The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz was raised in New Jersey but born in the Dominican Republic. In 2008 Junot Diaz won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for the best work of fiction written in English with “The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao”. Junot was the second Hispanic novelist in receiving this honor, after Oscar Hijuelos had achieved it in 1990 with the “Mambo Kings Play Songs of love”.

Even though Diaz chose English as his medium of expression, he never aspired to create a failed Spanglish, but an English exceptionally creative, capable of assimilating the Spanish spoken in New York and using it to improve their adoptive language. None of its relators fascinates with this new language, or becomes the main topic of the novel, but rather it is used as a fun vehicle that allows him to expose his stories with admirable freedom.

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao began with a failure, a night out in Mexico City with a few drinks and a book of Oscar Wilde. The title did not matter, what mattered the most was the Dominican Republic accent when it comes to pronounce in English Oscar Wilde. Junot Diaz, who was in a party with a few friends, said very laud; “Oscar Wao”, as clear as that, Oscar Wao. As a result; everyone started laughing but at the same time people did not pay much attention to what Junot had just said and continued chatting and drinking until the next morning. In that very same morning in Junot Diaz’s head was still resonating Oscar Wao, Oscar Wao, Oscar Wao, like an incoherent song, but essential. Despite the fact; Junot Diaz was still unaware that the importance of being Oscar Wao was such that it would lead him to the Pulitzer Prize seven years later.

Junot Diaz had a few years embarked on a novel and gripped by vertigo when he said "Os...

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...ge of a Hispanic author who writes in English and occasionally combining words and phrases in Spanish, is a lot more than that, his style is a new language that expresses a new life form. If The United States is the ground zero in the struggle between the English and the Spanish, Junot Diaz opens a window to a foreign world of confrontation where Anglos and Hispanics have to create something alive and different. The writer, a clear intellectual and linguistic poet, has become a reality full of unknown possibilities and that is probably why he has been granted with the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle.

No doubt the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao marks a turning point in the Caribbean literature, and can be very truth that also marks a beginning for this language, infested from a different points of view with more and more followers, called Spanglish.