oscar wao

i should probably write more about the things i read because why else read them i suppose. this is how the good things will stick. i already wrote a short bit about this book, probably talking about i loved the history in the book and how i love its elevation of spanish, and of poor, urban spanish into the realm of the untranslatable, to the thing to which mr. 1st world language has to conform. that's gotta be at the core of respecting another language and so another people, is to recognize a language's dominion over a certain thought because you cant even translate it.

something that's iffy but perhaps just unavoidable is the book's trafficking in all the badonkadonk, car-stopping asses and general mania about female bodies. i mean, this stuff, apparently, is extremely real, but diaz indulges it pretty uncritically. or maybe not. i guess i just felt the book encourages you to salivate along with the greasy hordes. it definitely spends a little bit of time with how women were really uncomfortable with their bodies, about the horror of the attention, but i think it ends up coming down pretty emphatically on the side of voluptuousness as an empowering thing for them. which is thoroughly iffy.

yunior (junior?) is an interesting character. why choose him to narrate? to choose the one who ultimately loses out? from that perspective, he seems like a guy to give the story a happy gloss, the gloss of longing, a lying gloss. i guess he works because he's the one who's "friends" with oscar. still, a strange choice. maybe just empowering the meathead in a book that empowers a slew of maligned demographics.

i mean, the glory of this book was being on the subway and reading this book and not knowing many of the words in it and so approaching, as i never ever had before, hispanic people who look live and work nothing like me. but they knew more than i did! they could explain, and giggle knowingly, at my book! that's fucking ill empowerment for people too easily known just stammering english. to forget, as one so easily can, that this person does not speak "broken" but has a whole fluent mind. that they're just accommodating your foreign-ass language because they have to. that these people might very well be dazzling articulate. oscar wao's a beautiful reminder.

i think the most poignant image in the story is of oscar's mom when she's with the gangster, just before that ends, when they're having sex and she grabs him to stop him from pulling out but he wrenches free and comes on the "ruined plain of her back" or something like that (because her back's burned from when she was orphaned). so so horrrrrrible.