The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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"Of what import are brief, nameless lives... to Galactus??" —Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four, (Vol. I, No. 49, April 1966)

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuká americanus, or more colloquially, fuká-- generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Junot Díaz. The story is centered around the character Oscar de León, a consummate scifi and fantasy geek with horrendous luck with women who wants to be the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien. The story is told through his former roommate at Rutgers, Yunior, who comes off as a bit dickish when he is first introduced into the story, but grows into a better person by the time he is writing the novel. Yunior tells the story of Oscar's life (and death) by tracing Oscar's story through his sister Lola, his mother Hypatá Belicia Cabral (or Beli for short), and his grandfather Abelard Cabral's own tragic tales.

Between all of the geek references, untranslated Spanish, slang, and footnotes, you might get lost in the text and believe that Díaz assumes too much from the reader, or that he is aiming to disorient the reader. However, understanding all of his references doesn't add much to understanding the text.

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Tropes used in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao include:

• A Man Is Not a Virgin - Oscar before he is executed by Ybon's boyfriend's goons.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys - Played straight, subverted and deconstructed all in the same book.
• Cultural Rebel - Oscar fit the profile to a T; Lola too, to a lesser degree.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin - The word "Brief" being in the title isn't for show.
• Big Bad- You could argue that Trujillo or the fukú curse fulfill this role.
• Big Breasts, Big Deal: Beli becomes extremely well-endowed when she hits puberty. She's initially ashamed about her breasts, but soon begins flaunting them when she realizes that they make men fall all over her. Her daughter Lola, on the other hand, is as flat as a board but became just as well-endowed in a different area.
• Big Damn Heroes: José Then and the rest of Belicia's old coworkers, who put themselves in danger of great harm by saving her life from some secret police thugs. José even pulls a pistol and jams it against one of their heads.
• Bittersweet Ending- Oscar is no longer a virgin and found someone who he could get intimate with, but in doing so he got himself killed. Hypatía died from breast cancer. Lola and Yunior are not together, and Oscar's manuscript on his family's history is lost, possibly forever. But Oscar found love!
• Black and Nerdy - Oscar falls into this category.
• Curse - Fukú may or may not be real, but Oscar and his family certainly get into some deep deep shit.
• Dirty Cop- Ybon's boyfriend is a thug with a badge.
• Driven to Suicide - Oscar attempts this before moving in with Yunior, and again after he caught Jenni having sex with a punk guy. He fails both times.
• Evil Overlord- Trujillo certainly fits the bill. He is directly compared to Darkseid and Sauron.
• Footnote Fever - Quite unusual for a work of fiction. You'll either Love It or Hate It.
• Funny Afro - Oscar eventually gets rid of it.
• Geek Physiques - Oscar weighs over 300 pounds for most of his life.
• Geek Reference Pool - Listing all of the references that Yunior includes to various aspects of Geek Culture would take a page unto itself. But that doesn't mean we are not going to try:
  • Akira
  • The Dark Knight Returns
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Fantastic Four
  • New Gods
  • Watchmen
  • The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion
  • Dune
  • H.P. Lovecraft
  • Love and Rockets
  • Daniel Clowes
  • The Sandman
  • John Kricfalusi (misspelled "Krikfalusi")
• Lonely Funeral - Oscar's funeral at the end of the novel is attended only by Yunior, Lola, Beli and La Inca.
• Loners Are Freaks - Oscar.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Oscar, so very much. We see in a flashback that he inherited this trait from his mother Beli, who nearly got killed because of it. Oscar is even less lucky.
• Named Like My Name: Óscar de León, the main character, has the name of a famous salsa singer. This is, though, never mentioned in the book.
• Names to Run Away From Really Fast- Trujillo.
• Narrator All Along - Yunior.
• Nerds Are Virgins - Up to Eleven.
• Pyrrhic Victory - Oscar finds love...and then is killed brutally.
• Sensei for Scoundrels - Yunior tries this with Oscar and fails utterly.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man - Oscar and Yunior definitely fall into these categories.
• She's All Grown Up: Jacquelyn and Beli blossom almost overnight from skinny girls into stunningly beautiful and well-endowed teenagers, although it doesn't do them much good in the long run. Especially for Jacquelyn and her poor doomed family in the Age of Trujillo.
• Shout-Out - The title is an allusion to the Ernest Hemingway story, The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
• The Blank- The Man Without a Face appears during times of tragedy in the de León family.
• Too Dumb to Live - Oscar's attempts to persuade Ybon to ditch her husband for him, despite him nearly being killed by his goons before escaping to America and the persuasions of those closest to him not to go through with the act. You can probably guess what happens next.
• You Can't Go Home Again - Averted, Beli and her family go back to Santo Domingo every year for vacation.