The Perfect Sentence

So, two things.

One, I just bought my favorite book: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I lent my previous copy to my sorority sister and good friend. She loved it so much she wanted her fiance to read the book. He hasn't touched it yet. I never got it back. Yesterday, I found Diaz's masterpiece at a library book sale. I held the pristine hardcover beauty in my hands and then bought it without hesitation. Three bucks.

Two, I'm moving.

These things might seem unrelated, but I love threadbare connections. Symbols, like crepuscular spirits. I found the book a week after I signed my lease. I still don't believe I'm moving because I haven't moved yet. For me, this week extends into infinity with no hope for relief or purpose. (I'll talk about my move later, when I can think about it; but these raw feelings persist, and prevent me from doing anything else.)

The moment after I bought The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, something shifted. My favorite book, come to rescue me from the doldrums, made me believe again. What does that mean?

This short paragraph by Martha Southgate explains it perfectly:

A few months ago, I got a poke to do one of those silly “do this now” things on Facebook. We were asked to pick up the book lying nearest to us and quote a sentence from it on a particular page–I think it was page 58. The book near me at that moment, though I’d read it sometime prior, was Junot Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I grabbed it, flipped open to the directed page–and found there one perfect sentence. I remember thinking, “Damn, you can flip this book open anywhere and find perfection. Wow.”

On page 58:

Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared.

Lola's incredible, feminine voice hits hard across the page. The "long wild fever, the boldness, the abandon that comes from just not giving a shit anymore, makes this a perfect sentence. But it's that indelible image of a woman who hates her mother and is so much like her, who sharpens her anger as a weapon against her Dominican mother's noxious rage. It's close to my experience, too; my anger is a shade more passive-aggressive than Lola's, but my mother possesses fury as vast as Beli's fierce, cancer-addled rage. A perfect sentence is the sentence that sets the gong alive, makes me reverberate with its force.

That's what a Book with a Vengeance is going to be about. Soon, I will leave. I will leave my crazy house and I -- hope -- that I will never come back. I can get back to thinking again. I can get back to books again. After three years of living in silence, I can finally read again.