Oscar’s Scars

Oscar’s story is interwoven with the tragic story of the Dominican Republic itself and the great “fuku” or curse that lay upon the land — in the form of the dictatorship of Trujillo that lasted decades, broke thousands of lives and repressed almost every kind of freedom. We are told about the dictator: “At first glance, he was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.”

This interweaving is achieved in an edgy, ironic, streetwise prose that flows through the pages like electric current. The sentences are tough, muscular and uncompromising; sometimes they are just short, staccato bursts of gunfire. When Oscar’s sister Lola runs away from home and from the terrifying demands of her mother’s cancer, she simply gets on a bus out of town: “I didn’t write them a note. That’s how much I hated them. Her.” Running is a mistake, as she finds out later: “It was like the stupidest thing I ever did. I was miserable. And so bored. But of course I wouldn’t admit it. I had run away, so I was happy! Happy!”

Detailed footnotes are provided “for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history”; along with wry asides (“Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq”); authorial intrusions (“I know what you’re going to say. Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now”); and even the occasional resigned shrug (such as when the narrator Yunior tells us that Oscar’s rival in love is “one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away”).

At the heart of the narrative, woven vividly into the individual and family story, is a depiction of the hideous excesses of the dictatorship. We see Oscar’s wealthy grandfather Abelard being tortured by the regime, his family destroyed, and his only surviving daughter left to fend for herself until she is rescued by an aunt. Growing up, Beli falls in love with a character known to us as The Gangster — who turns out not only to be married, but also married to Trujillo’s sister. Immediately juxtaposed with the excesses of the dictatorship are those of the First World into which Beli finally escapes (“It was night and the lights of Nueva York were everywhere”). Finally, a mention of the last words of this remarkable novel — they are at once laugh-out-loud funny and hauntingly beautiful.