Interview with Junot Diaz

Carlos Fresneda interviews Junot Díaz.

"¡Diablo, este idioma es difícil!"... Seis años tenía Junot Díaz (Santo Domingo, 1968) cuando dio con sus huesos en Nueva Jersey, sin hablar "ni papa de inglés" y bregando con los molinos de viento de una cultura ajena: "Este país se nutre del silencio de los inmigrantes para mantener su imagen idílica...".

Sufrimiento, incomprensión, trabajo duro. Así se fue forjando su idea particular del sueño americano: leer y escribir a destajo en 'el idioma del diablo', que acabó superponiéndose con el tiempo a la lengua madre. Aunque por las noches, cuando todos callan, inglés y español siguen librando aún una tenaz batalla en su cabeza: "Todos mis sueños son bilingües. ¡Qué mierda, bro!".

Once años hace de la primera campanada de Junot Díaz, aquel 'Negocios' que le consagró como joven maestro del relato corto. Ahora rompe sonoramente el silencio con su primera novela, 'La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao', con la que se ha encaramado como "una de las voces más distinguidas e irresistibles de la ficción contemporánea norteamericana" ('The New York Times').

Junot Díaz recorre estos días en volandas su país adoptivo, agasajado por la crítica y aupado a la lista de los 'bestsellers' por un público cada vez más nutrido y variado. En plena gira tuvo el detalle de cumplir con su viejo amigo y traductor, Eduardo Lago, y llegar hasta el Instituto Cervantes con su peculiar visión de la lengua y del oficio: "No eres de verdad un novelista hasta que llegas al agujero más profundo de tu jodida vida, y desde ahí escribes".

Díaz estuvo a punto de morir ahogado bajo el éxito prematuro de 'Drown' (que así se tituló Negocios en su versión orginal). "Tuve que soportar mucha presión al inicio, y empecé a escribir al mismo tiempo dos novelas en las que avancé con la esperanza de que alguna de las dos entrara en ignición", confiesa. "Todos los caminos me llevaron a una zona muerta, pero perseveré en el intento: yo soy mi peor verdugo".

Hubo que esperar a una noche de excesos para que sus ojos se clavaran en las solapas de un libro de Oscar Wilde, y así nació en su mente el "maldito gordito ese", o sea Oscar Wao, y después vinieron la hermana Lola y la madre, Beli, mientras a pie de página fue ganando fuerza la presencia inquietante y monstruosa del infame dictador, Rafael Trujillo.

De La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao han escrito que es "una saga de inmigrantes para los que no leen sagas de inmigrantes". Con ayuda inestimable de Yunior, ese alter ego en el que vuelve a apoyarse "para que haga el trabajo sucio", Díaz tiende un puente imaginario entre dos mundos irreconciliables, con la brisa de Samaná y la lengua su infancia colándose como un viento peleón bajo de la puerta: "You are the most buenmoso man I know".
Idioma mixto

"Lo que yo escribo no es esa cosa desaliñada que llaman spanglish sino una especie de criollo, con palabras y expresiones intercaladas de español", admite Díaz.

Hay quienes acometen su libro con diccionario en mano, pero la mayoría se deja arrastrar por el río caudaloso su prosa vivaz, moteada con expresiones al alcance del americano medio: "Then you will be mi negra bella". Ahora trabaja mano a mano con una traductora cubana para la versión en español.

Junot Díaz cree que se le da demasiada importancia al "poder mítico" de lengua, ora el inglés o en español. "La gente está obsesionada con el sueño del idioma puro como una cosa uniformadora", admite. "Y ésa es una idea que fomentan mucho los políticos... Estados Unidos es el opuesto a España en el siglo XIV: los que tienen el poder hablan un idioma; los demás hablan, tú sabes, una lengua distinta. Aquí los moros son los gringos, encerrados en sus castillos, cuando la gente empieza a hablar otra cosa".

"Los gringos quieren negar el español, lo perciben como una amenaza", asegura Díaz, "pero lo cierto es que este país camina hacia el bilingüismo. Con el español pasa lo que nunca ha ocurrido aquí con otro idioma, que se va reforzando con la llegada de nuevos inmigrantes. Cada cinco o seis años viene aquí un nuevo draw, una extracción de dominicanos, y los mexicanos que no dejan de llegar, y los colombianos, los ecuatorianos, los argentinos... Yo lo veo como una piscina que a la luz del día se seca un poquito, pero que por la noche se vuelve a llenar de agua".

Admirador de Toni Morrison, comparado con David Foster Wallace, Díaz se siente más próximo a la narrativa norteamericana que a las letras hispanas. La fiesta del chivo de Vargas Llosa le parece "una biografía novelada y bidimensional". Su debilidad es Juan Rulfo, y su última obsesión, Martín Solares: "Los minutos negros es lo mejor que he leído en español en bastante tiempo".

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Dominican Literature

If you love love, this book is the best love story ever.

Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.





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Latin American Literature

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño's The Insufferable Gaucho in the New Yorker.

In the opinion of those who knew him well, Héctor Pereda had two outstanding virtues: he was a caring and affectionate father and an irreproachable lawyer with a record of honesty, in a time and place that were hardly conducive to such rectitude. As evidence of the first virtue, his son and daughter, Bebe and Cuca, whose childhood and adolescent years had been happy, later accused him of having sheltered them from the hard realities of life, focussing particularly on his handling of practical matters. Of his work as a lawyer, there is little to be said. He prospered and made more friends than enemies, which was no mean feat, and when he had the choice between becoming a judge or a candidate for a political party he chose the bench without hesitation, although it obviously meant passing up the opportunities for greater financial gain that would have been open to him in politics.

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Chilean Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

James Urquhart reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

With murderous intent, Croatian veteran Ivo Markovic tracks down former war photographer Andres Faulques to a derelict coastal tower. Inside, Faulques is trying to capture in a mural the true meaning of humanity that had always eluded his camera. Markovic’s life had been shattered because of appearing in a famous picture by Faulques of terrified, retreating Croatians – but he had also witnessed Faulques photographing the mangled corpse of his colleague and lover, Olvido Ferrara.

Perez-Reverte, himself a former war correspondent, makes a heroic stab at anatomising artistic responsibility in the grudging rapport between Faulques and Markovic. But their aesthetic ruminations smother the more exciting story of Faulques’s truncated affair.

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Spanish Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Jonathan Yardley reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl will do nothing to improve his lot in Stockholm, but somehow it seems unlikely that this much worries Vargas Llosa. Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -- the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it. It also obviously was written out of a deep nostalgia for the author's lost youth and for the Lima in which he then lived. He evokes it beautifully:

"In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses -- two at the most -- and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas, laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine. In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani, jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers in the gardens and the little D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks . . . that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. You could still hear birds singing in that Miraflores, where families cut a pine branch when their girls reached marriageable age because if they didn't, the poor things would become old maids like my aunt Alberta."

Into this paradise, during the "fabulous summer" of 1950, comes a 14- or 15-year-old girl who calls herself Lily and claims to be Chilean. Soon enough she is found out as an impostor and expelled from 15-year-old Ricardo's privileged set, but the damage has been done: He is madly in love with her, and her expulsion is "the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality." She has rejected his declarations of love, but she scarcely vanishes from his life. By the early 1960s he is in Paris, studying (successfully) to become a translator at UNESCO, when she appears as Comrade Arlette, ostensibly to bring Castroite revolution to Peru. She goes off to Cuba, but soon resurfaces as Madame Robert Arnoux, wife of a French diplomat. Ricardo craves her as ardently as ever, even as she blithely dismisses him: "What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito." She does permit him to make love to her but vanishes once more, reappearing as Mrs. Richardson, wife of a wealthy Englishman hooked on "the aristocratic passion par excellence: horses."

By now Ricardo has figured out that she has come a long way: "I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now." He understands that she is now "a grown woman, convinced that life was a jungle where only the worst triumphed, and ready to do anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher." And yet:

"Everything I told her was true: I was still crazy about her. It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism and disappearances. A cheap, sentimental thing, no doubt, but also true that I wouldn't do anything . . . but curse how slowly the hours went by until I could see her again."

Over and over again she tests him, never more so than in a bedroom in Tokyo, "an experience that had left a wound in my memory." He actually manages to persuade himself for a time that he does not love her, but the obsession is too powerful: "I was a hopeless imbecile to still be in love with a madwoman, an adventurer, an unscrupulous female with whom no man, I least of all, could maintain a stable relationship without eventually being stepped on." In time he tells his story to a friend, a woman, who calls it "a marvelous love story," and who later adds, "What luck that girl has, inspiring love like this." There is a moment when Ricardo wonders, "Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?" but in his heart he knows that's just what it is, and Vargas Llosa tells it as such.

Being Vargas Llosa, he takes care of plenty of other business as well. The novel touches on the full sweep of Peruvian history from the 1950s to the Shining Path terrorism, "which would last throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in Peruvian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared." He says a lament for the generation of Peruvians before his own "who, when they reached old age, saw their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of materialize."

He also, having made Ricardo a translator and interpreter, affords himself the opportunity to have a bit of fun. One interpreter remarks: "Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between," and when Ricardo himself turns to translation, he discovers that, "As I always suspected, literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than for commercial ones." Probably no one is more amused by this than the redoubtable Edith Grossman, who has translated The Bad Girl with her accustomed skill and grace, making this lovely novel wholly accessible to American readers.

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Peruvian Literature

Bogota Film Festival

The Bogotá film festival starts today.









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Latin American Literature

La señal, directed by Ricardo Darín

Argentine actor Ricardo Darín makes his debut as director with "La señal".








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Argentine Cinema

Junot Díaz - Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Nowadays, there may be Hmong in Madison and Somalis in St. Paul, but some of us still have trouble keeping up with all the intense cultural mixing and melting going on amid our purple-mountained majesty. For example, mention the Dominicans among us to the average Tom, Dick or Andy Rooney, and he's liable to speak of a mythical Shortstop Island from which wing-footed infielders plot their takeover of America's pastime. As for the Dominican Republic's history, imports, exports, that sort of thing? Well, its national baseball team is one of the best in the world, right? Or is that Venezuela?

Junot Diaz has the cure for such woeful myopia. The Dominican Republic he portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Diaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander -- a borderless anxiety zone that James Baldwin would describe as "the anguished diaspora."

Thus, that nation's bloody history, often detailed in Diaz's irreverent footnotes, intrudes periodically in Oscar Wao, as if to remind Dominicans that tragedy is never far from one's doorstep. Or maybe it emerges simply to instruct the rest of us, because Diaz's characters are already painfully certain that they are destined for misfortune.

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The hero of Junot Díaz’s first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a “ghetto nerd” from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls “the more speculative genres.” He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games — the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit.

But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Díaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called “Drown,” shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to “Dune,” “The Matrix” and (especially) “The Lord of the Rings” rub up against references to Melville and García Márquez. Oscar’s nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween.

“What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” Oscar wonders. And the question of how to take account of his ancestral homeland — its folklore, its politics, the diaspora that brought so many of its inhabitants to North Jersey and Upper Manhattan — is one that explicitly preoccupies Oscar’s creator. The way Díaz tells it, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Spanish-speaking half of the island where Columbus made landfall, is the kind of small country that suffers from a surfeit of history. From the start, it has been a breeding ground for outsize destinies and monstrous passions.

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Dominican Literature

Brazilian Cinema in the Hamburg Film Festival

The 15th edition of the Hamburg Film Festival will include four new Brazilian films.
"Baixio das Bestas" - Directed by Cláudio Assis.

"O Cheiro do Ralo" - Directed by Heiter Dhalia

"A Via Láctea" - Directed by Lina Chamie

and "Fabricando Tom Zé", a documentary directed by Décio Matos Jr.






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Brazilian Cinema

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

Eça de Queirós - The Maias

Benjamin Lytal reviews Eça de Queirós' The Maias.

It is not simple to read a virtually unknown book that, suddenly, is supposed to be one of the greatest 19th-century novels. Margaret Jull Costa, translator of José Saramago and Javier Marías, has recently turned to José Maria Eça de Queirós, reputedly the great national author of Portugal. And the resulting translation, of Eça's masterpiece "The Maias" (New Directions, 628 pages, $17.95) wants entry into our closed canons.

For a few hundred pages, I was disappointed. Hoping for a family epic, I found a fin-de-siècle morality tale of thin ambitions treading on thick, luxuriant carpets. Lisbon is not Paris or London; it did not corrupt Eça's young men with suitable dazzling force. Like Flaubert, Eça skewers the pretentiousness of 19th-century social climbers, but Portuguese pretentiousness looked like small fry in comparison: The follies of a few well-meaning dandies did not immediately justify the roomy designs of Eça's monumental novel.

But as I read on, into the long straightaway that, comprising only two years of the novel's 70-year narrative, takes up the majority of its pages, I began to appreciate Eça's emotional point. WhereacharactersuchasHomais, Flaubert's pedantic pharmacist, stays face up, a fool, in reader's minds, Eça's aristocratic fools have a flip side: Their civic and national damnation. Ridiculous as they may be, they always have the excuse of whistling in the darkness. In Eça's hands, a Flaubertian fool becomes a tragic symbol.

"The Maias" begins with the renovation of a house. A grandfather and his grandson are all that remain of the great Maia family. Afonso, the grandfather, was once a Voltaire-reading exile, living in England, but by 1875 he has become an eagle of the Ancien Régime: Venerated by his own peers, he stands throughout the novel for passive power. When his own, melancholic son commits suicide, Afonso consoles himself with his infant grandson, whose boyish good cheer promises the regeneration of the family line, and by analogy, Portugal. But instead of growing up to be a national leader, the young Carlos graduates from the University of Coimbra a diletantish doctor, and, when he and Afonso agree to move in together in Lisbon, it is house decoration that most excites him.

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Portuguese Literature