Authentic reading: "This is How You Lose Her" by Junot Díaz

I am in serious debt to my book blog. It is almost a month since I listened to this (audio)book, and another, highly significant, book has passed since. So it's about time. 

I admit that this book was bought initially on the strength of something as banal as its length. I needed an audio book to accompany me on a drive  from Brussels to Cardiff, so something clocking under about seven hours. After that, the title caught my eye, then a snagged memory of reading a review somewhere recommending it. Hardly a choice based on fastidious literary criteria, but a felicitous one nonetheless. 

It may help that on the recording I bought this book is read by its author. The reader had to be intimate with the language and cadences of the Dominican community transplanted to the US, mostly in rough parts of New Jersey, for that language and those cadences are so much of the power of this short collection of stories. On the page, it might be a struggle, but Díaz brings the sentences to life, giving an authenticity - almost an extra character - to this inside view (told from various interlinking perspectives) of the often harsh life of the immigrants at the bottom of America's food chain. 

At the centre of the stories is a single character, albeit at very different stages of his life, Yunior, transplanted along with his mother and brother from the Caribbean to the unbelievable cold of a New York winter by a father he barely knows. In fits and starts, with some digressions via other characters on the margins of whose stories Yunior still hovers, the life of an individual and a community emerges. 


We root for Yunior, we have to. His life is tough. He starts out at the bottom of a pile which is itself at the bottom of a bigger pile called America. He is admittedly smart - albeit get-beaten-up kind of smart when he is young - and although this does ultimately lead him somewhere, it does not stop him screwing up monumentally and repeatedly in the way he says all Dominican men screw up, by being indiscriminately horny, serially unfaithful and utterly unable to build a relationship that lasts. This is how he loses her, again and again, literally and metaphorically. Sure, the Culture is against him: boys are wise-ass and macho, girls make the most of what they've got, men come and go, women try to hold it together. It's a world of hustle and make do, take what you can while you can, take casual tragedy in your stride, confront adversity with street-talk. But also of glimpses of how it could be better, family solidarity hidden in wisecracking banter, punctuations of joy, fleeting moments of tenderness, instants of joyful bravado. Ultimately, there might just be a way up and out, and we see Junior feeling his way towards it. Maybe he even gets there, sort of, in the end. 

Junot Díaz

Díaz manages to tell his stories, always in that fantastically evocative language, in an extraordinary range of registers. The stories are by turns elegiac, tragic, gleefully streetwise, downright sexy, bitter, hopeful... This could have been bland lad-lit or depressive political denunciation. Instead it has great breadth and humanity, it has wisdom, it has authenticity. Díaz knows this world, now we do too.