This is how you lose her

Review by New York Times Review

Junot Díaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it's practically an act of aggression, at once alarming and enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy: "Dude was figureando hard. Had always been a papi chulo, so of course he dove right back into the grip of his old sucias, snuck them down into the basement whether my mother was home or not." Breaking easily and often out of first-person narration to address his readers directly, Díaz flatters us with his confidences. Yet his prose also throws up walls, equally abruptly and equally seductively. Refusing to condescend or even pause for edification, the narrative moves along at speed, exciting us with its demands. This, then, is the Díaz rhythm: a syncopated stagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire. The Díaz dialect has been described as Spanglish, but the term is inapt, both because it implies a dominant perspective that all his work energetically counters and because it fails to suggest the variety of vernaculars he can tap. Sure, he spices his sofrito with a healthy helping of Spanish, but he's also fluent in the languages of hip-hop, sci-fi, nerd-dom, the drug culture and - lest you thought you had him pegged - the academy. Not to mention every permutation of every four-letter word you ever dreamed of, turbo-powered and torqued past compare. Oh: and he's so damn funny you might just fall out laughing as you read. His new collection, "This Is How You Lose Her," can stand on its own, but fans will be glad to hear that it brings back Yunior, who narrated several of the stories in Díaz's first collection, "Drown," as well as parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Yunior is a gorgeously full-blown character - half the time you want to comfort him, the other half you want to kick him in the pants - and at this point it just seems lame not to refer to him as Díaz's alter ego, so conspicuously do their biographies overlap. This time around, we revisit some of the same chronological territory as before, witnessing moments from Yunior's early years as well as tracking him further into a decidedly troubled (Yunior would use a more emphatic phrase) adulthood. By the final story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," Yunior, like Díaz, is an author and college professor living in Greater Boston (a locale he disses with devastating and hilarious accuracy). IN the new book, as previously, Díaz is almost too good for his own good. His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status. The book is billed as a collection of love stories, but for all the sexy bits and all the heartache, for all that four of the nine stories are named for lovers and eight of the nine revolve around relationships gone sour, Díaz is most affecting when he's writing about the inescapable undertow of family history and cultural mores, about the endless difficulty of loving oneself. In fact, he's always writing about these more elemental quandaries, exploring the way they carry over and undergird the challenges to romantic love. "Invierno." the collection's most subtly devastating story, unfurls an exquisite, threadbare tapestry of alienation. Yunior, along with his mother and older brother, Rafa, has just arrived in New Jersey from Santo Domingo, relocated by the father he barely knows. As the title indicates, it's wintertime. Papi won't let the boys out of their grim apartment, ostensibly because of the cold, "but really there was no reason other than that's what he wanted." While Papi is off at his factory job, Yunior and Rafa spend their time staring out at the vaguely malevolent snow or at the television, practicing the English they hear, repeating the words slowly for Mami's benefit, like "huge, lazy soap bubbles of sound." Yunior himself is encased within a kind of bubble - doubly, triply, multiply encased - separated from his new environs by paternal mandate, maternal timidity, unfamiliarity with the language and the frozen turf beyond the window panes, on which "beads of water gathered . . . like bees," obscuring the view. Even his hair cuts him off, having too much of "the African" in it. Papi hauls him to a special barber, a Puerto Rican who knows "just what to do with the pelo malo," but Yunior's hair defies even this maestro's repertoire of creams and skills. In the end, inevitably, and to Yunior's mortification, his head must be shaved. These ingredients alone would have made for a good story. Yet in the unshowy, breathtaking final pages, Díaz takes it to another level. Snow becomes the medium through which Mami and the boys finally trespass into the wider world as a nearby landfill is transformed into a curiously majestic landscape. "Rubbish fires burned all over it like sores and the dump trucks and bulldozers slept quietly and reverently at its base." Even Yunior's "cold, hard scalp" becomes an unexpected instrument of heightened perception, a means of communing with the strange and the new. Díaz makes brilliant use of the character of Yunior's big brother, Rafa, who tantalizes in several of these stories as a charismatic, funny, often cruel, occasionally kind and ultimately heartbreaking figure. We feel Yunior's hero worship, his helplessness and hatred and longing as he struggles against the realization that he and Rafa will never quite connect. "You should have seen him those days," Yunior tells us in one of his intimate asides, "he had the face bones of a saint." We feel, too, how Rafa haunts Yunior throughout his life, dogging him in his efforts to become a man. Male infidelity is a recurrent theme. In "Miss Lora," a teenage Yunior ponders his emergent lust in the context of Papi and Rafa's rutting ways. "You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself." Díaz also pays special attention to the intersection of sexual betrayal with the betrayal inflicted by our own language: many of these stories concern relationships that implode when a lover finds written evidence of Yunior's unfaithfulness. And Yunior isn't exactly blasé about the results. He berates himself and engages in marathon sulks. "The Cheater's Guide to Love" chronicles no less than five years of despondency following one such breakup. Why, then, you might wonder, commit the infidelities in the first place? And why leave the written records? The answer to the second question seems plain: Yunior, like his creator, is a born storyteller; his first loyalty may always be to setting down the right words to describe his experiences. As for the first question, who knows? Could it be that Yunior is just a sucio? Or maybe Díaz means to suggest that it's human nature to be divided against ourselves, that we are all on some level conflicted, displaced creatures, making our way within the diaspora of the human heart. Junot Díaz is fluent in the languages of hip-hop, sci-fi, nerd-dom, the drug culture - and the academy. Leah Hager Cohen's latest novel, "The Grief of Others," has just been published in paperback.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 23, 2012]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Diaz continues to keep company with his alter ego, Yunior, a Dominican turned New Jerseyan, in his second short story collection. Drown (1996), his first, introduced Yunior and established Diaz as a writer of promise. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), won the Pulitzer Prize and galvanized a world of new readers. Diaz's standout fiction remains pinpoint, sinuous, gutsy, and imaginative. Yunior kicks things off by stating, I'm not a bad guy. The women in his life would caustically disagree. We see Yunior as a boy new to America and his long-absent father's temper, a teenager and college student forever infatuated and forever cheating, and a lonely adult confronted by aggressive racism. Each taut tale of unrequited and betrayed love and family crises is electric with passionate observations and off-the-charts emotional and social intelligence. Diaz's involving, diverse characters include Yunior's combative brother Rafa, Magda the coldhearted, Nilda the young man-magnet, and a sexy older woman. Fast paced, unflinching, complexly funny, street-talking tough, perfectly made, and deeply sensitive, Diaz's gripping stories unveil lives shadowed by prejudice and poverty and bereft of reliable love and trust. These are precarious, unappreciated, precious lives in which intimacy is a lost art, masculinity a parody, and kindness, reason, and hope struggle to survive like seedlings in a war zone. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Diaz, as compelling in person as on the page, will connect with his large and loyal readership via a national author tour, extensive media interviews, and a social media campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pulitzer Prize-winner Diaz delivers a collection of linked short stories that focus on love and the challenges it brings Dominican men grappling with their heritage, socioeconomic status, the legacy of machismo, and modern women. As a reader, Diaz delivers a winning performance; his narration is clear, nuanced, and true to the text, his voice as engaging and confident as that of any professional narrator. Diaz's reading ably captures the emotional states of his characters, his voice conveying all the humor, sorrow, and anger of the prose. Additionally, he lends his characters a host of subtle accents and dialects-each one distinct and appropriate to their background. This is a must listen for fans of the short story. A Riverhead hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The latest work since the author's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains nine short stories linked by a common narrator whose tales of love won but mostly lost are recounted with macho bravado. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

From the author of Drown (1996), more tales of Dominican life in the cold, unwelcoming United States. Eight of the collection's nine stories center on Yunior, who shares some of his creator's back story. Brought from the Dominican Republic as a kid by his father, he grows up uneasily in New Jersey, escaping the neighborhood career options of manual labor and drug dealing to become an academic and fiction writer. What Yunior can't escape is what his mother and various girlfriends see as the Dominican man's insatiable need to cheat. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, resisting the temptation to turn interconnected tales into a novel by default, but it has a depressingly unified theme: Over and over, a fiery woman walks when she learns Yunior can't be true, and he pines fruitlessly over his loss. He's got a lot of other baggage to deal with as well: His older brother Rafa dies of cancer; a flashback to the family's arrival in the U.S. shows his father--who later runs off with another woman--to be a rigid, controlling, frequently brutal disciplinarian; and Yunior graduates from youthful drug use to severe health issues. These grim particulars are leavened by Daz's magnificent prose, an exuberant rendering of the driving rhythms and juicy Spanglish vocabulary of immigrant speech. Still, all that penitent machismo gets irksome, perhaps for the author as well, since the collection's most moving story leaves Yunior behind for a female narrator. Yasmin works in the laundry of St. Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick; her married lover has left his wife behind in Santo Domingo and plans to buy a house for him and Yasmin. Told in quiet, weary prose, "Otravida, Otra Vez" offers a counterpoint to Yunior's turbulent wanderings with its gentle portrait of a woman quietly enduring as best she can. Not as ambitious as Daz's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and morally challenging.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Year 0        Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she's your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won't matter.) She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but as you're a totally batshit cuero who didn't ever empty his e­mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six­-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn . Maybe if you'd been engaged to a super open-minded blanquita you could have survived it--but you're not engaged to a super open­minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad­ass salcedeña who doesn't believe in open anything; in fact the one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating . I'll put a machete in you, she promised. And of course you swore you wouldn't do it. You swore you wouldn't. You swore you wouldn't.       And you did.       She'll stick around for a few months because you dated for a long long time. Because you went through much together--her father's death, your tenure madness, her bar exam (passed on the third attempt). And because love, real love, is not so easily shed. Over a tortured six-­month period you will fly to the DR, to Mexico (for the funeral of a friend), to New Zealand. You will walk the beach where they filmed The Piano , something she's always wanted to do, and now, in penitent desperation, you give it to her. She is immensely sad on that beach and she walks up and down the shining sand alone, bare feet in the freezing water, and when you try to hug her she says, Don't . She stares at the rocks jutting out of the water, the wind taking her hair straight back. On the ride back to the hotel, up through those wild steeps, you pick up a pair of hitchhikers, a couple, so mixed it's ridiculous, and so giddy with love that you almost throw them out the car. She says nothing. Later, in the hotel, she will cry.       You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you're a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e­mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always swore you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak--­It was the book! It was the pressure!--­and every hour like clockwork you say that you're so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more , and, Ya , and you will have to move from the Harlem apartment that you two have shared. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say won't go. But in the end you do.       For a while you haunt the city, like a two­-bit ballplayer dreaming of a call-­up. You phone her every day and leave messages, which she doesn't answer. You write her long sensitive letters, which she returns unopened. You even show up at her apartment at odd hours and at her job downtown until finally her little sister calls you, the one who was always on your side, and she makes it plain: If you try to contact my sister again she's going to put a restraining order on you.       For some Negroes that wouldn't mean shit.       But you ain't that kind of Negro.       You stop. You move back to Boston. You never see her again.  Year 1        At first you pretend it don't matter. You harbored a lot of grievances against her anyway. Yes you did! She didn't give good head, you hated the fuzz on her cheeks, she never waxed her pussy, she never cleaned up around the apartment, etc. For a few weeks you almost believe it. Of course you go back to smoking, to drinking, you drop the therapist and the sex addict groups and you run around with the sluts like it's the good old days, like nothing has happened.       I'm back, you say to your boys.       Elvis laughs. It's almost like you never left.       You're good for like a week. Then your moods become erratic. One minute you have to stop yourself from jumping in the car and driving to see her and the next you're calling a sucia and saying, You're the one I always wanted. You start losing your temper with friends, with students, with colleagues. You cry every time you hear Monchy and Alexandra, her favorite.       Boston, where you never wanted to live, where you feel you've been exiled to, becomes a serious problem. You have trouble adjusting to it full­time; to its trains that stop running at midnight, to the glumness of its inhabitants, to its startling lack of Sichuan food. Almost on cue a lot of racist shit starts happening. Maybe it was always there, maybe you've become more sensitive after all your time in NYC. White people pull up at traffic lights and scream at you with a hideous rage, like you nearly ran over their mothers. It's fucking scary. Before you can figure out what the fuck is going on they flip you the bird and peel out. It happens again and again. Security follows you in stores and every time you step on Harvard property you're asked for ID. Three times, drunk whitedudes try to pick fights with you in different parts of the city.       You take it all very personally. I hope someone drops a fucking bomb on this city, you rant. This is why no people of color want to live here. Why all my black and Latino students leave as soon as they can.       Elvis says nothing. He was born and raised in Jamaica Plain, knows that trying to defend Boston from uncool is like blocking a bullet with a slice of bread. Are you OK? he asks finally.       I'm dandy, you say. Mejor que nunca.       Except you're not. You've lost all the mutual friends you had in NYC (they went to her), your mother won't speak to you after what happened (she liked the fiancée better than she liked you), and you're feeling terribly guilty and terribly alone. You keep writing letters to her, waiting for the day that you can hand them to her. You also keep fucking everything that moves. Thanksgiving you end up having to spend in your apartment because you can't face your mom and the idea of other people's charity makes you furious. The ex, as you're now calling her, always cooked: a turkey, a chicken, a pernil. Set aside all the wings for you. That night you drink yourself into a stupor, spend two days recovering.       You figure that's as bad as it gets. You figure wrong. During finals a depression rolls over you, so profound you doubt there is a name for it. It feels like you're being slowly pincered apart, atom by atom.       You stop hitting the gym or going out for drinks; you stop shaving or washing your clothes; in fact, you stop doing almost everything. Your friends begin to worry about you, and they are not exactly the worrying types. I'm OK, you tell them, but with each passing week the depression darkens. You try to describe it. Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul. Elvis sits shivah with you in the apartment; he pats you on the shoulder, tells you to take it easy. Four years earlier Elvis had a Humvee blow up on him on a highway outside of Baghdad. The burning wreckage pinned him for what felt like a week, so he knows a little about pain. His back and buttocks and right arm so scarred up that even you, Mr. Hard Nose, can't look at them. Breathe, he tells you. You breathe nonstop, like a marathon runner, but it doesn't help. Your little letters become more and more pathetic. Please , you write. Please come back . You have dreams where she's talking to you like in the old days--­in that sweet Spanish of the Cibao, no sign of rage, of disappointment. And then you wake up.       You stop sleeping, and some night when you're drunk and alone you have a wacky impulse to open the window of your ­fifth-­floor apartment and leap down to the street. If it wasn't for a couple of things you probably would have done it, too. But (a) you ain't the killing­yourself type; (b) your boy Elvis keeps a strong eye on you--­he's over all the time, stands by the window as if he knows what you're thinking. And (c) you have this ridiculous hope that maybe one day she will forgive you.       She doesn't. From This is How You Lose Her © September 2012 by Junot Diaz, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher. Excerpted from This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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