This Is How You Lose Her is the only book I read from Junot Diaz’s, and I think it will remain that way for a long time. I don’t know if I expected a lot from this book, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot. Now I feel like I’m going to be stoned in the literary realm even for saying these. Almost every reader and every book blog I read loved this book. Am I missing something?
I liked a few stories in the book, and I found some characters quite interesting. And that is it. I forced myself to finish the book, and I was bored while trying. Even though I kept reading that it would give a message other than “Deceiving is bad”, I could not reach my goal.
I have been a stranger to the author’s style, his stories that repeat each other, and even the sadness of the characters. Is it because they are Dominican? Definitely not. They are universal enough but unfortunately not interesting enough.
Did you like this book? What am I missing in this one?
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz’s new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, is a collection of linked narratives about love – passionate love, illicit love, dying love, maternal love – told through the lives of New Jersey Dominicans, so as they struggle to find a point where their two worlds meet. In prose that is endlessly energetic and so inventive, tender and funny, it lays bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of the human heart. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience and that ‘love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever.’
Junot Diaz
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and so fiction editor at Boston Review.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
