The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz is an encyclopaedic novel that presents itself as having much to say about history, literature, popular culture, and the experience of exile. As one might expect from such a wide-ranging yet oblique novel, it invites numerous types of readings. Among them, the most literalist approach is one that takes Díaz's plot on its own tragicomic terms, seeing it as the pathetic story of a Dominican-American science fiction-obsessed ‘nerd’ named Oscar De León and the two previous generations of his family. The novel offers a fragmented account of how these three generations directly or indirectly suffered the events of Rafael Trujillo's rule—that is the period between 1930 and 1961, commonly known as the Trujillato. Told through the perspectives of the narrator (Yunior) and Oscar's sister Lola (Yunior's onetime girlfriend), one thread recounts the downfall of Oscar's grandfather, Abelard Luis Cabral, who in the 1940s tried to keep the lustful dictator Trujillo away from one of his adolescent daughters. Oscar Wao also narrates the dramatic history of Abelard's youngest daughter, Hypatía Belicia Cabral, who flees the Dominican Republic after being nearly killed for having an affair with a man who was married to Trujillo's sister. The bulk of the novel recounts the life of the hardened Belicia and her two children, Lola and Oscar, after she migrates to the USA during the high point of Dominican diaspora, a trend that was spurred by the lifting of restrictions on travel during Joaquín Balaguer's rule in the 1960s. The family's ‘eternal return’ (296) to disaster culminates in Oscar's murder in 1995. Like his mother, he had fallen in love with the wrong person, in his case a prostitute named Ybón, whose boyfriend was a corrupt captain in the Santo Domingo police force. Yunior, the narrator whose identity is revealed well into the narrative, gives himself the difficult task of piecing together the family's history.