Junot Diaz, as those of you who caught our coverage of last year’s Auckland Writers and Readers Festival will know, scored a literary hole in one with his debut novel The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Expansive, multi-generational and totally enthralling, the book recently won the Morning News Tournament of Books. The book follows the trials and tribulations of a Dominican family, especially the hapless son, the eponymous “hero” of the title.
Though this was Diaz’s first novel, it’s not his first book and hungry for more of his work I asked nicely of them-that-buy-the-stuff and so now we have copies of Diaz’s 1997 short story collection, Drown in the library collection. So is it any good? Does it have the “Wao-factor”?
Does a Dominican male have swagger?
If you liked Oscar Wao then you’ll enjoy Drown too. It has a lot of the same elements; depictions of poverty and family life in the Dominican Republic, not-as-innocent-as-you-would-hope childhoods, gritty urban characters with dependencies and turbulent love lives and so on. It also features a handy glossary at the back for most of the Spanish terms that liberally pepper the stories.
The only problem is that at 166 pages it’s a mere slip of a thing compared to the robust Oscar Wao and the stories are short enough to be digested rather quickly. This makes it more of a snack than a banquet which means I’ll be hungry again in no time at all.
