I did not like this book.
It starts off as this overview of Oscar (not Oscar Wao, as you would have thought, which is eventually revealed to be a taunting nickname based off of Oscar Wilde), spoken (as I listened to the audio book rather than reading the actual novel) off this unknown presenter. It would later be revealed to be Oscar's roommate at college Yunior, who would also date Oscar's sister for a short time. Anyway, there's this curse called fuku in Dominican culture and Oscar is sure that his family suffers from this curse, and then explains that he knows that he has this curse because when he was in primary school he dated two girls at the same time. The more beautiful of the girls was jealous and made him dump the other girl (who was literally the female version of Oscar and should he just have dated her on her own in the first place, I feel like none of this novel would have been written and Oscar and this other girl would have been happy together but...), only to be dumped the next day by the girl. Oscar would grow up to be overweight and a nerd, essentially, which meant that he wasn't the greatest at dating. The beautiful girl would grow up and continued dating jocks and abusive men, while the less attractive girl grew up to be overweight and a nerd, like Oscar. This apparently shows that all three are under the curse of fuku. This idea of fuku is an overarching plot line throughout the novel, stretching over all of Oscar's family (himself, his mother and his sister).
After a few chapters, it changes from Yunior talking about Oscar and instead focuses on Lola (Oscar's sister) talking about her strained relationship with their mother, Beli. I thought that the change in narrator was a nice touch, foreshadowing Lola and Yunior's future romance and closeness. Other than that, I didn't really get it. Was it just to show that she too suffered the curse of the fuku? Lola ran off from her mothers due to emotional abuse and lived with her boyfriend and his father, who hated both his son and Lola. She hoped to make a life for herself far away from Beli and be successful. In a moment of homesickness she calls Oscar who leads their mother directly to her. While she detests this, she is trapped by her mother and stays with her family. After (SPOILERS) Oscar dies at the end of the novel, Lola married and had a daughter that Yunior wishes was his, and hopes is smart enough to overcome fuku by coming to him and asking about her great-grandfather, grandmother and uncle.
After Lola's short interlude, the narration turns towards Beli's time in the Dominican Republic as a child. She was one of three children, the daughter of a doctor who was imprisoned under the rule of Trujillo, a dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic. Beli lived with her aunt after her mother and two sisters had died. Wishing to get away, she fell in love with a man known only as Gangster. This is to her detriment however as he was married to Trujillo's sister; Beli is taken to a sugar cane field and is beaten half to death. This is later mirrored by Oscar, and emphasized the cultural heritage of the cane fields in the Dominican Republic; Spain built an empire on the sugar fields and plantations and in this novel, they are used as metaphors for the brutality and oppression suffered by the Dominican Republic by the Spanish Empire. Following this, Beli is sent to New Jersey by her aunt, and she falls in love with a man there. He however, only stayed long enough to have conceived Lola and Oscar before leaving, showing that the fuku curse did indeed run in the family.
However, I did not feel like this section, which seemed to take over half of the book, was truly needed in the novel. The novel was supposed to be about the short life of Oscar, and he was not part of the book for the majority. If it was needed in the novel, I didn't really understand the significance of the section other than Beli's father is how the fuku curse started in the family.
The narration then returns to Oscar; he graduates Rutgers University where he met Yunior, and tags along with his family on their annual summer holiday to the Dominican Republic.Oscar's fuku curse comes in the term that he wants to lose his virginity and fall in love. Oscar does love in love in the Dominican Republic with a middle aged prostitute called Ybon, Ybon is dating the police captain, and is abused by him. Oscar spends time with Ybon before the Captain sends his lower downs to beat Oscar up, which they do in a sugar cane field, mirroring his mother from earlier in the novel. Beli reacts to this by returning Oscar to New Jersey.
However, Oscar can't let go of Ybon, and borrowing money from Yunior, returns to Ybon. He spends (I think?) a month in the Dominican Republic before Ybon relents and has sex with him. They are caught by the Captain, who has his men shoot Oscar. Oscar dies.
A while later, Lola receives a letter sent through the post by Oscar before he died, explaining that he finally got to experience the little intimacies of love and that he is happy. This effectively means that the fuku curse was broken, I think. Except for Beli, who dies a year or so after Oscar from her returning breast cancer. Lola married a man and had a daughter in Miami before moving back to New Jersey. Yunior teaches and is also married. He harbors the hope that he and Lola would get back together, but if they meet up in the street, they only ever talk about Oscar.
Overall, I seriously struggled with this book. Maybe it was the awkward story line, the constant time jumping, the changing narrators, the sudden change in language between English and Spanish, maybe it was a combination of all of it, but I really did not enjoy this book. Most of the way through I really wished that I could have just left it, but I had to know how it ended, which is why I finished it in the end. I don't feel like it was worth it.
Rating = 1 / 5 stars.
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