What are you living for if you don’t have goals? Some
goals define our lives, such as having children or pursuing a
particular career. Other goals enrich our lives. In the latter
category, I have a personal goal of reading every Pulitzer Prize
winning novel ever written. The Pulitzer is a uniquely American
literary prize, established in 1917 and has been awarded to an
outstanding novel nearly every year since 1918. (The Prize was
not given in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1974, or
1977. In 1947 the novel category was renamed fiction. Since then,
several winners have been for collected short stories). When the
Hollywood Sentinel editor, Bruce Edwin, approached me about
chronicling this journey with a series of book reviews, I
responded enthusiastically. Reviews will start with the most
recent Pulitzer Prize winning novel I read and progress in random
order.
I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you that the
title character in Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao” (winner, 2008) dies at the end of the
book. “Oscar Wao” is a nickname given to a morbidly
obese 2nd generation Dominican Republican, whose mother fled the
Trujillo regime after a doomed affair with an official who was
married to Trujillo’s sister. The narrator of the story,
Yunior de Las Casas, is another Dominican college student at
Wesleyan, who has the hots for Oscar’s sister. Yunior is a
real macho guy who can’t remain faithful to one woman, even
though it is Oscar’s sister Lola who steals his heart. He
wants to get with Oscar’s sister so bad that at her
request, he befriends Oscar.
The way the narrator tells the
story, it jumps from Oscar’s birth in the United States to
his childhood, with flashbacks to Oscar’s mother’s
story. But the book starts out with a long soliloquy about fuku,
a uniquely Dominican curse. Fuku for Oscar and his mother is a
love curse. In his mother’s story, her life begins as a
curse. Her father, a professor, refuses to bring his innocent
daughters to a society event that Trujillo has insisted he bring
them to. He doesn’t want them to be raped by the dictator,
who literally took thousands of young girls from all over the
island and used them. This act of defiance costs him his sanity
and eventually his life. First he is imprisoned, then tortured
over the course of decades.
Meanwhile every family member meets a
suspicious death, all labeled “suicide” by the
corrupt government. The only one who survives is his last
daughter, a dark-skinned girl named Beli, who is taken in by
distant relatives, and transferred into increasingly demoralized
conditions. By the time La Inca, her good-hearted aunt, tracks
her down (after being told that she was dead by people who had
sold her) she is living in a chicken coop, caged and covered in
burns. La Inca rescues her and spends her savings to get her into
a good private school. Unfortunately, after a few years, puberty
hits, and her body is so sensual and attention-getting that she
ends up getting expelled. Beli disobeys La Inca and becomes a
waitress, and starts going to nightclubs, where she meets the
Gangster, and gets pregnant. When word reaches the
Gangster’s wife, Beli is kidnapped, taken to a sugar cane
field, beaten, and left for dead. She loses the baby and almost
loses her life. La Inca and her neighbors start a prayer
vigil in a Catholic church that saves Beli, who La Inca puts on a
plane to America.
In America Beli becomes a strict, angry, single mother who works
all the time after the father of her two children leave her. Her
son, Oscar, is overweight and nerdy. He likes Science Fiction and
falls in love with girls who either ignore him or mock him. As
far as what happens next, all I can say is that it made me cry.
Oscar knew he could die, but he was unable to consider anything
once he had tasted a sliver of real human affection. The author's message is "What are you living for if you don't
have love?"
-Moira Cue for The Hollywood Sentinel, © 2009.