There are lots of reasons why this novel shouldn’t work: the liberal use of colloquial Spanish throughout the text; the extensive footnotes going in to intricate detail about the history of the Dominican Republic; the constant geeky references to Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, Dungeons & Dragons, Dune and other touchstones of nerdiness. Yet work it does – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may sound like it’s set on following a central character, but in actual fact Oscar is only part of the story, the logical outcome of the life experiences of three generations from the Dominican Republic, and possibly of the fuku, or curse, that they think affects not just them but their entire people.

It’s disturbingly easy to characterise the whole of Latin America during most of the 20th century as the land of tinpot dictators, banana republics, death squads and rampant corruption – which is to say that it’s also easy to lose sight of what that means for just one country, or just one family. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, was ruled by the vain, womanising, brutal military strongman Rafael Trujillo from 1930 until his assassination in 1961 – tolerated by the Americans, for whom anything was preferable to a Cuban-style socialist regime, and then ultimately killed at their instigation. The reign of terror, the secret police, the political murders, the genocidal campaign against Haitians along the shared border – it all adds up to one of the nastiest regimes of the 20th century, yet ironically not one that many people will have heard of. It is this land, and this era in particular, that have shaped the worldview of Dominicans like Junot Diaz and like the family whose life he describes.

There’s Oscar himself, a second generation emigrant, living in New Jersey, along with his sister, Lola; there’s his mother, who bears deep scars both physical and emotional as a result of her experiences in her homeland; there’s his great-aunt, La Inca, who still lives in the Dominican Republic, and who has witnessed at first hand many of the worst execesses of the Trujillo regime; and there are his maternal grandparents, never known by Oscar or even by his mother. The tale is recounted by Yunior, sometime-boyfriend of Lola and room-mate of Oscar the classic nerd – overweight, obsessed with science fiction and fantasy of all kinds, and as the product of both America and his homeland, he is truly happy in neither, principally because of his complete lack of appeal to the opposite sex.

That Oscar’s life is brief is clear from the title: his tragic end a culmination of the corruption and violence that persists in the Dominican Republic long after the passing of Trujillo (who has has clearly poisoned many facets of the lives of his people), coupled with his own peculiar singlemindedness. The fates that befell his mother and grandparents before him are no less tragic – and it leads one to wonder whether there is indeed a curse at work – or whether a whole family, a whole nation, have used the notion of a fuku to abdicate responsibility for making the best choices they could have made. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is warm, funny, luminous and sad, and comes highly recommended.

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