Adriana V. Lopez

And the Pulitzer Goes To: Junot!
April 8, 2008

2008 Pulitzer Prize for Letters:
Fiction: Junot Diaz,
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The news left me sort of dumbfounded. Like I’ve been on this earth long enough to meet a great writer when he was on the rise. Really? Junot? That skinny Dominican guy with the glasses I met in the mid 90’s because he dated a friend of mine and we were all into politics and writing (and the politics of writing) and supporting writers of color? Yes, it was him. That guy who managed to put Spanglish into The New Yorker, publish words in Spanish without italicizing them. They were printed in crystal clear Roman lettering like that said magazine does with French. He fought good and hard for that. Then he was lucky to get Sean McDonald, an opened-minded, kind-souled Irish editor at Penguin to edit this groundbreaking novel. Though McDonald didn’t necessarily understand immediately what “Coje that fea y metéselo!” was at first, he left it in anyway. And a lot of other cryptic Dominican-Spanish chunks of paragraphs mixed in with Sci-Fi nerd language that goes with Oscar Wao’s canon of special vocabulary. From what I remember, Junot is somewhat of a perfectionist. So it makes sense that it took him a good eleven years to work on Oscar Wao. He worked, traveled, had fun with the ladies, dealt with literary fame, taught writing at MIT, tossed out another novel he started---some sci-fi story that I remember he so kindly let me publish an excerpt of for a Latino website I worked at---and became a man of the world. In his words for the The New York Times, “In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself,” he said. This Pulitzer couldn’t have gone to a more deserving fiction writer. Congrats, homeboy.

Achy Obejas’ translation of the novel into Spanish will be available from Vintage Español in the fall.  Random House Mondadori will publish it in Spain in June 2008.

 
Ah, and here’s a great blurb and a link to a BookForum piece on Junot's novel by Críticas contributor, Marcela Valdés, put very well:

 “Because Díaz moved to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic in 1975, when he was seven, because he grew up in Section 8 housing and worked all manner of blue-collar jobs, there has been a tendency among critics to portray him as a kind of outsider, a writer from the margins. But what makes him compelling are not just his flickering portraits of urban alienation but his rich sense of Dominican history, of community. “Way too often,” he told Other Voices, “writers of color are, basically, nothing more than performers of their ‘otherness.’ I’m trying to figure out ways to disrupt that.” The way out has been lit by Toni Morrison, whom he has cited again and again as the most lasting influence on his work. “Morrison,” he explained to Black Issues Book Review, “is not attempting to translate black American culture for a white audience. . . . That in itself is revolutionary.” It’s a revolution that Díaz himself clearly intends to continue, in his own Latino, African, Dominican, Middleearth, X-Man way.”

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on April 8, 2008 | Comments (1)