the brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007

Oscar hopes life in college will be different, but while there, he realizes that he is still a loser. Soon after, Oscar goes to college at Rutgers. Eventually Ana’s boyfriend Manny returns from the army and Ana stops spending time with Oscar. Ana and Oscar become good friends, but are never physically intimate. When Oscar returns he meets a girl named Ana Obregón at his SAT prep class and falls in love with her.

Oscar goes and visits his Nena Inca in Santo Domingo, and turns to writing science fiction as an outlet. When Al and Miggs find girlfriends and purposely leave him out Oscar realizes that even they think that he is a loser. Oscar’s tío Rudolfo and Oscar’s sister Lola both try to encourage Oscar to lose weight and be more masculine so that he can land a girlfriend or a lay, but Oscar does not heed their advice. Oscar’s interest in Genre makes him even more undesirable, and his only friends are Al and Miggs. In adolescence, he is fat, dorky, and unattractive. However, the threesome soon falls apart and Oscar’s life goes downhill from then on. For one week when Oscar is seven, he dates two girls, Maritza and Olga, at the same time. The first chapter, which takes place in 1974 – 1987 in Paterson, New Jersey, details Oscar’s childhood and adolescence. The narrator then wonders if writing this book is his way of saying a zafa. The only known way to counteract a fukú is to use the term “zafa” to ward off the curse. The narrator informs the reader that he will be telling us the story of Oscar de León, who was the victim of his family’s fukú. The narrator makes the claim that the late dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, has a close connection with fukú. It was brought over to the islands of Antilles when the Europeans came, and has stayed ever since. The novel begins with the narrator's description of the curse, called fukú americanus-a curse of doom, specifically that of the New World.

The brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007