#44, This is how you write a short story
Dec. 5th, 2012 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslant44. This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
I am not normally a big fan of short stories, but as it turns out, I am a big fan of trying to read autobiographical details into Diaz's fiction! It is kind of nice to read his short stories, since many of the characters are the same, or so similar it doesn't matter, so you start to recognize Paloma, and Rafa who dies, and Yunior who always ends up at Rutgers eventually, etc. These are excellent stories -- mostly told by men who lament their nature as sucios while being incapable (seemingly) of living any other way, constantly cheating on women who don't deserve it. The final story, though, is what really got me. It appears to be Diaz's story of a terrible, Sisyphean attempt to get over a girlfriend, told over several years, complete with serial awful dating stories and heartbreaking revelations from girlfriends and guy friends, and he is very funnily insulting about Boston the whole time and it is a kind of Job story, I suppose. Terrible, constant heartbreak that is only vaguely illuminated at the end by the promise of yes, finally, after six or so years, he finally wrote a tiny bit of a book that he didn't hate, and went from there. This is what I was wondering about his Oscar Wao book, when does he ever write about not Dominican life, on the island or in New Jersey, but his current life, the one where he's a pulitzer-winning professor at MIT? If this is that story, it is more than enough, it is too much: it made me pity him, and if it is really his life, it made me dislike him as a person. It was a lot harder to write off the macho/sexist stuff as "just characters" because the narrator in the final story, The Cheater's Guide to Love, is pretty awful. With his friends, without his friends. I feel like I have a complicated attraction for him. For all the sexist realism he writes, though, there is still a lot of poetry, a lot of fire, and this book only made me want to read more. I am definitely putting Drown on my list. Hopefully he finishes that postapocalyptic novel from his New Yorker story soon, too.
I am not normally a big fan of short stories, but as it turns out, I am a big fan of trying to read autobiographical details into Diaz's fiction! It is kind of nice to read his short stories, since many of the characters are the same, or so similar it doesn't matter, so you start to recognize Paloma, and Rafa who dies, and Yunior who always ends up at Rutgers eventually, etc. These are excellent stories -- mostly told by men who lament their nature as sucios while being incapable (seemingly) of living any other way, constantly cheating on women who don't deserve it. The final story, though, is what really got me. It appears to be Diaz's story of a terrible, Sisyphean attempt to get over a girlfriend, told over several years, complete with serial awful dating stories and heartbreaking revelations from girlfriends and guy friends, and he is very funnily insulting about Boston the whole time and it is a kind of Job story, I suppose. Terrible, constant heartbreak that is only vaguely illuminated at the end by the promise of yes, finally, after six or so years, he finally wrote a tiny bit of a book that he didn't hate, and went from there. This is what I was wondering about his Oscar Wao book, when does he ever write about not Dominican life, on the island or in New Jersey, but his current life, the one where he's a pulitzer-winning professor at MIT? If this is that story, it is more than enough, it is too much: it made me pity him, and if it is really his life, it made me dislike him as a person. It was a lot harder to write off the macho/sexist stuff as "just characters" because the narrator in the final story, The Cheater's Guide to Love, is pretty awful. With his friends, without his friends. I feel like I have a complicated attraction for him. For all the sexist realism he writes, though, there is still a lot of poetry, a lot of fire, and this book only made me want to read more. I am definitely putting Drown on my list. Hopefully he finishes that postapocalyptic novel from his New Yorker story soon, too.
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Date: 2012-12-05 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 08:35 pm (UTC)i would love to send you an anthology of short stories just to read your review of it. Have you read any Chris Adrian? I would love to hear what you think of his work. Would you review it for me if I sent you the collection (it's not too long--maybe just under 200 pages?--and there's a separate short story published by New Yorker available here to get your feet wet and see if you'd even want to read more of his work: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/09/27/100927fi_fiction_adrian
anyway, i love his work, but i can't always articulate why. it'd be really cool to read what you think of it!
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Date: 2012-12-05 09:41 pm (UTC)That link is behind the pay wall so I can't see it...is it 'A Better Angel'? If so, we have that at the campus library, so I could just pick it up there. But it might be a while...I have about four books ongoing, plus more in my ILL/Summit queue...
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Date: 2012-12-06 02:19 am (UTC)