tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9518779.post7629192074070254831..comments2023-07-06T04:29:27.227-05:00Comments on Reading for Writers: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DiazA. P. Bucakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06041973307279126317noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9518779.post-60087844695257938582007-09-15T19:24:00.000-05:002007-09-15T19:24:00.000-05:00Hi Rafe--the piece in The New Yorker was actually ...Hi Rafe--the piece in The New Yorker was actually an essay, so it's Diaz himself battling the turtle. (I only know this because I have The Complete New Yorker DVD and so could access the Table of Contents to doublecheck). The interesting thing is he published the whole of the Oscar Wao storyline (including the turtle battle) in the New Yorker in 2000 and the essay in 2003, so he must have anticipated that readers would notice. Oscar, Yunior, Rafa--they probably all have their seeds in the Diaz biography.A. P. Bucakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06041973307279126317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9518779.post-509815382226294462007-09-15T17:48:00.000-05:002007-09-15T17:48:00.000-05:00Okay, I finished _Oscar Wao_ this afternoon. And i...Okay, I finished _Oscar Wao_ this afternoon. And in that last chapter, the last page, we learn that Oscar has spent a weekend at a hotel and gotten in a fight with a turtle shell hanging on the wall--which is a story told in "Homecoming, With Turtle." (Available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/14/040614fa_fact1?currentPage=1) In that story, we don't know the name of the narrator, but we know it isn't Oscar, since he's been sleeping around; in fact, he sounds a lot more like Yunior. Which makes me wonder, has Yunior stolen Oscar's story? In other words, if _Oscar Wao_ is something between or other than a short story collection and a novel, is Diaz creating an entire corpus held together by Yunior? (To which I'll add that as I got into the last 20 or so pages of _Oscar Wao_, I started to come around to the idea that Yunior is really the main character.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com