reactionary blog to oscar wao

So, I’m not sure how much I like this book. Just as I get engrossed in the story, I have some obnoxiously long footnote to refer to.  The footnotes are like another story. Half the time I skip over them, and come back, or the other half I try to read them simultaneously and then I just lose my spot on the page (as I rented a large print edition from the library, which I’ve never had to read before and ironically, its blinding me from reading easily). Also, the Spanish which I cannot translate, and all the nerdy references from Oscar – it feels like to read this book; I have to do an insane amount of research. But I do like the basics of the story once all that research is pushed to the side.


Then there were all the Spanish lines. Is it Spanish? Some variation of it? I don’t know. I bugged my roommate this entire weekend, asking him to translate because he speaks Spanish/Portuguese = Spanport? And I remember very little Italian, so the two of us actually didn’t get anywhere with this. As a construction worker, he understood more of the foul language than the descriptions/statements. I was pleased to translate a total of 4 words: �Cono, pero tu si eres fea�. I understood this to be something along the lines as, �but you are still ugly�. Nice momma, for real.


And! All the nerd references. I was nice and lost into the story, and then the narration disrupts by: “Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Bani her own personal Lothlorien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye.” (in my book its pg 227, I have no idea where that is in the class edition) Anyway, these little references kill the story for me. I literally think, “hullo Oscar” whenever the historical story of his mother in Bani gets compared to Lord of The Rings.


Anyway. I also looked up the name Oscar, because I was wondering if there was a reason Foer and Diaz picked the same name. It means, ‘Spear of the Gods’ in Old English, or ‘Lover of Deer in Gaelic’. I guess there’s not really a connection.

There are a few different sub-stories, and different narrations. I’m not really a fan of Beli’s, because it makes me really uncomfortable, but I do like the descriptions of her first love: Jack Pujols, with his ‘Eyes of Atlantis’ or ‘deep dolphin eyes’.  Anyway, Beli kinda scares me, or offends me. I can’t decide which. I think as a younger girl, she offended me for her actions  and then when she’s older, and fake cries to get Lola back and then smiles like a tiger — that would scare me.


The sub-story I like the most is from Lola’s “friend” that becomes Oscar’s roommate. I feel like I get a more real description of Oscar’s life, or at least the sort of interaction a non family member/non nerd friend would experience when living with Oscar. I think the best part was the questions � the inquiries that the readers were privy to:

“These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?”

^ pretty heavy. Especially if you think of all the possible outcomes those two questions can have:


1) Oscar quit because he was never a friend.
2) Oscar quit because he pretended to be a friend.
3) Oscar defied him because he wasn�t his friend.
4) Oscar defied him because he pretended to be his friend.

And then all the lovely analysis for each possibility.
Lola is nonexistent in my evaluation. I like how she treats Oscar, but she made me mad with how she dismissed Max when she had to go back. And then he died, and she says:”what happened was that one day he miscalculated – heartbroken, I’m sure – and ended up being mashed…” the nonchalance pisses me off. “I’m sure”. Hmph. I hope he wasn�t thinking about her when he miscalculated and maybe that little mongoose creature lets her in on that sometime in the future.


Also, wondering if this �mongoose with black pelt and gold eyes� that appeared in Bani�s life when she was beaten, and then Oscar�s life when he jumped will have more of a summary at the end. I find it interesting though that it helped Bani get up, and motivate her with the two upcoming children, but with Oscar: “Dude had been waiting his whole life for something just like this to happen to him, had always wanted to live in a world of magic and mystery, but instead of taking note of the vision and changing his ways the fuck just shook his swollen head.”


And, was kinda thinking about the treatment of women in this novel. Besides Lola, every other feminine character lives a sad life. I found a quote in Abelard’s segment: “Young women have no opportunity to develop unmolested in this country.” The word ‘unmolested’ makes me cringe.  It holds true for Bani. And with all the vulgarity I translated, the theory holds true all around.


Sorry for the length. I didn�t know where to go with this. I still don�t know where this story is going anyway. And it keeps changing its narration and subject and languages and reality and nerdism.

7 comments

  1. With regards to the meaning of the name Oscar, I’m actually doing a presentation for another class on the Inca, and I stumbled across the name there.

    Huáscar, as we eventually learn Oscar’s name is spelled, is also the name of the thirteenth Sapa Inca (Sapa Inca = title for the Inca emperors). He died of smallpox in 1532, and his brother Atahualpa succeeded him, before being captured and executed by the Spanish a.k.a goodbye Inca empire. Anyways, that all seems a little irrelevant but what isn’t irrelevant is the fact that, apparently, Huáscar (which derives from the Quecha “Waskar”) actually means “rope” or “chain.” This meaning seems to fit quite well with the linear nature of the curse, propagating itself down generations.

  2. Laura – you raise a lot of intriguing ideas in your post. I think we as readers are probably supposed to “work” in order to get the story and all its arcane references and mixed languages. Diaz doesn’t want to make it easy for us. So the real question becomes: why?

    Pierce – that’s great etymological detective work. These different meanings of Oscar’s name have very evocative resonances. I think we’re definitely supposed to be aware of the power of a name (highlighted by the “changing” of his nickname to Wao).

    1. I feel like the answer to the question ‘why’ is because Diaz wants us to understand exactly where everything came from, so we get the spooky superstition of fuku and the expectations of a DR boy and how Oscar fails at that – I think he put too much of his own attitude in the footnotes, thats why it was difficult to read, I would’ve prefered all the history be collaborated into a “READ FIRST” at the beginning of the book, and in shorter, bullet form. Although Diaz’s attitude in the history helps widen the gap between normal DR boy and not so normal.

      Pierce, I like the definition of Huascar/Waskar. It does fit, and also, I like how nobody remembered that was his real name until he returns to D.R. Because before he returned, Oscar was always wondering, “Why me?” Why, Oscar, why deer lover, why not so special Oscar. Having Huascar/Waskar say, “Why me?” gets a simpler answer, “why, because you’re chained”.

  3. To tell you all the truth, I hated this book. First of all because I am a crazy IDEALIST and I hate books with unhappy endings. Secondly, I love Spanglish because I practice it almost everyday of my life, but the Spanglish presented here is mostly slang from the Dominican Republic and New York Street slang. Then, to make matters worst, the reference to the “Inca and Atahualpa refers to specifically to South America in Peru not a Caribbean country like the The Dominican Republic. I love the idea that Oscar would die for LOVE, but the animalistic description that Diaz provide at then end of this book regarding LOVE is almost like reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 versus Sonnet 116. In other words LOVE versus LUST 

  4. This is partially a specific response, and partially a response to class discussion and the book in general.I hope the correlation I drew with the name Huáscar didn’t seem to imply an interchangeability between all Hispanic cultures. That certainly wasn’t my intention; I am aware of the geographic and cultural distance between the Andes and the Caribbean. The connection I was drawing was primarily an etymological one, although I can also see it as a way Diaz is highlighting the long-term poisonous effects of colonialism by giving Oscar a name shared with one of the earliest victims of Spanish colonialism.  In effect, the name shows symbolically and etymlogically the cyclical nature of the violence and unrest which post-colonial countries frequently become trapped in, and the way in which old traumas seemed to be destined to repeat themselves.  (Slight tangent: one term which comes to mind here is “internal colonialism,” which, in part, refers to the economic and political exploitation of minorities by powers within a country in a way that mimics old-style colonialism.  This is, somewhat ironically, a common problem in post-colonial countries like Mexico, where the indigenous peoples are exploited for agricultural labor in a way that seems to me almost feudalist.)      I also consider myself a little of an idealist, although that’s mixed up pretty heavily with a personal bent towards cynicism.  (I don’t consider the two outlooks mutually exclusive.)  And I can see how the ending would be frustrating.  But I think we are supposed to value “The Last Letter” (if it is taken at face value) for Oscar having finally achieved intimacy with another human being, prostitute or not, rather than looking only at the literal physical act. Whether we would consider this real intimacy or not is, I think, secondary to Oscar’s own perception. So, in my opinion, comparing the ending to Sonnet 129 seems a little harsh.  That being said, I can’t say I viscerally enjoyed the whole of the book.  What I can say is that it one of the most interesting post-colonial narratives I’ve read, and that it addressed the issues of post-colonialism in the way that I think is most effective, through a complicated (and yes, postmodern) multi-generational, multi-cultural, heteroglossiac representation which spans both time and geography.  And yes, the ending is not happy, but I think that for there to be a happy ending one of the books major themes, fatalism, would have to have been chucked out the window.  I suspect that ultimately a happy ending might have been more frustrating then the one we have. (And of course, ironically, while struggling to get fifty words on paper for my term papers I ramble four hundred and fifty on here.)

  5. Also, there was formatting in that response.  Thank you website for rendering it into an unappealing blob of crap.

  6. Pierce, I’m not sure why your formatting keeps disappearing. Let’s chalk it up to a fuku in the machine. In any case, thanks for the close reading of the names balanced against the unsettling dislocations and displacements we see in the novel. Diaz himself seems to encourage these kind of postcolonial erasures of distance and geography (perhaps in order to critique them). A key piece of evidence is the name of the Belicia’s adopted mother, La Inca.

Comments are closed.