Can we ever escape generational trauma? Junot Diaz talks about mothers who save, politicians who dictate and language that colonization creates in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Wao and a fukú you’ve never seen or maybe you have, you wouldn’t know until it gets to you. But let me first tell you what a fukú is: a familiar curse, a generational mutation of the DNA that affects the brain, makes you your family’s child.

That is the kind of fukú that runs through the wondrous though brief life of Oscar Wao.

A first one for me or maybe it is the first time I have paid such acute attention to language and it’s modulation, the way it changes with our excellent narrator that one can see the sigh in every “Oscar”, he exhales when our homeboy; that’s what the narrator calls him, not me, is about to go all down into the dumps, much like the class of “Diaspora” that he keeps referring to.

Language as a beautiful gift, it’s non-transferability to another one and the absolute inability of translation to carry along the myths, ideas and cultures, is something irrepressible in Diaz work. To be fair, I may have enjoyed the book way more than a non-Spanish speaking , but who knows. Like language, the experience of reading is also not quantifiable.

But Oscar’s brief life is, which makes for an amazingly vast canvas of humour and breathtaking rhythm in the novel, weaving in story within a story till we got to the origin, that I simply couldn’t stop.

After a Chilean author, this is my second novel from the Latin America ( of course keeping Marquez aside) that blew me away with a humour that is so dark, you bite your nails with nervousness and the ease with which the narrative flows through that humour. A political satire under the reign of a dictator, a familial tale of mostly mothers ( I wonder why it’s always the mother who saves in the stories and not life), telenovela love stories and the sadistic individualism of the modern man, all find their place in this book.

But who wins?