The Part About the Book Review

[I've been reading Roberto Bolaños' 2666, the future of pan-global fiction within a geography devoid of border towns and customs requirements--an epic, sprawling novel which features long, meticulous sentences, one flash-dynamo of a sentence after the other (and you wonder, how is language possible in translation; isn't everything a false repetition, a reflection of something misplaced? Is language possible when uttered at our backs?), all of which shape paragraphs populated with characters, no, lives, named after some distant European principality, or such is the impression--Archimboldi and Morini are some examples--lives, rich, full lives of beings residing in places as wide-ranging as Leipzig and Turin, beings, like most others, in pursuit of women and themselves because this the hunger of the sudden world, a world refused once disease overtook the author, a Chilean expatriate who, in wanting to secure a future of his family, planned to see his final novel, his final examination of all that is proper and human, published in the five, distinct chapters that now make up 2666, until his literary executors saw fit to do otherwise, and we are given this presence to consume in a single block, a single, undulating mass that needles and underscores, and for this the author is forgiven, he is forgiven because he was not to know, he could not ever have known, that I was unable to stop reading and turning, even after fourteen pages in, no, twenty, sixty, one-hundred pages in, despite my being hungry, despite my being tired after a session of work in Lower Manhattan, though lately these days I have been feeling something closer to dread, because the words that most closely approximate tiredness and hunger are not words at all, but are, instead, screens through which I confess, forgive me, Father, I sin and remain--]

Drown

Junot Diaz has been awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a rich, funny, and full work that examines the Dominican immigrant experience and the ways in which the past refuses to release its hold on those who insist on living in the present.

Diaz, who arrived in the United States as a young child without knowing a word of English, is the second Latino to win the prize; the first such author was CCNY alum Oscar Hijuelos, who won for his sex- and drink-riddled novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, published in 1990. (This book would later be adapted into a film and, uh, a Broadway musical.)

While I do not know Mr. Diaz personally, I still feel quite proud that, in a country which insists its Latino immigrants are little more than border-jumping thugs, he has been able to reach this level of professional success.

The winners in poetry:

Robert Hass, for Time and Materials
Philip Schultz, for Failure

Congratulaciones, Junot, y mucha suerte!

[D | R]