This is How You Lose Her
See the post on the Bookgeeks website here
Junot Diaz is one of contemporary America’s most engaging writers and his latest work is a warm, compellingly written collection of love letters to betrayed girlfriends and elegies to past selves.
The stories are held together by the confident, playful narrative of Yunior, a Dominican in New York who has featured in two of Diaz’s previous books; he and his “boys” are cheaters and chancers, but the verve and wit with which their stories are told makes them bounce off the page. However, the loss in the book’s title doesn’t just refer to lovers. Themes of loneliness and apathy are woven throughout and as the collection moves on, we see even the proudest men become fragile.
Yunior’s voice is a rich mix of influences, deliciously peppered with Dominican slang and darting back and forth to recall fragments of memory that fit together to create a patchy narrative. In this way they resemble the photographs his older lover plasters over her wall in ‘Miss Lora’.“It was an OK life”, she says, with a resignation typical of the collection as a whole. “All things considered.”
These are stories of lives gone awry, of choosing passion over pragmatism and falling into bad habits or seedy affairs. In ‘Otravida, Otravez’, a quiet, subtly moving story, a young woman now wised-up to the immigrant experience reflects that when she first moved to New York, she “was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart”. Now, she is in the middle of an arduous house hunt with a man who has a wife and son in the Dominican Republic.
He’s not the only one who has left something behind. The tales here are too universal to be only about the immigrant experience, but many of the characters are caught between their home country and the US. ‘Invierno’ tells of Yunior and his brother’s first few months in New York. Their father forbids them to go outside, so they have to watch the snow from their windows with a mixture of awe and bewilderment, reflecting a broader detachment from their new environment. The run-down housing estate in which many of the stories are set is similarly far from the heart of the action, with the bright lights of New York City far away on the horizon.
Yunior’s mother remains isolated in part because she never learns the language after her domineering husband, a “sucio” like her sons, tells her, “It’s best if I take care of the English”. But the syncretism of Yunior’s rhythmic, flowing narrative voice enables him to straddle both worlds and marks him as a master of his heritage.
It’s this narrative voice that makes the book compelling whether it’s tackling the banality of serial cheating or themes of loneliness and poverty through the sad, quiet characters at the periphery of Yunior’s vision. He makes flawed choices repeatedly, and so do most of those around him. But the way the stories are told makes it impossible not to want to be taken along for the ride.
Samantha Cox 