The title of this post takes the words “great wars” from the epigraph to the book, a quote from Sandra Cisneros.
“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her.”
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz’s new book of short stories, takes it title from this ending to a story about Yunior, a Dominican guy whose love life this book sort of traces. It’s a book about the confluence of errors that it takes to learn how to treat people, or, what love looks like when it’s you doing the loving.
The words “this is how you lose her” might seem abrupt for a story’s ending, but no story here is an island. They come together as a book to do what many consider the work of a novel: they chronicle a change in a person. Many of these stories, for that matter, use the pronoun “you” to refer to Yunior, making the change seem all the more relevant, as you cannot possibly prepare for the shock of every instance of the word.
You.
Me?
You.
It’s pretty deep, but don’t be scared.
There are lines that mimic very real, day-to-day speech, and much of the dialogue uses an approachable vernacular—much of it Spanish, Spanglish, probably Dominican, and it all fits seamlessly. The stories are natural, yet they won’t leave you gagging by page four with gratuitous cussing. They just do what they have to do. Each story ends where it wants to. I think that the jacket artist and designer, Rodrigo Corral, captures the grace with which each story allows part of its meaning to be told in the negative space.
I first encountered a story from this book called “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” in the July 23rd issue of The New Yorker. All I knew up that point were the wonderful things I’d heard about Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is clear that the story was chosen for The New Yorker not because it is the “best” story or for its length, but for its fullness and clarity of the character’s story, despite a fragmented narrative movement. This is representative of the book as a whole. Perhaps Díaz began writing, in both the case of the novel and this book of stories, from the same starting point: the character. It is a patient but uncensored examination of the character’s decisions and how they affect the people around him, and himself, through time.
There is also an expatriate worldview in the pages of this book that reminds me of that of Hemingway’s war-torn characters. But, redeeming the suffering and confusion, there is a somehow optimistic, 21st-century outlook on love and identity. Yunior is an expatriate Dominican guy in the black-and-white U.S., who has to learn that, in love and all things, you can’t just wake up one day and find yourself—you create the person that you are.
Read on.
You will like this if you liked/reminds me of: Rick Moody’s Demonology, Denis Johnson, Spanish/Spanglish, Dominican Republic, love and relationship stories.
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, $26.95, Riverhead Books.
Signed copies available at the store.
by Whitney
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