Junot Diaz: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; Ernest J. Gaines: "A Lesson Before Dying"

Winner of 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Junot Diaz wrote a very contemporary story about love, which corroborates the pop-song phrase "love hurts". Oscar is an overweight lovesick ghetto nerd, who devours fantasy fiction in the hope of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. Because of an ancient curse, fuku, he will finally die in the name of love, beaten to death by a gang of bandits, such as those who are in the service of Dominican tyrannical President Trujillo. In an interview, the author himself defined the subject of his novel as follows: It’s the quest story of this young Dominican guy Oscar, his quest for love, for a safe place in the world, which is what love is. It’s not only his quest, but it turns out to have been his entire family’s quest. If nothing else speaks to the human condition, it is that quest. You could expand it, of course, another degree and just say that that’s really what this whole thing that we call humanity is about: each of us trying to find a place where we’re safe and where we can know love. The rest of it is, in the end, kind of garbage.

Universal though the story's theme is, Diaz is a very demanding writer, exposing his readers to the multiculturality of his characters by peppering his narrative with many (unitalicized) Spanish words and expressions. In this way he seems to repeat the gesture of many bicultural writers - for example Gloria Anzaldua - who emphasize their rich and complex border identity by mixing two languages. This constant crossing of linguistic borders reflects the mixed identity of Dominicans, who are of African, Taino and Spanish descent. Despite such heterogeneity, all of them are subject to the Curse and Doom of the New World - fuku, brought about by an Admiral, who was both its midwife and one of its great European victims. In this way Oscar Wao's cursed life reflects Dominicans' history shaped by bad luck, and a sense of doom is perceptible from the very beginning of the story.

However, despite the fact that the story is so sad and tragic, it is also very entertaining: the narrative is funny, also in the footnotes supplied For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history. A passage about Trujillo will sufficiently illustrate Diaz's fierce style: Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.

All in all, with its absorbing narrative - rich and playful thanks to its shifts in language and point of view - the book is a wonderful read and deserves a place on every book shelf. Only one thing disturbed me as a woman reader: the narrator's uncritical attitude to machismo, so pervasive and taken for granted (natural, some might say) both in the culture that he depicted and in his narrative.

Ernest J. Gaines's Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for a reason. This piece of solid realistic prose poignantly portrays a small town's life in Louisiana in the 1940s, where African Americans still suffer from segregation and are expected to show respect and submissiveness to whites despite the fact that slavery is long over. The narrator, Grant Wiggins, is a university graduate working as a teacher of the Negro plantation school. Although he returned to the town to help his people improve their life, he has lost all hope for the possibility of such improvement. Another African American young man, Jefferson, has been accused of and charged with murder of a white shop owner. His complicity in the crime is dubious (he was only an innocent bystander), but the prejudiced white community leads to his conviction and execution on an electric chair.

The verdict and the ensuing sentence may as well have been the result of the incompetent defense, and a passage from the advocate's speech will illustrate white people's attitude to the members of the black community. In his final speech before the jury the advocate focused on undermining Jefferson's humanity, which supposedly made him incapable of committing the crime: Gentlemen of the jury, look at him--look at him--look that this. Do you see a man sitting here? I ask you, I implore, look carefully--do you see a man sitting here? Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes. Do you see a modicum of intelligence? Do you see anyone here who could plan a murder, a robbery, can plan--can plan--can plan anything? A cornered animal to strike quickly out of fear, a trait inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa--yes, yes, that he can do--but to plan? To plan, gentlemen of the jury? No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans. What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. ... I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

The lesson mentioned in the title begins when Grant is asked by Jefferson's grandmother to teach the boy that he is not a hog and to make sure that he goes to his death like a man. The task seems impossible since at first Jefferson, who is mentally slow and barely literate, refuses to speak to Wiggins. In the course of the two men's weekly meetings Grant manages to transform Jefferson into a hero, who is the strongest man in the courthouse when he walks to his electric chair. However, it seems that Jefferson is not the only student here: Wiggins, who hates himself for having to teach black children on white people's terms and for the necessity to compromise his pride in the constant struggle over whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be, also learns from Jefferson a lesson in heroism (a hero does for others) and humanity. Jefferson, who in the novel is compared to Jesus (analogies can be easily drawn though they are not too obtrusive), proves his manhood by accepting with dignity the plight that befalls him, and teaches Wiggins to accept his own, and do the utmost for the bettering of his people's condition. In this the novel seems to endorse the lesson preached by the famous black nation's leader from the turn of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington: cast down your buckets where you are. In the reality in which black people are constantly humiliated (for example, Wiggins can enter the sheriff's house only through the kitchen door, and has to wait over two hours for the sheriff to finally come to the kitchen and speak to him), preserving one's dignity is subversive enough to be perceived as fighting for civil rights. A great book: poignant, moving and eye-opening.

P.S. After reading this book one can't fail to realize that the recent inauguration of the American President marked a historic change, perhaps comparable only to the inauguration of George Washington. President of the United States Barack Obama - I still have to repeat it to myself over and over again to make it sink in.

Daniel Mendelsohn: "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million."

Daniel Mendelsohn is an American writer of a well-established position thanks to his 2001 autobiographical book The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, in which he explored his sexuality, frequently referring to the homosexual code of Greek mythology. He is also an awarded regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His 2006 Book-Critics-Circle-awarded novel The Lost is another autobiographical work. In it the author records his round-the-world journey which he undertook to find out the circumstances in which his great-uncle Schmiel, his wife and four daughters were killed by the Nazis.

The decision to search for the lost members of the family was triggered by the desire to fill in the blanks in his grandfather's stories, as the narrator confesses: My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls, who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but — even more terrible to me — from my grandfather’s stories. After his grandfather dies, Mendelsohn receives the mysterious wallet which he always saw in Grandfather's pocket, where he finds a set of letters from his great-uncle Schmiel to the family in America: his pleas and descriptions of the situation of Jews in the then Polish town of Bolechow at the onset of the Nazi terror. And so, reading Grandfather's gift as a sort of command to write the full history of the family, the narrator has produced what he calls a mythic narrative... about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death. To make sure the story sounds complete, he writes the novel in five sections named after the first five chapters of the Torah (starting with 'Bereishit' or 'Beginnings'), interweaving his narrative with the mythic narratives of the Creation, the Flood and Cain's murder of Abel, which serve here as master narratives universalizing and explaining the significance of the ordeal which Bolechow's Jews suffered from the Nazis. He interprets the story of Lot's wife as a warning that regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempt to make a new life. For those who can't help it and look back the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks ... knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

Having signaled that the story promises no optimistic ending, he constantly doubts whether it is possible to comprehend and render properly what happened to the victims of the Holocaust. Mendelsohn states: Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like... We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but... simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space... is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone. In order to overcome this impossibility (probably), he records an eye-witness account of A terrible episode [which] happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth... When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd... who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth... The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.

Mendelsohn's effort to give the lost six their faces ends in a partial success only, since in the novel, which is a record of his search after all, equal attention is paid to the perished members of the family and to the ramifications on the significance of the biblical stories. Moreover, every step that Mendelsohn undertakes to gain scattered pieces of information about the victims (the Internet searches, the library visits, the airplane flights to meet the survivors from Bolechow) and his own bewilderment and desire to find out the truth are treated with equal solemnity. For me - too many details and names to remember, too many threads picked up that do not contribute to the discovery of the truth, if there is any to be discovered. Hence I gave up and left one fifth of this thick volume unread. I don't know what to blame it on - is it the book's fault confirming the narrator's immobilization or is it my attitude, resembling that of Huck Finn, who initially got interested in the story of Moses but, having learned that Moses had been long dead, refused to concentrate on Miss Watson's lesson.