Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

The grand wondrous stories of Junot Díaz and Isabel Allende
April 8, 2008

Put the name of Dominican immigrant Junot Díaz alongside those of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Alice Walker, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy--winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The 39-year-old's first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has astonished readers with its freewheeling multicultural flavor. The review in the NY Times, which did use the word Spanglish, called it "a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves."  That review agrees with lots of other readers that Díaz is "one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices."

You can see him reading from the novel and talking about fiction at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA last year around the time of its publication.

As a child, Díaz learned to read English in a few months but it took a long time before he ever spoke it. Responding to a question about the interplay of English and Spanish in his mind and in his work, he says, "For me it's like I feel that both languages are, like, running simultaneously and they'll cross at weird moments. And when I'm writing I tend to have both of them running through my head."

Dive into the radio archives of Ira Glass's This American Life from ten years back to hear Díaz reading "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" (She will say, "I like Spanish guys," and even though you've never been to Spain, say, "I like you."...) from his other book Drown.  You can also catch, from the same collection, an episode in which the author reads "Edison, New Jersey."

Pure coincidence, but with Juan Luis Guerra copping five Latin Grammys last fall it's been quite a year for dominicanos. It'll be interesting to see how Junot Díaz adjusts to winning the Pulitzer. "I always felt so separated from all those dudes who...were gonna win the awards," he said at the Googleplex, "because I just felt like historically writers of color in the United States have been even more marginalized than comic book writers." He's only the second Latino to win the prestigious prize. Oscar Hijuelos in 1989 got a Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

There was other excitement yesterday besides the Pulitzer Prize announcements.  Isabel Allende did a half-hour interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in the morning. She spoke of her new book, of Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, of family and tribes and the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder.  Allende even revealed Sophia Loren's surprisingly simple beauty secret.  It's all entertaining.  Near the end she was asked about her interest in immigrants:

I work very closely—my foundation works very closely with immigrants in the place where we live [Marin County, CA], most of them Latino immigrants, Hispanics. And there were raids, families that were torn apart. They would break into their houses in the middle of the night, right 4:00 in the morning before people had time to get to work, and they would take the parents and leave the children behind. So the community tried to help. And it’s very frightening.

I lived in Venezuela thirteen years as a political refugee, and some of—sometime during that period, I was illegal. I didn’t have documents. I could be pulled out of a bus and deported. If I would have been deported to Chile, that would have meant death. So I know the feeling of terror, of vulnerability that the immigrants feel. I am very privileged. I am married to an American, I’m a citizen, I have documents, I support myself, I don’t have to be standing in the street waiting for a truck to pick me up to go pick oranges. So I know how privileged I am. But because my foundation works so closely with immigrants, I also know how hard it is for them.

Posted by Bruce Jensen on April 8, 2008 | Comments (0)