The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The narrator—later revealed to be Yunior, a Dominican American man loosely based on the author—introduces the concept of fukú americanus. Fukú is a curse introduced to the Taíno people of Hispaniola in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, whom Yunior refuses to mention by name and will only refer to as “the Admiral.”

To Yunior’s parents’ generation, fukú was particularly palpable, thanks to the rise of the Dominican Republic’s ruthless dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who ruled from 1930 to 1961. Anyone who challenged Trujillo or his successors was at the mercy of fukú, including the United States, which tried to assassinate Trujillo under President Kennedy and which launched an invasion of the Dominican Republic under President Johnson. Yunior names the Kennedy assassination, the broader “Kennedy curse,” and the Vietnam War as consequences of fukú. Meanwhile, the story of Oscar de León, the book’s protagonist, is another—albeit less grandiose—example of fukú.

Finally, Yunior introduces zafa, a counterspell invoked to combat the effects of fukú. Yunior hopes that this book is a form of zafa.