So I wrote a review for The Lumière Reader. Usually I review for Booksellers NZ, and usually I stick to non-fiction because it's just what I really like. But I starting volunteering for Lumière, and when asked to review a book of short stories, I figured, why not? So This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz was given, I read, and I reviewed. And I found it harder than I expected. But it was finished, and it was published yesterday.And here it is:
This is How You
Lose Her
Pulitzer
Prize winner Junot Díaz on the power of love.
Take a professor from MIT, one who has previously won a Pulitzer Prize and was the recipient of a
Genius grant, give him five years, and what will he produce? A collection of
short stories based around the universal—and unexpected—theme of love, and an
annoying feeling of wanting to know how much of this is based on his own life.
It’s been
five years since Junot Díaz’s last book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and only his third book overall. The
character of Yunior introduced in his first book, Drown, serves as the
narrator in Oscar Wao, and Diaz has stuck with him again for This Is
How You Lose her.
Comprising of
nine equally fantastic stories, Yunior tells us about the power and
impossibilities of the love he’s experienced. Yunior is a character we should
hate; everything he does just makes us want to yell at him. And yet I
sympathised with him, despite the voice in my head saying “he’s a dick.”
Although the opening of the book sets up what is to come over the collection of
stories, there’s still some great surprises to come. Yunior explains in the
opening story, ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars’: “I’m not a bad guy. I know how
that sounds—defensive, unscrupulous—but it’s true. I’m like everybody else:
weak, full of mistakes, but basically good. Magdalena disagrees though.” And
sure, we probably shouldn’t be rooting for him—after all, he makes the same
mistakes over and over—but as Yunior tries so hard to make things right, we
can’t help but side with the underdog.
What struck
me about This is How You Lose Her is the way Yunior lets us into his
life as though you’ve been talking smack with him for years. “You know how it
is,”, he says, as if nudging us in the arm after explaining his actions.
Suddenly we’re complicit in Yunior’s crimes. But not just his crimes: his
father’s, his brother’s. But then he turns, and Yunior bares his soul by
imagining the relationship between his father and mistress in New Jersey while
the rest of the family are back in Dominican Republic; and then again through
the love/hate relationship with his brother. This intimacy Díaz creates makes
us want to keep turning the pages, to find out whose crimes you’ll discover
this time, and who’s going to be hurt.
This intimacy
is fuelled by the changing narratives between stories. Díaz alternates between
first- and second-person narrative seamlessly and without hesitation. I was in
the shoes of Veronica when Yunior relays their love back to her in ‘Flaca’; I
was Yunior in ‘Miss Lora’, trying to figure out if getting involved with an
older lady is a smart idea, and then there I am again, the cheater, in ‘The
Cheater’s Guide to Love’—I don’t want to be, but it’s too late.
I used the
word unexpected to describe this theme of love because as we read, Yunior
guides us through different types of love. And these aren’t just his
female conquests; as the blurb explains, it’s about “passionate love, illicit
love, fading love, maternal love.” Diaz’s characters are human in a wonderfully
tragic way, from his descriptions of them, through to the way love makes them
act. Yunior introduces us to Pura in ‘The Pura Principle’, and explains that
she’s Dominican, “As in fresh-off-the-boat-didn’t-have-no-papers Dominican,”
and so she ends up in New Jersey with a kid, free-loading off anything she can
sink her claws in to. ‘The Cheater’s Guide to Love’ gives us Elvis, the
committed-to-his-family best friend of Yunior who’s sleeping with anything else
that moves on the side. While I’m not saying this is how the whole world acts,
Díaz captures something real about these characters, which begs the question
how many of these people feature, or have featured, in Díaz’s own life.
After such a
defensive opening and the realistic characters that feature, the nagging question
of what’s real and how much is dramatised is there. Yunior takes us into his
life, makes us a real part of it. But how much of it is a fictional character’s
life, or the author’s? Yunior has been referred to a quasi-autobiographical
character, after first appearing in the early 1990s. Recently in an interview
with the New York Times, Diaz stood for the duration of the interview
due to major back surgery; in ‘The Cheater’s Guide to Love’, Yunior discovers
he has a serious back problem. The more I researched Díaz, the more parallels I
began to draw, and the more I needed to know what was real and what wasn’t. But
after finishing the book, that feeling went away. While reading This is How
You Lose Her, everyone’s going to make up their own mind about Díaz and
Yunior, and their relationship. I like to believe it’s mostly real; I doubt
I’ll ever really know. And ultimately, everyone’s going to come away from these
stories knowing something more about themselves, their lives, their friends. I
have.
It takes some
seriously great writing to get me interested in fiction, and without a doubt
everyone needs to be following Junot Díaz. But have a Spanish to English
translator within reach while you read—it helps.
Original source of the review: http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/this-is-how-you-lose-her/
He's a rather facinating man, Díaz. Professor of Creative Writing at MIT, only written three books, two of which are novels, and still one of the biggest up-and-coming names in fiction.
I've been helping at Lumière with some proofreading and transcribing too. Check out the site, it's pretty choice.
I'm currently working on another review at the moment for Booksellers, will have it up in the next few weeks.
K.
