For
our second book review, we are distancing ourselves from the nineteenth-century
industrial novel, and moving forward to a contemporary text: Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (2012).
For
anyone who is unfamiliar with Junot Diaz and his work, I’ll offer a brief note
of biographical information. Diaz was born in Santa Domingo, DR, but his family
immigrated to New Jersey when he was a child. He has published three longer
works, Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(2012), and This Is How You Lose Her
(2012), in addition to writing a number of essays which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The
Best American Short Stories. He currently works as an editor for The Boston Review, and teaches creative
writing at MIT. In his career he has won a number of awards, including the 2008
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the 2012 MacArthur “Genius grant” award, and
most recently, the Sunday Times Short Story award in 2013.
Now
this review will be a bit different from the previous one on Gaskell’s North and South, primarily because it
will take the form of a discussion between myself and a former classmate, Paul.
Paul and I met years ago in undergrad while taking English classes; in one of our
classes, “Global Literature,” we were introduced to Diaz’s Drown—since then, we have been avid readers of his works and
continue to follow his literary career. As such, it is only natural that we
chose This Is How You Lose Her as our
first joint piece.
