Review of This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, is the ultimate recipe for getting your ass kicked and dumped by your girlfriend. The main character of the short story collection, presumably Díaz’s alter ego, Yunior, who also appeared in Drown, a short story collection written in 1997 and in the author’s only novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, walks the reader through a battlefield of lyrical storytelling about what it’s truly like to be a Dominican man in the United States. The narrative voice so vividly honest, it reads more like a confession than fiction.

The first story in the collection, “The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars,” first published in the New Yorker in 1998, is written from the perspective of Yunior, a young man who cheats on his girlfriend Magda. Of course, Yunior doesn’t tell her about his infidelity, his lover is the one who confesses it to Madga. The relationship continues only because of the main character’s pleading, but the relationship would never be the same. Yunior’s best thinking takes the two on a vacation to Santo Domingo. Instead of basking in the delight of barrio lifestyle with his “abuelo and his campo hands,” Magda, is portrayed as an Americanized Cuban who would rather stay at a resort in the DR than see life as it really is. No matter how much Yunior tries to make this relationship last, the two are too fundamentally different to be together—Yunior is too rooted in his life as a stereotypical machista, a melancholic being who constantly dreams of his real home to be involved with a woman that takes her heritage for granted.

“Otravida, Otravez” is another well-crafted piece in the collection. The author or the protagonist of this piece has flung us into this story en medias res, without any backstory or context—the reader is put an active position of trying to unravel what’s going on. The story has no connection with Yunior and his brother Rafa (aside from the fact that the woman’s lover is Yunior and Rafa’s father, Ramón before the boys moved to the States), yet it is plopped in the middle as if somehow, the woman telling this story is connected to the brothers by simply sharing a country and its many unknown (to the people that have never been to the DR) characteristics. The story also serves to provide the reader with the glimpse of Ramón’s life in a foreign country before he sends for his family.

Like Yunior and Rafa, the protagonist in “Otravida, Otravez” is distant with her lover Ramón, which is remarkable in and of itself because she breaks free from the role Latin America give women—that they crave love and attention from their men. But this woman is not like that—her only desire in life is to survive, to never go back to the Dominican Republic. The protagonist works at St. Peter’s Hospital, doing laundry for patients who stain the sheets with gallons of blood: “I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying” (55). There is great detail surrounding the daily task—sheet stains as the epidemic of the sick and dying—of AIDS, of people dying as this woman only observes, doing nothing, commenting nothing about these daily scenes, she just wants to survive:  “You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says” (55). The dialogue between the two is short and straight to the point—Ramón and the protagonist don’t talk in circles like dialogue is suggested it be written in writing workshops. The narrator treats Ramón as she treats the blood-stained dying patients at the hospital—at arm’s length. Díaz uses minimalistic descriptions to describe an extremely mundane job and converts it into an employment worth seeking and finally obtaining.  

“ ‘Each building has its own laundry room,’ Papi explained” (121) and Mami goes along with it, trying to make the comment, the situation run smoothly across her family’s expression. Like Call Centers in Nicaragua or for Nicaraguans, buildings containing their own laundry room represent success to this Dominican family; to some it might even represent the American Dream.  There is no other, subtler way to say it better than Yunior: “This was our first day in the States” (121) in “Invierno.” These eight words convey so many questions and stories behind each letter that as a reader, it’s better to accept its no-context directness, move on, and swallow hard ‘till the end. The stories jump around out of sequence, because in this piece, Yunior is only about seven years old, compared to the first story of the collection, where we read a narrative by a Yunior who has already completed an undergraduate degree. This is the pivotal moment, where the reader gets to see the influence of a deep-rooted machismo first hand. To Yunior, “a father is a hard thing to compass,” therefore, this story is not about his thoughts about his father’s behavior, but simply an observation. It is important to note that “Invierno” is written in the present about the past in the perspective of a child. No matter how street-smart Yunior and Rafa are intellectually, seven year-old children can’t understand what gender oppression is and can’t possibly understand that their Mami is suffering in her own solitary enclosure. This woman must walk through the snow in a straight line in order to escape into the future, where she will be stuck with two adult men that will be exact replicas of their father; one constructing a formula to lose all the women of his life while the other slowly but surely dies alone.

"In the Bodies of Previous Occupants": A Lit Mag Looks at Architecture--From The Review Review

Rating: Three Stars

Whether we are surrounded by a four wall enclosure inside one of Louis Sullivan’s creations or in a tightly compressed studio apartment in downtown Chicago, the structure that make up these rooms come alive and will continue to outlive us throughout history. MAKE’s Architectural 2013 Issue: Now we’re in the bodies of the previous occupants is dedicated to Chicago’s longstanding architecture and the people that inhabit these buildings on a day-to-day basis.The interviews, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art are printed in MAKE’s Spring Issue #12 for the purposes of humanizing architectural compounds. Buildings are beings that are shaped by our own perceptions of ourselves, by the way we might place our stack of books on a hard wood floor on the edges of each wall space, or the way we might throw a tattered copy of Fifty Shades of Grey across a living room, leaving a dent on our whitewashed wall. A building must settle in with our needs and wants. It must suffer with us when our walls become yellowed by our constant, anxious smoking at 3AM, or the excruciating August heat.

John O’Toole’s unwillingness to comply with his wife, Mary’s desire to put a chain link fence in their house, demonstrates the protagonist’s desire to keep his only possession pure in Erin O’ Sullivan’s fiction piece, “Chain-o-Link.” The Jencho boys bulldoze through front yards as they toss their football across what seems like everyone’s property but their own, and Mary and all the other wives on the block despise them.

John is a Korean War vet who recently moved to a Chicago suburb with Mary and their son Mikey. He envies his howdy-greetin’ neighbor Bob because unlike him, Bob actually has a handful of war stories to share at get-togethers. The man actually did something. The only upgrade John got in the army, was to be deployed to Missouri. John craves the mindset of a Post-Traumatic; instead, he’s forced to be surrounded by neighbors that don’t seem to notice that their soon-to-be-caged fences will take away the innocence of two boys who are simply doing what young boys are supposed to do. To the protagonist, a fenceless house means freedom. It represents a world without boundaries and aesthetic symmetry within the confines of a house.

Other stories in MAKE’s 12th Issue take on the task of further personalizing objects, like Tovah Burnstein’s nonfiction piece, “Other People’s Wigs: Buying a New Life at Estate Sales.” Burstein flings us into the first estate sale in a 1960s “sitcom house in Wisconsin,” whose “second floor was decorated for three perfect sitcom daughters: a pink room, a yellow room, and a blue room, each with a canopy bed and matching upholstery.” It’s not difficult to imagine, the owner of the house—an old woman that hasn’t been to the grocery store in decades—with her three daughters, helping their mother pin oddly shaped wigs on her thinning hairline. The wigs are sold at $50 a piece, memories included.

The fiction and nonfiction pieces in the magazine’s spring 2013 issue did the architecturally themed concept justice. Amy Yoes’ silver gelatin prints demonstrate the life of buildings without inhabitants—grayish death tones, places left to rot.

The issue, however, lacks proper formatting. Genre labels are present in the table of contents, but not within the pages that follow. Though this is standard form in many literary magazines, it makes for disruptive reading. One must constantly refer back to the table of contents to know what is what. Worse, some of the pieces are not numbered correctly. In the contents, Randa Jarrar’s short story “Building Girls” is said to be on page thirty-three, but is really on page seventy. There are six other pieces with this same error. 

One of the most eye-catching fiction pieces in this issue is Jarrar’s story, which takes place in a summer home in Egypt. Jarrar’s syntax is flawless:

My father’s skin is black like the street on which the summer children play soccer, and his teeth are white and gleaming, with the occasional cavities, so they look like the soccer balls. He runs errands for the women who don’t have their husbands with them, or whose husbands are lazy; I sometimes see the women blush when Father talks to them because he is unbearably handsome.

“Building Girls” is written in first person point of view from Aisha’s perspective whose routine, quotidian life manifests itself into an exquisite mixture of language and detail. Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to get to know this character after the first two paragraphs—the place where MAKE’s editors seem to have mistakenly duplicated the author’s first two paragraphs in one page. It's possible this repetition was the author's intention, yet “Building Girls” is not experimental and similar repetition is not seen anywhere else in the story.

“Know When to Shut Up: A Q & A with Chicago’s Official Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson” placed several pages into the lit mag is decorated with a considerable amount of photographs taken from Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building at the Roosevelt University, Samuelson’s ultimate structure. The images are the only reference the reader obtains from the interview. It would have been nice to see Samuelson provide a more detailed account of the reason Sullivan’s Auditorium has impacted his life, or else to see photographs with greater detail in precision.

Despite these oversights, MAKE is a good starting off lit mag for current creative writing undergraduates that want to get into the habit of reading something other than literary classics or for writers whose work has never been published before. MAKE is the perfect magazine to send your name off into the sometimes overwhelming literary world.

Here's the link for this review: http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/bodies-previous-occupants-lit-mag-looks-architecture