Book Reviews,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  Immigration,  Latin America/Caribbean

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz **** (of 4)

A series of connected short stories about Yunior, a semi-autobiographical doppleganger for the author, Junot Diaz.  Yunior is a streetwise Dominican immigrant in a poor neighborhood in New Jersey, son of a largely absentee father, an overwrought, overworked mother, and brother to Rafa an unrepentant womanizer dying of cancer.  Yunior himself loves women, but mostly for their sex.  Each one is a mountain to conquer, from whose peak there always seems to appear another on the horizon.  And yet this disrespectful, infidelity prone schmo is not only lovable himself, but pitiful in his cluelessness.  That is the secret of the book.  We are simultaneously repelled by Yunior’s callousness toward women, a trait I have been assured is one hundred percent Dominican, and anxious to see him finally find the love he desperately craves.  Yunior is a contemporary, hip-hop, Espanglish speaking Charlito Brown.