When Junot Díaz walks into his apartment, stacks of books topple over and welcome him like pets. The “to-read” pile just inside the door—several stacks wide and several deep, with the tallest reaching about hip height—has collapsed in one corner. After picking up the books, the author, who has been an omnivorous reader since he was a child, lays the latest addition on top, capping it with a history book on World War II that had been waiting for him in the lobby.



Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for his debut novel *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, a multi-lingual, multi-generational story of Dominican *fukú*, a curse with a death grip even after the family of the eponymous Oscar has moved to the United States. His prose demonstrates his love of language and an acute sense of how it works—and how it can be pushed, threading hip hop vernacular and Spanish slang in sentences that spit as they sing. Traveling through a multitude of different milieux, the novel circles its protagonist with a fierce centrifugal force even as it encompasses an enormous number of footnotes. Though his first book, *Drown*, a collection of ten short stories that cohere into a nearly novel-esque whole, was a highly acclaimed best-seller, the release of *Oscar Wao*, his second book, eleven years later has made Díaz one of the world’s most celebrated authors living in the United States.



Sitting in his living room with views of Cambridge rooftops and towers all around, Díaz is clad in a black hoodie, jeans and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. The sweatshirt is embellished with a pin given to him by a student of his at MIT, where he was recently granted tenure. The pin is the size of a quarter, depicting a lion in a top hat. “A Dandy Lion. . . Terrible,” he shook his head as the cashier in the Harvard Book Store asked about it earlier in the day, cheerfully bemoaning the visual pun.



Looking at the books around us in the apartment, Díaz warns readers of *Oscar Wao,* with its allusive qualities and encyclopedic erudition in everything from island politics to B-movies*, *“The book obsessions of the novel have only a little to do with my own obsessions. I think that I read more about falconry when I was in sixth grade than I did science fiction.”



After moving to the United States with his family at the age of six, he learned how to read and began to tear through books. While still wrangling with English (learning to speak the language? “That fucking sucked”), the written word became his ally.



 “I just read everything. I think that for me it was just such a comforting rhythm. Words on a page. Me reading those words on a page.”



Though later on his own writing would be a site where the translated life was confronted in all of its complexity, in the beginning he says,  “I found reading to be such a great respite from the daily pain in the ass process of immigration. It was a place I could live in language without feeling my deficits. There’s nobody in a book that can tell whether you’re pronouncing the words right or not.”



“A typical hyper-lexic kid,” he read compulsively, in particular spending a lot of time with biographies and nature books—“You know, those kid biographies: The Lives of Great Men. And it was *all* men. And they were all white. They should have been more honest: the Lives of Great White Men.”



“I was obsessed with the United States wilderness,” he continues, self-mockingly enumerating their titles, “*The Desert, The Grand Canyon…The Sea Islands of the Carolinas*,” in the faux-soothing tones of advertisements promoting vacation spots.



“I think there was a part of me that was seeking an answer to the question who am I? How did a Dominican kid leave his island and come to New Jersey? And what *is* this place? I think a part of me was reading so compulsively because I thought that maybe there would be some code in one of those books that would explain not only explain this new place but would explain me. What I discovered is that there is no answer. . . It was the process that provided me with what I was looking for. There’s a great quote, which is about Gilgamesh, ‘the quest itself proves the futility of the quest.’”



His two principal linguistic registers (“this kind of crazy Caribbean language and music” and “this sort of African-American-infused American vernacular”) grind against each other along with the many other voices he ventriloquizes in his writing. Much has been made of his ability to stretch languages and idioms by putting them together, an ability that Díaz says is, at its root, the product of a certain shamelessness. “Shame more than anything interrupts your ability to learn. If you feel shame when people mock you or look crazy at you’re less likely to practice it. One of the things that’s helped me is that I have a particular amount of shamelessness around these different idioms that I love. I’ve grown up with hip hop my whole life but I’ve never felt any shame of misusing the language that I grew up with. I feel no shame using this discourse which is basically my English jammed against things that would be anathema in the larger hip hop culture, you know, mashing all the intellectual nonsense that I learned in graduate school with it. . . .



“It takes so much more energy keeping these things apart.”



Emphasizing the difference between the daily multilingual practice of a community and its reconstruction on a page, he maintains, “One lives in English organically and then one has to represent it artificially.



“The artifact of the fiction requires an enormous amount of work. There’s stuff that exists perfectly normal life in conversation—no one cares if you fuck something up, it’s felicitous, people enjoy it—it doesn’t have to be necessarily literary, but, yes,  [writing is] an enormous amount of work, an enormous kind of stupid work, which means that there’s a lot of just the basic experiment of adding a drop, tasting, nope, adding a drop tasting it, nope. That’s a pain in the ass, you know; my students know all about that, my students run through a million models to get to the right thing.”



The translation of the book from Spanish-speckled English into English-inflected Spanish required its own experiments (though, he argues, “If you think about it, it’s a piece of cake”): “What’s really driving the book is code switching. I can’t control all the other languages but I can certainly control English and Spanish, so that all I needed to find with the Spanish translation was find an entirely different code to switch. So what we did was we translated the entire book into Spanish and then went through the entire book matching English and Spanish looking for a set of codes in English that worked really, really well in Spanish to preserve that sort of multilingual madness. For example, the word ‘feeling’ is an English word that’s very, very common in Spanish and it means something completely different. If you say someone came at you with feeling it speaks of a deep sincerity, but it has a very particular cool resonance in Spanish.” He adds that you can never go wrong with a word like “cool.”



As for those translations into languages which he can’t control, he says simply, “In translation signal noise is a given.” He gestures towards the bookshelves to our left, “If you look up here, at least 10% of these books are in translation. . . In the U.S. we have the lowest rate of reading in translation of any country in the industrialized world. And yet there’s more complaints, or more reservations around translations than anywhere else.”



Ultimately, “I think the more that you actually spend a translated life, the more you realize that it’s a minimal charge to be able to engage yourself in another world.”



And, in fact, though Díaz began reading as soon as he came to the U.S., attempting to find some sort of life logic in the pages of books, it wasn’t until he was much older that he began to write. When he was growing up, his brother came down with a brutal form of Leukemia (“It was a big part of my childhood,” he says. “He’s fine, he’s in remission, but he spent ten years in chemo. That’s a fucking long time, man.)



In an attempt to communicate his world to his brother, he wrote twenty to thirty page letters to him during his long stays in the hospital.



“A part of the way I stayed connected to my brother was writing these enormous, ridiculous letters about what was going on about our lives, about the neighborhood, and in some ways my complete love of reading had prepared me for the moment that my brother’s illness provided, which was an excuse to now participate in the form I loved so much. So that’s how I started actually, writing letters to someone in a hospital.”



(He no longer maintains his art by writing letters, though, “I’m as much a traitor as the next person, I’ve given up the form…You should see I have boxes of the letters I wrote and the letters I received when I was in college. My god! I can tell the loves because of the stacks of letters. We wrote each other like crazy.”)



His family continues to be a strong presence in his writing. The fantastical elements of magic realism have been one of the most widely recognized aspects of Latin American literary canon, evolving in more recent years into the Macondo vs. McOndo debate. Seemingly counter-intuitively, the moment in which magic realism is most present in *Oscar Wao* is also the part most derived from real life; towards the end of the novel, a mystical mongoose comes to Oscar’s aid, a creature which Díaz explains comes directly from family lore.



“My mother got lost when she was young in a coffee plantation (my father used to grow coffee) and she was lost for like three days and everyone thought she died and by the third day they just went and bought fucking—I mean, it shows you the difference, if a child were lost for three days today, we would still have hope, we would still be looking, but in the DR they were like ‘Three days? ’That kid’s fucking dead man’—they went out and bought funeral clothes, they were going to bury this little outfit and then my mother shows up. And my mother tells this story and she was like I had gotten lost and was just desperate and this mongoose came up and was like ‘you lost?’ ‘Well, I’m tired right now but I’ll come back tomorrow and lead you out.’ So he did and my mother arrived home the next day.”



Given the presence of magical mongoose in *Oscar Wao*, one might think that they are some sort of national animal, a kind of mascot, in the Dominican Republic, yet Díaz says, “Most Dominicans don’t even know we have mongooses. . . . If I can claim any fame, it’s singlehandedly reminding the *pueblo dominicano* that we have mongooses.”



The brutalities of the thirty-year tyranny of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which pervade the action and atmosphere of the novel are another outgrowth of Díaz’s family life. “I was deeply allergic to the kind of insane fascistic militaristic craziness that was present in my family through my father’s military ethos that came directly from the Trujillo regime.



“It was nothing personal. It doesn’t make a difference what your opinion is if the house is on fire, the house is on fire. Probably the only thing we’re [Junot and his siblings] all completely in agreement on is that that family structure was just toxic. And everyone had very different reactions to it. My older sister ran away. My brother checked out. My little brother went and idolized the absent man and he joined the military. The effects are everywhere. And even my sister who ran away married a military guy; she spent years in a military base in Berlin.”



The extremities of evil in the novel, in particular those presented by the dictatorial regime, are at times distilled and allegorized according to science fiction and comic book archetypes as Trujillo is put in apposition with Sauron in *Lord of the Rings*, for one*.* Originally, Díaz wanted to include actual images from comic books in *Oscar Wao*, making these ties and the narrator’s interdisciplinary wanderings all the more palpable. But in execution, the postmodern project failed: “It was not working. It was just garbage. It was like eight or nine kinds of bad. It felt forced; it felt pretentious. And your mind is like, dude what you’re trying to build is like a jet engine, but what we have here is like a go-cart. It’s a go-cart.”



He describes a plan for the first page that was meant to the open with an image of the apocalypse from Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga *Akira*, rays of destruction extending to the leaf’s limit and folding over to the next side to point to the Dominican Republic. I ask if the comic book panels  he had in mind were all found or if he had drawn some by hand.  “Darling,” he says, “if I could draw, I wouldn’t be in this business.”



It is in large part the social function of visual art, he explains, that appeals to him. “I’m sorry, but look at that painting someone sent me,” he says, gesturing to a painting, sitting across the room unhung. Red, beige, blue, it demands attention with its bright hues and dynamic, cartoon-like shapes—brown bald stylized figures with triangle teeth, a grey creature with blue on its head, a blue line through the middle to the painting.



“Somebody saw me at a reading in Seattle and just fucking sent to me. And, I’m sorry, but that’s kind of a cool painting. . . The thing is that for me writing is so personal and so deep and so private. This is so social, you know.”



Díaz describes the immediacy with which visual art can be shared in contrast to the delayed reaction time engendered by writing. If you give a book to someone, they walk away with it alone and then come back later, sometimes delaying weeks. “There’s something pre-modern about writing. It’s not so much that I’m waiting for a response as I want to be involved with that person and have my art form some sort of community with them. With this, someone walks in: instantaneous. I love that we’re in a community there.”



 As if to prove the point, he logs onto Facebook, where we watch a video a friend posted on his wall. In fact, of the favored artists he mentions—Tony Capellan, Jacob Holdt, Pipilotti Rist, Piero Manzoni—many work with video. Perhaps given the cinematic preoccupations evident in the novel this comes as no surprise, even with Díaz’s warning  of the differences between Oscar’s taste and his own.



I ask about film and look over at the DVDs beside the television. Some of the DVD boxes are still shrinked-wrapped because “I keep losing them, so then I have to keep buying them,” which is to say he keeps lending them to friends, so then he has to keep buying them. While the selection is not all about the apocalypse—he recommends the Japanese film *Ping Pong, *calling it* *“One of the greatest fucking movies I’ve ever seen,” the presence is strong, as is further evidence of his love of the social nature of art. Above the TV set is a cartoon, marker on paper, that his friend Petey just rolled in and put up one day; it has hung there ever since.



In the DVD pile there is an old British miniseries called *UFO*; *Threads*, a BBC documentary from the 80s about the atomic destruction of England (“fucking terrifying even today”); *Planet Terror*;*The Last Days; Appleseed; The Last Blood*.



 “This is just a *small* selection,” he reminds me as a lists them. A central theme in his work, made clear by his description of layout from *Akira* with which he had wanted to begin *Oscar Wao *and the reverberations of the now invisible image of destruction extent in the text of the novel itself, is manifested here as well: dude’s obsessed with the apocalypse.



“I’ve been fucking fucked in the head by the apocalyptic eighties.



“Look, I was fucking generation bomb. It’s the most hidden thing. what separates me from my students is not the fact that they’re eighteen and even their cells are new—you guys just fucking glow with your newness—and the fact that I don’t know any of your music or any of your culture, part of it is that the apocalypse was fucking real, man. I mean part of why *The Watchmen* the movie the doesn’t work is that Alan Moore in the comic book didn’t have to do anything to convince people that the end of the world was this far away.” He illustrates the extreme proximity of the end that he felt with the inflection of his voice and two almost touching fingers.



“We’re deeply apocalyptic now but it’s not on the skin in the same way.”



As a self-described sensitive eleven-year-old, watching the news at night outline where the atomic blasts would hit—and seeing his town in New Jersey in the black—it’s no surprise that with every movie, every TV show, every*thing* touching on the apocalypse, it started to eat at him. “The whole world was tearing itself to pieces; South Africa was in place; the entire economy was dumping. And that really fucking fucked me up, so I’ve been trying to write something about the end of the world.



“I’ve got to do something to channel this apocalyptic madness of mine.”



Díaz is currently doing just that, reviving work on a book he has described as his Black Akira novel. He began work on it before *Oscar,* which rose from its ashes in the wake of 9/11.



For the moment, though, he is off to see some friends, who have been calling him over the course of the past hour, taking advantage of the little time he has in Cambridge these days.



And so, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, the door closes.

The spring break of my junior year of college I spent entirely at home on Avenue R, while my mother and father were at work and my brother was at school.  I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break: I had brought a shoulder-bag full of books home, many of them hardcover, stuffed between two pairs of jeans and my baseball glove.  I wore my own jeans and my brother’s t-shirts, that week.  We had become the same size, nearly exactly, leveling off around maturity.  Our shoulders, in the mirror, were the same width. 



 



That week was the week after the tsunami wave and earthquake in Japan, when three nuclear reactors suffered a partial meltdown.  I had about fifteen books to read that I knew with only a small sinking feeling I wasn’t going to finish.  There was a price to be paid for every book gotten through, and that price was 60 minutes for every 60 pages read—at best—meaning that each paperback stacked in my blue bag was a collection of solitary hours that I had no choice but to attempt.  I had recently read an essay by Jonathan Franzen in which he said that he had come to the realization that he would read only a finite number of books in his life.  He’d calculated that finite number, and at his stage in life it was a three-digit one.  I hoped that mine was an order of magnitude more than that, but still, the tangibility was weighing. 



 



My brother was a senior in high school then and it was his last for-sure baseball season, surely the last that I would be able to watch with such ease, considering the difficulty of making a college baseball team and the by-no-means guaranteed proximity of our schools during the brief spring season.  That week he had a game every day, so my schedule revolved shadow-like around his actions.  I took the train or drove into the city to watch him warm-up.  I’d sit on the bench and talk to his coach, once my own coach, while he played.  I watched him lean forward too much on first pitches, anticipating fastballs.  He was hitting third that year.  Sometimes he struck out and sometimes he got hits through the hole between short and third.  He had become in my absence a quite remarkable fielder. 



 



Then at nighttime I would eat dinner with the family, go upstairs and help my brother with his calculus homework, try to concentrate on something like reading or internet television while my slowly-deafening father listened to too-loud television in the living room, wait until everyone but my mother was asleep, when we would watch “The West Wing” on my laptop at the kitchen counter, and then even she would drift off and the house would be mine, except for my father’s coughs, and every once in a while when my brother got up to go to the bathroom. 



 



I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break.  It felt then like one of those threshold moments, when the world asks of you what the rest of your life will look like: summer jobs, no summer jobs, graduate school applications.  My computer was slowly dying that spring break. The Genius Bar people said it was only a matter of time.  It was leaking power.  This turned my attention to the appalling emptiness of my bank account.  I conjured up and rejected various get-rich-quick schemes.  I considered application to Kings Highway Car Service before remembering my sense of direction. 



 



The Big Thoughts were centered around things like reading and writing, which I thought were things I had focal points of understanding for and wished that I could make everyone else see like I saw.  I just needed to translate.  Questions like, now what *really* is the experience of reading.  I looked at old bookshelves that my father had built incorrectly in the last millennium and tried to relive the experience of each and every paperback.  I looked at the fifteen unread ones in my blue bag and tried to absorb their knowledge and desire.  I chipped away at the longer ones among them, trading clumps of time for their middle pages, forgetting, afterwards, even the characters’ names.  



 



And all along I had nothing else to do on the dying computer but check the news from Japan.  Every time I opened my email or watched internet television the news sites began flashing with journalism and numbers from the East.  Headlines about the last fifty workers left in the nuclear reactors, battling fire and radiation, shuffling in and out, some to the hospital when they collapsed for no reason and others on the floor dry-heaving, their lungs frozen with hidden fire.  There was an invisible pollution seeping through the air, the reports said.  There was the regular destruction of ocean-front towns and the shaking of skyscrapers, but also this, fifty workers chosen to remain in gas masks and white radiation suits.  Who could say that the world was not at an end?



 



In *Freedom*, Jonathan Franzen’s book, there are a couple of things that characters keep saying, but one of them that I remember is “so and so didn’t know how to live.”  It’s just the way things are.  “They haven’t figured out yet how to live.”  This stuck with me over that spring break.  The way I read books then (still do, it’s ridiculous to refer to this in the far past tense) was to trace little things through them.  Franzen was great for this kind of trace.  Over the course of the book something became apparent, which was that no one knew or learned how to live. 



 



My roommate had (still has) a whiteboard on his desk.  He always insisted on having his desk in the common room, so he could be at the center of everything.  The rest of us just wanted to escape.  I thought of this at home.  On his whiteboard, at the top, it had a little improvised chart for how many miles he’d run on the days of the week.   And, included, his goals and personal bests for various distances.  2 miles, it said, question mark?  13:30.  4 miles? 27 flat.  Below that it said, “Life goals.” 1. Graduate.  2. Teach back home in California.  3. Teach abroad in Spain.  4. Graduate school of education. 5.  Principal.  And then 6: Secretary of Education?  Next to “abroad in Spain,” he had a questioning squiggly line, off onto a separate column.  “Astrophysics?” it said, question mark?



 



I read a lot of journalism, a lot book chapters, sitting on the Q train into the city.  The baseball games started at 4.  The sun was at a good point then, baseball-wise, not so high it hurt pop-flies, not gone enough to make shadows.  And you could see it, when the train went over the Manhattan Bridge.  There’s a moment after the East River as Chinatown disappears above you and the tunnel consumes the first cars, when you wonder if the Q could take you into the future.  Canal Street opens to its usual stench.  Next stop, you tell yourself, putting the book away.



 



The final day I was home for spring break was the last chance I thought I’d get to see a baseball game of my brother’s.  It wasn’t.  I bussed home later that semester, because I didn’t know what else to do, and watched the first round of their playoffs.  They won.  He hit a double down the fast alley an out-of-place centerfielder and left-fielder make, on a hot day and with a quick Astroturf.  Even that wasn’t the last chance.  He played over the summer with a local team, the Hurricanes, with a friend of his from high school whose mother had just died, cancer.  The kid was going to City College next year.  He was going to make the team, god damn it. 



 



That last spring break game, that hadn’t happened yet.  The last play of the game, if I remember it right, was a roller to my brother at third.  The important thing about those is that you have to take the right step first.  I mean you can shuffle on the way, but it better be damn near perfect.  We practiced these on the softball fields in the park, better after it rained, so the dirt was wet and smooth, without the possibility of bad hops.  The kid who hit the chopper was quick, you could tell when he’d walked up to the plate.  The coach of my brother’s team from the bench had made that motion with his hands, a roll of two fingers: wheels.  So my brother had to move fast.  You have to catch a ball like that on the right bounce.  He got it on the long one, didn’t even glove it, just open-handed it, and that was all off his left foot, and then he landed on his right foot and used the torque from that landing to throw.



 



Now once the ball left my brother’s hands it needed to be moving at 75 miles per hour, or, because he was so close, and I’m being generous, let’s say 90 miles per hour, or 132 feet per second, to get the quick runner in time.  Let’s say 50 feet away, and the runner more than three-quarters of the way to first.  The throw, at that speed and distance, would hit the glove in less than .45 seconds.  This was all through my head while the ball kissed my brother’s fingers, before he leveled his other foot down.  Other numbers: 9.0 on the Richter scale, 72.0 sieverts of radiation doses, enough to kill a person in minutes.  One book a week, 50 a year, 3,000 left.  Quick quick quick, yelled the coach on the bench.



 



It was a smooth pick, smooth throw.  The first baseman stretched and caught it.  The ball got there in time, and we all went home.  My brother was flush with suspense.  

On the ground rests a slip of paper worth $96. A janitor, mop and cigarette in one hand, kneels down and studies the fine print. CALDER LEG 1: 4, 6, 7; LEG 2: 3.



He stops there. He mops on, smokes on, looks on. Later he returns with a dustpan and wipes up the trash under Seabiscuit’s 1937 MassCap banner.



            Outside, the oval is kept well enough, dragged through and through with a six a.m. tractor and a six a.m. man. The enclosing fence defines pristine as white. In the infield lurks a fountain in its off-season.



            At the nearest betting window, a sign hangs reading “CLOSED.” In the window next to it, a sign reading “CLOSED.”  A third window missing its sign is closed.



            On the wall hangs a painting of a horse standing on a patch of grass. There is no one on the horse, but the length of the grass patch in front of the horse is equal to the length of the grass patch behind the horse.  Behind the painting of the horse is a mural of another horse. There is a man on the horse in the mural, but the painting is on that man.



            A square machine in a hole in the wall prints a slip of paper worth $24. It falls into the hand of a man with a custom-made coat made for someone else in someone else’s era. It will learn if it deserves the ground.



            The man limps out to the track and squints at the finish line. No one has crossed it in three months. Not a single loser. He limps back inside.



            Twelve TV’s in two rows of six flash odds, pools and payouts. POST TIME blinks on the set simulcasting live from Aqueduct. The horses approach the starting gate resolute and in low-definition.



            A cluster forms. All heads turn up, all eyes take in the screen a few feet under heaven. “I know a guy,” the man says. No one mutters an answer. “I know a guy who had a dream about the number five. So he woke up at five and took the fifth train out of the station. There were five people in his car. He shows up at the track, and in the fifth race puts five grand on the five.”



            The race goes off.



            “Horse finishes fifth.”



            2:03:20 later, the race ends. The $24 slip of paper lazily finds the ground, worth nothing.



            The man heads for the machine in the hole in the wall. It does not smell like horses.