Michael Cunningham Praises the Book of Junot Diaz

I read The Hours without leaving it from my hands. I had already seen the movie by that time and I enjoyed the book more, and this was because it seemed to offer a better space to balance the continual switches between the three periods of time and to give a sense of simultaneity. This balance was critical to convey this sense of simultaneity among Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and the reader of the book; creator, creation, interpret and the subtle dynamic of relationships between them. The author of a book creates a hero who takes autonomy and interprets creatively the plans set by the creator. The reader is also an interpret: the book starts another life with each reader, and this life is in turn creative.

Michael Cunningham wrote then Specimen Days. I have not yet read it, I have read about it and I am waiting for the book to come by mail, eager to know whether my perception is correct: the same subtle dynamic of relationships between creator, creation and interpret, this time being about Walt Whitman.

So Michael Cunningham enters in his books in creative relation with the universes of Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman; no wonder that he ranges these two authors in his list of five most preferred books (Newsweek): Whitman made the revolution in the literature of the nineteenth century, Virginia Woolf made the revolution of the twentieth one.

But I was very excited to find in the list of Cunningham a book that I am just reading: it is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the recent novel of Junot Diaz. Many would say that Diaz renders us the universe of Caribbean immigrants, I think it's much more: Diaz is a creator of universes, at the level of Borges, of Pavić, of Lem.

Here is the list of the five most important books, as considered by Cunningham (along with his reasons):

1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (we see her learning how to write a great novel by writing one)
2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (perfectly balanced and structured, a Bach cantata)
3. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (it's the great ecstatic masterpiece of the 19th century)
4. Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips (a book of short stories that are baroque and complicated)
5. The Brief Wondrous Life of... by Junot Diaz (I read living writers for fiction that matters in this world right now)

As I am just reading the book of Diaz, I can note that some of the above reasons fit to his works too, so Cunningham's preference for his novel along with the others makes perfect sense. I can tell you that his stories about the barrios in Edison, New Jersey and the run-down districts in Santo Domingo are also baroque and complicated, as for his first book, Drown, I could say that it is perfectly balanced and structured.

What great authors did Cunningham not read? His answer is Stendhal (and he adds, it's shameful).

(Michael Cunningham)

(Junot Diaz)