The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao


Overweight and viewed as a “nerd,” Oscar lives a life of loneliness, always on the lookout for an opportunity for love. Yet the fukú curse follows him, betraying his love and his dreams.

 I'm rereading this novel.  It's Oscar's story and not mine.  I live in Miami, not New Jersey, and from everything I've ever heard about about the Dominican Republic, it is not on my bucket list.  

 I'm rereading the novel or more particularly the footnotes in the novel and trying to put together the history the footnotes tell.  In someways the whole Island of Hispanola is a pretty sad place in a lot of ways.

#1 Part 1. Trujillo, one of the 20th Century's most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 with implacable ruthless brutality.

 The next is one sentence.  A portly,sadistic, pig eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon Era haberdashery, Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DR's political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two Months and Eight Days

Early voting and mail in voting will take place before November 5, 2024. And on a related front I hope people will notice that it does not take four years of partisan snark and sniping for the voting public to make a decision about who the next president will be.  I voted  in the Florida primary for the November Election on August 20, 2024. Locally, the mood of the electorate in Miami has changed.  A few weeks ago I just couldn't imagine a person born in 1942 running for reelection as president or a person with as much baggage as an ex-president running for office, who could legitimately be understood to be running for office as a strategy for not going to prison.  Assuming he would win, he could, stop any prosecutions and if he lost he could further question what democracy is.  And it is no surprise that the former president has started complaining about an election that hasn't happened and claiming that the opposition will have stolen the election if he does n...
Read more

Internet Dust Ups

 A high school classmate shared on FB, something from a 64 year old commercial pilot who had passed a exam to fly on of the latest jets in their fleet of aircraft.  I was also aware of an FAA rule about retirement at age 65 for commercial pilots.    In the U.S.,  there are no  FAA  age limits for pilots except for commercial airline pilots employed by airlines certificated under 14 CFR Part 121 . These airlines cannot employ pilots after they reach the age of 65. However, these pilots may stay on with a Part 121 carrier in some other role, such as flight engineers. I then went on a digression about the retirement of folks in professions like law or accounting.  From my own experience 30 years at a job or working for an employer is a very good time to start serious planning for the next chapter in your life.   And for my efforts at explaining my work history, working with folks who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.  I wa...
Read more

What Is Official These Days?

 I would guess most people would understand what Official means.  Just because a person holds a public office doesn't mean everything he might do is official and everything he might not do is official as well. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness". from J. Kenneth Galbraith interview. And oh, by the way, moral justification at times isn't much more than a fig leaf, you can bet someone got screwed or got the proverbial get out of jail free card.
Read more