“The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao”

In the story, “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz he shows a superstition from Santo Domingo called “fukú”. I found it to be a bit hard because of the fact that there were a lot of Spanish or slang  words so I had to keep looking the words up to see what they actually mean. But as I kept reading I kind of started to enjoy it.  I guess it was because of how Diaz was telling the history of “fuku.” The focus begins on the culture of “Fuku” which is known to be a type of curse or bad luck especially in Santo Domingo later on revolves around the power that it has to control others. I started to really enjoy it because its kind of like a horror story, he claims, “but the fuku aint just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare.” (page 2) Diaz provided many examples of encounters with Fuku and thats really how the text had my full undivided attention. He said, “although you may not believe in Fuku it does exist, theres no way in escaping it and it works patiently  waiting for its next victim.” Made me start thinking about what else Fuku had the power of doing.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.