Don’t be fooled by the lack of book posts in here. I’ve read really good books this year and at some point in this tumultuous year in this Tumultuous Life I thought I would never read a book I wouldn’t love. This year was marked by ‘best book ever’ feelings and proclamations which usually last for a week. That is until I came to book #8 which was Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game and book #12 which was Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It wasn’t really their fault. In Patricia’s case, I may have started on the wrong Ripley book which left my insides unstirred (which rarely happens with her!), while for Virgie, it was the fault of the faulty, mis-scanned e-book, and myself, for not having the foresight to switch to a better version of the e-book rather than slogging through a shitty e-copy obtained from a source of disrepute, which, I realize now, I have no right to complain about. But as the great (young) Heather Mooney would say about the cigarettes she never gets to finish, what a waste!
Not that it matters but, should I die the next day, I would like the world to know that the last book I read and loved was This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. Of course I’m not going to die tomorrow because all my enemies are nowhere near me, and like Yunior, I’m not the killing-self type of guy, maybe.
I can barely remember what Drown was about, all I can remember is that it’s also structured like TIHYLH, with Yunior as the narrator/star. This is why it is very important to write down exactly what you love about a Junot Diaz because someday you might find yourself reading him again, very certain of your enjoyment of his work and not know exactly why and feeling like a true fool and an unreliable professor of love.
In This, hogging the spotlight is his brother Rafa who uses cancer to his great advantage. I can’t get through cancer stories without getting really very emotional which is why I decided that after season 1 of Breaking Bad, I’m done, why even though I have some sardonic feelings for John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars I still found it in my heart to appreciate its highly self-aware, ultra-witty teens who are all almost unbearably witty and articulate, for acting like Seth Cohen and think no one will notice, and getting back to the sardonic feelings and thinking that the feelings were not incorrect. In here, the becancered Rafa knocks Yunior out and it is a cause for hilarity. Best cancer story ever.
It may sometimes feel as if Yunior spends a lot of time navigating the legs of his girlfriends and side-bitches, but all of that are essential to the stories; all that sexing and side-bitching are sure to put an end to even the most hardcore relationships and Yunior is one horny, passionate motherfucker. This is a book about losing through the inescapable necessities and peculiarities of life. Stories about loses are, or should be, rife with sadness and drama, but Junot Diaz is not that kind of guy.
Even though I generally find his humor sublime despite not really getting all the pop culture, comics references and not understanding the Spanish slang (which he never bothers to translate, and why should he), I can’t help but think that if this were my first time to read him, I’d find characters who say things like ‘Bitch made Iggy Pop look chub’ a very poor attempt at either coolness or funniness. A line like that is in itself not funny, but the funniness here necessitates presence aka you have to be there. And so, Junot Diaz, is still for me a very funny person.
In George Orwell’s lengthy scrutiny of Charles Dickens, he says something about putting/imagining a writer’s face:
‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer… What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have… Well in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.’
If I were to give a face to Junot Diaz, it would have to be a sexy, mischievous face. It is a face attached to a desirable head, perched atop a towering, impressively built body with hills for chest and buns for days. Having heard about the author’s bad back, I know this imagining to be inaccurate, but that is the author I choose to have imprinted on my mind forever and I am not willing to entertain retaliations. When you feel like putting a face on an author you love, know that you’re entitled to it, the emblazoning of a face, in the same way that Michiko Kakutani is entitled to calling certain voices in fiction ‘limber, streetwise, CAFFEINATED, and wonderfully eclectic’.
This is How You Lose Her is my year’s second highest point because #1 is George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Congrats, This is How You Lose Her.
Pat Session 