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For the rest of the world, who had been waiting over ten years for Díaz’s first novel, following on from his short story collection, Drown, I hope the wait was worth it. For me, having never heard of Díaz until his book, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007) took the 2008 Pulitzer Prize there was no weight of expectation hanging around, waiting to confirm him as a genius or to wallow in what could have been. And were it not for the Pulitzer I would probably have remained ignorant of it as the cover is…well, ugly. Not something I’d pick up, never mind read.

Wao being a distortion of Wilde, used to ridicule him, the Oscar of the title is actually Oscar de León, an overweight nerd of Dominican heritage living in the United States who, unlike his skirt chasing contemporaries, is more into sci-fi, fantasy, role-playing games, and writing novels. Not that he doesn’t attempt some skirt chasing himself, it’s just that his lines, along with the rest of him, need a bit of work:

Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands. Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it.

Dominicans talking is nothing new - it’s in their history. And the history of the Dominican Republic plays a large role in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. While the idea of Oscar’s bad luck, to some, is something to be skeptical about, it could possibly be attributed to a curse in the family, referred to as  fukú:

But the fukú ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare. In my parent’s day the fukú was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in…But in those elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest you could say. Our then dictator for life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.

The life of Trujillo, whose reign was one of the 20th Century’s bloodiest, and lasted over thirty year, mixes with the history of Oscar’s mother and grandfather and ties them neatly together.  And with a narrator -who doesn’t reveal himself until late into the novel - that wasn’t actually there at the events he relates, there’s much filling in of the blanks. There’s footnotes, too - loads of them - providing further history about Trujillo and the Dominican Republic, and it’s an unsettling experience, being dragged between narrative and notes, that soon becomes annoying.

And when it comes to annoying, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao has another ace up its sleeve in the use of ghetto Spanglish. It’s understandable why Díaz has done this, given that it’s his narrator’s voice and to not do so would lessen its power but the Spanish is sometimes laid on so thick that, save taking time out to look up words and phrases, the context sheds no light. Reading this was reminiscent of the white boy in the wrong neighbourhood stereotype. However, I didn’t feel too fussed by the peppering of sci-fi and fantasy references, mostly alien too, because they seemed more like texture, whereas the Spanish felt important.

Yet, even when it annoys, the novel has an energy to its prose the likes of which I’ve not enjoyed for a while. It picks you up, and carries you along, to the end. Personally, I found the sections detailing Oscar’s relatives’ lives the least engaging, perhaps because of the distance between the narrator and the tales, whereas the Oscar sections flow with warmth, love, and humour. That they do is a pity because Oscar’s role, despite being the titular character, is minimal on the surface, with Díaz using him as a way in to writing about his political interests in the Dominican Republic.

I know I’ve approached the novel from the wrong angle - or at least, not that which Díaz likely intended - but when the book became a lost cause for me, I relied on the sections about Oscar to get me through. Who couldn’t love the nerd, even if some of his interests….well, you know:

Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing fanatic…Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for normal if he’d wanted to.

While he may not pass for normal, Oscar certainly makes an interesting character and it’s a shame that, for all the interesting history and story there, I couldn’t enjoy the book, except for the brief and wondrous pages of Oscar Wao.

Ever since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road came out, Jim Crace’s tenth novel, The Pesthouse, itself dealing with a future America, has had less attention. But, Picador have recently released his back catalogue in new paperback editions and, since I’d never read him before, I thought it better to start way back at the start of his literary career rather than cut in so late. So it was that I came to Continent (1986), winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Personally, I’m not sure that this is a novel, being a series of short stories, seven in total. But if David Mitchell is getting away with it today, there has to be a precedent. And Continent may just be it. The short stories are all told outwith any particular over-arching storyline, the only constant thread being the continent of the title: a seventh, somewhere in our world, with its own customs, languages, and history; its own flora and fauna; a selection of animals, exotic and not so.

This other land, however, is in no way hermetic and the influences of the western world are infringing upon it. In the opening story, Talking Skull, Crace sets out the stall that characterises the book, introducing the dual themes of trade and superstition. Here a man returns from a western education eager to impart his new found capitalist ways, only to learn that he can exploit superstition in order to make his money, as regards bogus freemartin milk, which some believe aids fertility:

“You and science would tell me that coffee doesn’t sober, doesn’t relax, doesn’t revive, doesn’t welcome, that it shortens my life, costs a fortune, disrupts the economy of Brazil, and if left to long in the pot will corrode the silver. But try to stop me drinking it! I don’t care for the dictatorship of science. Nor do your neighbours. Freedom of choice. Deceive yourself at will, that’s the motto of the nation. Harness superstition. Turn it to your advantage. Milk it dry!”

It’s a multi-layered story, taking in both the effect of modernisation upon tradition and the differences between rural and urban life along the way, all the time mixing myth with the hard-hitting reality of our world. In fact, this is the pattern for all seven stories, each varied in content, holding a surreal mirror up to our world and putting words to the reflection, whether it be looking at the effects of introducing new customs to a culture (Cross-country) or the repercussions of supply and demand (Sins and Virtues).

While the stories for the most part are subtle in their underlying ideas, Electricity hits you with all the subtlety of…well, an electric shock. Unashamedly blatant story it accounts a time when a town, after much petitioning of office by someone called Awni, is connected to the grid, the villagers amazed at this new magic line the streets to see the “mangoes of light”. Regarding this, the local teacher has a grim prediction:

‘Soon’, he says, ‘thanks to Awni’s obsequious petitions, this town, with its oil lamps, its hand pumps, its long nights, its stillness, will be a powered cauldren of heat and light and sound. It will spin with electricity. And it will disappear.’

That the town could become like any other brings the question of identity to communities and what they stand to lose from ongoing commercialisation. And the notion of spinning with electricity foreshadows the eventual disaster in which the story culminates, once again landing on a bed of superstition.

There were times in reading Continent that I found Crace’s voice too similar from one story to the next, especially on those employing the first person. While it keeps the tone of the book consistent I couldn’t help feel that individual voices needed to be heard. But, that grumble aside, each story is a wonderfully crafted piece of layered fiction that complements the whole, making a landscape that is fantastical and believeable at the same time.