear, we go back in time rather than forward with each chapter, marked with dates (years) covered. Junot Diaz jumps from time periods with focus on a different character in each chapter, from Oscar, to his sister Lola, and now to their mother, Beli.  What is interesting is that we find something new about the characters by the different perspectives, and in particular, where Lola's problems with her mother appeared to make her mother into a monster, where Diaz has left us in chapter two leads into an answer that surprises us. Here, at the end of Chapter 2, Lola is listening to her abuela talk of Lola's mother.

She was about to say something else and then she stopped. And that's when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood, straight up, the way my mother always wanted me to stand up. My abuela was sitting there, forlorn, trying to cobble together the right words and I could not move or breathe. I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was sure that I was going to explode. She was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin. (p. 75)

After some description of Beli's life with her aunt–we find that she was an orphan, and her aunt was 'mother' to her–we begin to see a different image of Beli. But here is what we believe has disturbed Lola at the telling:

What is likely frightening to Lola as she hears her abeula's story, is that her restlessness, her spirit, her senses, are so very much like the mother she shuns.

Junot Diaz has a nice sense of his characters. With Oscar, we feel his struggle between his growing natural interest in girls compounded by peer pressure and his need to hold onto the part of himself that he knows is true.

When we get to Lola, we see a passionate need for release from responsibility and a desperate grasp for self esteem, her mother having dumped on her the former while hacking away at the latter. There is a language that Diaz uses with Lola that is both bitter yet hopeful.

We get a feeling of movement, "singing out of my bones" and "the way blood seizes cotton."  With this single sentence, Diaz demonstrates the anxiety of Lola's life, the push and pull that carries her through her days.

While Oscar was the protagonist in the third-person pov of the first chapter, and we followed him from adolescence through his going away to college, Diaz switches us to first person pov of Oscar's sister Lola without warning in the second chapter. But then, that's what chapters are for; to designate a change of time, place, or character.

We've already been introduced to Lola and we see her as basically a caring older sister, encouraging and teasing the nerdy Oscar in his relationships. At school she seemed to be considered cool and Oscar holds her in high regard. But with the switch to Lola, we see a very different home life for her and Oscar. Even while discounting some of the usual mother-daughter misunderstandings, Lola claims to be mentally and emotionally abused by her mother, something that we didn't get the feel of from Oscar's story.

This reminds me a bit of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, where we get several perspectives of the same events from the different characters. It's a nice element in writing that allows the reader to make a better assessment of the environment by balancing out the different viewpoints. It also allows the reader to get a better feel of the characters by how they present their versions.

What we see of Lola's character is grit and determination, rebellion and strength; a much stronger player than the nurturing older sister we've come to know.

I've been busily writing on Hypercompendia so I haven't been as caught up as usual here on the literature postings but I have starting reading this novel by Junot Diaz and find it to be rather quick, easy reading despite some halts over the Spanish words with which the story is graced.

Not sure why I've been into adolescent boys lately–in my reading, that is–but this is another and yet it is so different than the rest perhaps because this boy is not a hero, but more the geeky pimply-faced and overweight typical teen. 

Oscar goes through his awkward stage determined to not adjust to his peers, but take the opposite approach and stand out as different. Though he attempts to work on his physical appearance, his interests are sacrosanct.

He gains some respect from his older sister as he stands up for himself:

So Oscar learns early how to escape peer pressure, that pox on adolescence that leaves its marks on lesser souls. It is clearly one of the hardest lessons one learns in life, and some people never escape it. There is a need to be included, and yet the alternative is just as satisfying, often more so. As long as one becomes "unique" for a good reason rather than for antisocial behavior, usually those who once shunned such an individual come to admire him.

Diaz's writing style reveals a very strong voice that sets the tone and mood of the story. There is a casual language that includes expletives and politically incorrect labels and yet it, as with Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, belongs because it is used in innocence of its politically incorrectness. Language changes within society's norms. What once meant nothing demeaning, may become offensive. But it is not only time that changes meaning, but culture and often racially charged words may still be acceptable within its own marked group.