4 ideas
Oscar de León, an overweight, Tolkien-quoting Dominican American virgin from Paterson, falls in love with Ybón, an aging sex worker in Santo Domingo whose boyfriend is a police captain. He is beaten nearly to death in the canefields, returns to the island anyway, and is shot there after finally spending a few days with her, writing that he had at last known intimacy.
Fukú names a curse that feels supernatural but is really the lasting aftershock of colonial and dictatorial violence, carried forward in families as fear, silence, and self-destructive patterns. Its counterspell, zafa, is an act of witnessing: telling the story itself becomes the way to break the inheritance.
The narrator Yunior explains Trujillo through science fiction and fantasy references (Sauron, Darkseid, the Watchmen) because official history left gaps, 'páginas en blanco', where the regime erased records and witnesses. Genre gives him a working vocabulary for absolute evil and altered reality that realist history cannot provide, and the footnotes supply the suppressed history alongside the story.
The regime's deepest damage is the silence it trains into survivors: Beli never tells her children about her past, and the family's refusal to speak lets old terror shape new lives without anyone understanding why. Surviving an authoritarian state leaves a habit of not-knowing that the next generation inherits as an unexplained doom.