Junot Diaz is having trouble with his Mac. The new Leopard operating system, to be precise. “I’m just trying to keep abreast of technology and shit,” he says. “And now I’ve been on the phone with the Mac folks all fucking day.”
The 39-year-old Dominican author finally has a little time to deal with First World concerns, such as computers and pesky return policies. His first novel, “The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao,” was released last year to great acclaim and, even better, strong sales.
As Diaz himself would gleefully admit, it's a tough book to categorize. Put simply, it tells the story of three generations of Dominicans as they push their way through 20th-century history, slipping out of the Rafael Trujillo-controlled Dominican Republic and into Paterson, New Jersey. Usually, the phrase “multi-generational narrative” sends us into spasms of yawning, but with Diaz's combination of streetwise Latino slang, rich historical footnotes, and plenty of geeky name-dropping from “Lord of the Rings,” we found ourselves hooked in tight for three days straight.
Diaz is currently living in Rome on a fellowship from the American Academy of the Arts. We caught up with him to discuss misogyny, stage fright, reggaeton and being a nerd.
You’ve said that the act of immigrating to a different country is comparable only to science fiction. Living in the U.S., we don’t really understand what it means for a child to be able to leave the Third World and be miraculously transported to the First. How does a child’s mind grasp that? How does an adult’s mind grasp that? I think about these kids coming over, these poor kids who were child soldiers and were somehow brought over to the U.S. It’s like, “Come to our high school! Think about prom! Want to try out for the football team?!” You can describe the world that you left behind and the world you’ve arrived in, but that still doesn’t do the job of communicating how a person must make these enormous imaginative leaps.
You have a reading coming up at the Hammer. Do you still get weirded out by speaking engagements where people show up, expecting you to hold forth so profoundly?Well, luckily, there’s like no profundity to be found
[laughs]. But yeah, of course, there’s nothing scarier than public speaking. I guess some people really like attention, and I pass as an un-shy person, but every public event leaves me a wreck for usually a week. At least, being in L.A., I’ll get to go out with my friends and eat a bunch of
Korean food.
Do you wish to dispel the rarefied nature of being a writer? Oh my god, yeah.
Artists. I thought that being an artist, you could get away from the snobbish hierarchies that you learn in school. Then I became an artist and realized that nobody’s more snobbish or hierarchical than artists. And that’s what the heartbreak was—I was a hopeful nerd!
Any complaints from women readers about the way females are sometimes treated in your stories?Well, of course there have been plenty of criticisms. People say that they’re troubled by these representations. That they’re sexist. That they’re perpetuating the very thing that they claim to be criticizing. As a writer, of course, you’re going to immediately react, “No! That is not true!” But in the end, you have to cross your fingers and hope that what you’re doing is as feminist-positive as you think it is. I have to believe in my heart that what I write is critical of this kind of mentality, in a productive way. And to succeed in anything, you’ve got to imagine the possibility that you will fail beyond your wildest imagination. Otherwise, you’re not taking any risks.
In terms of genre fiction, are you getting to do any reading for pleasure? I just finished this
fucking
insane book called “The Real World” by this Japanese crime writer named Natsuo Kirino.
[Laughing]
Her shit is bananas! She loves murdering folks in her books, but this
book, fortunately she only focuses on one…two…three murders!
Lastly, and I've gotta ask this, do you listen to music when you write?Obsessively. Right now, I’ve moved away from what I was listening to because I just don’t fuckin’…I don’t get any work done! It’s all hip-hop and reggaeton. The words, the lyrics get distracting. So now I’m just listening to soundtracks.
Anything you’d recommend? From before your soundtracks era?The guys who just won the Grammy: Calle 13. I’d also recommend this ill album called “Stunts, Blunts and Hip Hop” from this group called Diamond D. That shit is great. But when you get to be my age, you just don’t have as much time as an adolescent does to keep up with shit.
Head on over to the Hammer on Monday, March 17 at 7 p.m. for a free reading with Mr. Junot Diaz. George Ducker is a contributing editor for Metromix Los Angeles.
