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Wanting

Oscar tries to find love in women, and not himself is the cause of his downfall. Yunior tries to be someone he does not attempt to play Oscar's sister Lola. Unlucky in love shows Beli's history with men causes her to overwork and raise two children after their father leaves. Lola wants to love, but she wastes her time with Yunior but has a child with someone else. Love is the central theme in this book, and its search causes heartache.

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Comparison

Daughters of the Stone is a magical fantasy of a stone coming from Africa, just as the curse from Africa fell on the de Leon/Cabral family because of enslavement that traveled across the Atlantic Ocean. Each story gives an account of the generational curse that befell the family. The cruel dictator Trujullo believed to cause this curse that followed the Caribbean people from the global Caribbean diaspora in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Fighting the odds in each story showed passion, love, commitment, endurance; one story ends with hope while the other ends with tragedy, but the story will continue for another generation.  

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Course Theme

This story follows storytelling mixed with magic and fantasy. Junot Diaz helps the reader to understand Oscar's lack of swagger of stereotypical Dominican and how he represents the insecurities men face daily for a person of color. The challenge throughout the book was searching for love in a coming-of-age generation. Oscar's grandfather brings a curse upon the family that sets the course of events with tragic endings. He shows what loneliness and depression can drive men to want to commit suicide. Junot Diaz skillfully gives us a glimpse of the Latinx male experience.

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Analysis

Oscar is an overweight, nerdy, brown-skinned boy with three strikes against him. Society sees fat people as flawed, not associated with because it's their fault they are overweight. The next strike is being black has a negative impact; it doesn't matter if you are smart. History repeats itself in each generation, but Oscar's return to the Dominican Republic does go as he would have long. Finding love is hard for anyone, but in Oscar's case, the challenges were tough to drive him to try to commit suicide. His search for love and his sexuality ends tragically.

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Questions??

What major historical event occurred in this book?

Does being different justify a persons insecurities?

Can people look at people and just see the person not their appearance?

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Magic and Fantasy

Yunior likes Caribbean history using stories in science fiction and fantasy; he shows us the introduction of the fukú curse. "Legend claims, fuku arrived in the Caribbean with the first slaves brought from Africa to work on the European colonial plantations there. The fukú curse has haunted the island nations of the Caribbean ever since allegedly. Junot uses Yunior to explain fukú as a legend; Yunior tries to demonstrate the reality of forced violence that characterizes Dominican history. He points out the brutal Trujillo regime that frightens the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961. "Yunior compares Trujillo to the most notorious science fiction and fantasy villains of all time, including the enormously evil Sauron from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.  As a living embodiment of evil, Trujillo seems to come straight from a science-fictional or fantasy universe. In these genres, however, the forces of evil rarely outlast the forces of good. Thus, by treating the Caribbean as a land of science fiction and fantasy, Yunior ultimately emphasizes the ability of Caribbean peoples to survive."

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The Plot

Oscar’s sister, mother, and grandfather disobeyed the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, which caused the family’s suffering. Oscar grew up in Paterson, New Jersey; he’s a Dominican-American who struggles to find community, identity, and love.  Distressed because of fuku, a curse of superstition that arrived from the first European in Hispaniola, was blamed for anything from the Yankees losing a ball game to an inability to have male children. Fukú is responsible for the death of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, and two of his three beautiful daughters, as well as the suffering of the much younger third daughter (Oscar’s mother).  The fukú that caused Oscar to go, crazy love, ended his short, lonely life. 

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Abelard Luis Cabral

Beli's father, Abelard Luis Cabral misfortune started the fukú curse that followed the next two generations. Abelard was honorable and had respect for his position in Dominican society. Abelard was trained in Mexico for his medical license when he returned to the Dominican Republic, he and married a nurse practitioner, and they opened a respected practice. Abelard being intelligent and could read in several languages, hosted at night a salon in his home.  Abelard ignored politics because he preferred his study and didn't worry about Trujillo and his cronies' crimes they committed.  Abelard's life changed forever when Trujillo began checking out his eldest daughter. Jacquelyn was beautiful like her mother, Abelard feared that Trujillo would rape his daughter.  Hiding Jacquelyn from Trujillo,  the Secret Police arrested him, saying he joked and insulted Trujillo.   Abelard's wife killed herself, and his eldest two daughters died mysteriously after his arrest. These tragic events marked Abelard's "Fall" and began the Cabral family curse, according to Yunior.

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Lola de León

Lola is Oscar's protective and loving older sister, and she's a tomboy in many ways, which complicated her relationship with her mother. They didn't have a great relationship and growing up, it got worse because of Lola's antagonistic ways during her teenage years, particularly after her mother's breast cancer diagnosis. Lola's mother's overbearing personality and her casual cruelty caused Lola to feel emotionally crushed. She also felt disempowered by her mother's.  Lola rebelled in an attempt to assert her own identity. She shaved her head and ran away with an older white boy. Oscar led her mother to her, and she was punished and then sent to live with a relative in the Dominican Republic. Lola was successful and proved to be athletic without her mother's insults. When Lola returned to New Jersey, her mother was still the same, mean and unforgiving, wanting to run away again. Lola wisely understood she could change only herself and not her mother. Lola changes and leaves Yunoir because of his cheating, but she is the only survivor and has a chance to lead the next generation of the de León family with her daughter.

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The Narrator Yunior

The narrator of the story is Yunior lives in New Jersey among a Dominican immigrant community. Junot Diaz says, "His writing includes a wide array of "low-brow" references to science fiction and fantasy as well as "high-brow" references to important figures in Caribbean literature, like Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant." Yunior is womanizing, macho jock who tries to be cool, but he is trying to represent Dominican masculinity, thinking he is charming and has swagger.  Yunior cheats on women and is not honest.  Yunior's fake personality is different from the real Yunior, an artist and a creative writer. Yunior is more committed to writing than to women.  Yunior can not figure out his true identity and what he wants in life—making mistakes causes him to mess up his relationships with Oscar and Lola. He wants redemption through writing, so he tells their family story to redeem himself for his past wrongs.

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Belicia de León (“Beli”)

Belicia de León, known as Beli, was Oscar and Lola's mother. Beli lived in Trujillo regime as she was growing up, causing her to experience lasting emotional and physical scars. Beli was the third daughter and her mother, a nurse, killed herself shortly after giving birth to her. The Cabral family was honorable but doomed. Her father, a surgeon, was in prison when she was born. As an orphaned infant, Beli was sold to a family in Azua by distant relatives. She worked as a child slave for nine years and suffered a terrible disfigurement when the family's father poured hot oil on her back. La Inca, her father's cousin, finds Beli, adopts her, and attempts to give her an upbringing worthy of her family's respectability. However, Beli was rebellious, and she got into trouble with a Dominican gangster. Beli left the Dominican Republic for New York, almost beaten to near death.  Her new life only exhausted her further. Abandoned by her partner to raise two children on her own, Beli spent the rest of her life working nonstop to support her family.

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Oscar de León (“Oscar Wao”)

Oscar is a Dominican boy who grew up in New Jersey with an overbearing mother and a protective sister. Oscar's self-confidence shrinks around age seven because he gains weight, he becomes quiet but he has a boyhood charisma. An adolescent, Oscar has an enthusiasm for science fiction and fantasy, which isolated him further from his peers. Oscar also felt increasingly alienated from his cultural heritage since he lacked the swagger of a stereotypical Dominican male. Oscar's loneliness worsens and leads to depression, and Oscar desires self-confidence and a sense of belonging more than anything else. He sought to achieve these feelings through meaningful relationships with women. But every woman Oscar fell in love with rejected him, sending him into spirals of sadness and suicidal thoughts. What he couldn't get from women he found in storytelling. By writing his science fiction and fantasy epics, Oscar has a creative way to change the course of his reality.  He eventually discovered a profound sense of self-confidence and acceptance in his relationship with Ybón, but he ultimately paid for this short-lived experience with his life.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This book is an intriguing story of Oscar, but he has not had an easy life; he is friendly and sweet but highly overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ—the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.  

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"Quote"

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz

According to GoodReads biography Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.