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Thursday 20 November 2008

A choice of first novels

Christian House recommends a selection of first novels

Pavel Richter is a decommissioned GI holed up in one such apartment. He’s in love with his neighbour, Sonia, who in turn is the mistress of the sinister, corpulent Colonel Fosko. However, when he agrees to hide the corpse of a Russian spy for a friend his problems really begin. Vyleta expertly depicts a cat running out of lives. What’s more impressive is that the reader remains uncertain which life is the authentic one.

Junot Diaz’s luminous Pulitzer prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber, £12) follows another fish out of water. Eleven years in the writing, after his equally dazzling short story collection Drown, the novel records the pratfalls of Oscar Wao, an adolescent Dominican immigrant slouching around in New Jersey.

Oscar is a romantic bookworm with a penchant for Tolkien and calorific indulgence. He dreams of becoming a best- selling author and cashing in on the nubile babes success will offer up, distant spoils to a fat sci-fi-reading ‘ghetto nerd’.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not what happened.

The book is peppered with ironic footnotes that have taken in at least one reviewer. To be fair, they do possess the absurdity of truth. I particularly liked the definition of the pejorative pariguayo: a kid who goes to parties and ‘stands outside and watches while other people scoop up the girls’. This novel bristles with imagination and heart, and ultimately blows a triumphant fanfare for the bravery of the persistent outcast.

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