After starting to read at least three new books and not getting more than twenty pages into any one of them, I thought maybe what I needed was a collection of short stories. I have not read Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” but I thought I would try his newest book “This Is How You Lose Her.”
I have only read the first two short stories, but I am fairly certain that they are indicative of the others. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic. He uses his background and his native language, Spanish, to create the men and women in these stories. His prose is beautifully crafted and peppered generously with Spanish words and phrases. His characters are very real. These are people who know their New Jersey neighborhoods very well. Some have made it beyond the ghettos; others never will.
In the two stories that I have read so far, the women are loved and lost by the main character Yunior. In the first story “The Sun, the Moon and the Stars,” he tries every way he knows to convince Magda that he loves her. However, she finds he has cheated on her, and Magda concludes that he cheated because he was Dominican and that “all Dominican men are dogs.” In “Nilda” a younger Yunior falls in love with his older brother’s girlfriend. She moves in and out of his life. Eventually, he goes to college, and they never meet again.
These are not “pretty” stories. They are born of the streets and created by a man who is connected to that life.