Jackets Required: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 9/11/2007 3:00:00 AM

This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.

Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Designer: Rodrigo Corral

Author: Junot Díaz

Publisher: Riverhead

This is a modern novel in both subject and form, combining twisting prose with urbonics, impending doom with soul-lifting humor, and sweeping history lessons with the personal account of a young, lonely, overweight, Dominican kid with a penchant for sci-fi. The cover does well to embody this modernism, proclaiming its otherness with a stark white background; a single, minimal, rounded sans-serif; and a strong, red stencil acting in opposition to it all. It is this stencil which begins to hint at the book’s eclectic contents; the silhouette that of a scowl-faced, chunky, adolescent boy with a horrible haircut and a feather tucked away somewhere, the feather and double-chin alone doing enough to pique the interest of any casual passerby. A bit of the story’s fukú, or Curse and Doom, is foreshadowed in its color and languid drips, while the very nature of it being a stencil speaks of the character’s iconic role as a representative (of sorts) of the Dominican culture. The boy is not just a boy: he is the culmination of 500 years of history, brought to bear and sprayed on the walls in an articulation of narrative and experience.