Question 1

What is the fuku in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

Accepted Answer

The fuku americanus — or fuku of the New World — is the central concept of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: a curse that the novel treats simultaneously as a literal supernatural force and as a metaphor for the historical violence of colonial history in the Caribbean. In the novel's conception, the fuku arrived in the New World with Columbus and has been pursuing the inhabitants of the Americas, and particularly the Dominicans, ever since; it intensified under the Trujillo dictatorship, which Díaz associates with an especially intense manifestation of the fuku. Oscar's family is particularly cursed: his grandfather was destroyed by Trujillo's regime; his mother Hypatia came into conflict with the Trujillo-aligned military; Oscar himself cannot find love and is eventually killed for pursuing the wrong woman. The counter-magic is zafa — a charm or counter-spell that the novel itself proposes as a form of resistance to the fuku: the act of telling the story, of naming what happened, as a form of protection against the curse's continuation.

Question 2

Who is Yunior, and how does he narrate the novel?

Accepted Answer

Yunior de las Casas is Oscar's college roommate, his sister Lola's on-and-off boyfriend, and the novel's primary narrator — though 'narrator' understates what Yunior is, because he narrates sections of the novel from multiple temporal positions (as Oscar's college roommate, as a retrospective narrator years after Oscar's death), and the novel sometimes shifts away from Yunior's voice without explanation. Yunior also appears in Díaz's debut collection Drown (1996) as a younger version of himself, and in the story collection This Is How You Lose Her (2012) as an older, more self-aware version; he is one of the most fully developed recurring characters in contemporary American fiction. Yunior's narration is characterized by an extravagant style that mixes Spanish with English, nerd cultural references with street slang, and footnotes that are sometimes longer than the text they annotate; the style is deliberately excessive, and its excess is part of its political argument: the history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo is too large, too violent, and too complicated to be contained in conventional realist prose.

Question 3

What is the role of science fiction and fantasy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

Accepted Answer

Oscar is a dedicated reader and fan of science fiction and fantasy, and the novel is saturated with references to the genre: Tolkien, Star Wars, Dune, Doctor Who, and dozens of other works are woven into its texture. Díaz uses these references in at least two ways. First, they characterize Oscar: his geekiness, his preference for imaginary worlds over the actual world he has to live in, and his use of genre fiction as a framework for understanding his own life (he sees himself as a character in a quest narrative who cannot complete the quest). Second, they make an implicit argument about the relationship between popular genre and serious literature: the novel treats Oscar's science fiction library with the same seriousness that it treats the Dominican Republic's history, refusing the cultural hierarchy that would separate 'low' genre from 'high' literature. Díaz has said that he wanted to write a novel that was both a work of literary fiction and a work that could be read by the readers of the genre fiction Oscar loves.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Reading Order

Complete Oscar Wao Book List