Interview with Junot Diaz

Understanding the immigration experience may be impossible if you haven't been through it. But it helps to hear Junot Díaz talk about classified ads.

Díaz is the author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a novel published early this month to immediate acclaim. He's sitting in the lobby of the venerable Algonquin Hotel trying to describe how it felt to be a 6-year-old kid from the Dominican Republic plunked down in New Jersey in 1974, at "the end of one world, the beginning of another."

He didn't speak much English for years -- out of stubborn-mindedness, perhaps, or a child's sensitivity to ridicule -- but he started reading it pretty much right away. By the time he was 9, he was compulsively consuming newspaper classified pages. They were, he says, "a window into a world I had no access to."

One day that window opened just a crack.

Someone had placed an ad offering free books. Díaz called and reached an elderly woman who lived maybe four miles from his house. "I have 500 books and I don't want to throw them away," she told him. "If you can get over here and get them, you can have them."

No adult in his life would have cared that he wanted those books, so being driven to pick them up was out. But he realized that if he took a shopping cart and made three or four trips, he could get them all.

"That was the first time I found 'The Borrowers,' " he says, referring to Mary Norton's children's classic about unseen, Lilliputian-scale people who live by "borrowing" from normal-size humans. Other favorites from this unlikely trove were titles by explorer and naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, "the guy who went to Mongolia and found the dinosaur eggs" -- Díaz still dreams of traveling to Mongolia himself -- and a variety of "books for young people, like 'On Hygiene.' Great stuff!"

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Latin American Literature

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Johnny Diaz reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Diaz is relieved.

It has taken him 11 years to produce the follow-up novel to "Drown," his collection of short stories about growing up Dominican-American that was published to critical success in 1996. His new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," follows the loves and losses (mostly losses) of a Dominican-American family back on the island and in New Jersey.

Throughout the book, Diaz points out that the family may be living under a curse, "a high-level fuku" that has doomed them to eternal unhappiness. But that curse may describe Diaz's temporary loss for words, the writer's block that paralyzed him sporadically over the years.

He managed to unlock his writer's block, and he seems at ease during an interview, although his leg pumps up and down like a car piston as he talks about his new novel and life after "Drown."

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Dominican Literature

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Michiko Kakutani reviews Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it’s confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.

Mr. Díaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 (“Drown”), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.

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Dominican Literature