This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

This is How You Lose Her is one the best collection of short stories you will give yourself the pleasure of reading this, or any other year.

By the Pulitzer Prize winning and best selling author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz’s idiosyncratic and immensely rich style perfectly layers his vivid and memorable recollections of Yunior, a young Dominican finding his way in New Jersey.

Suffused with sexual tension and eruption, brought to the boil by a Dominican heat at its most suffocating, This is How You Lose Her is immediately engaging by virtue of Diaz’s vernacular strewn dialogue and his ability to draw a character in a few lines.

In The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, Magda is ‘a Bergenline original: short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in.’ Superb.

In the second story in the 200 page book, Nilda, the narrator’s brother’s girlfriend, ‘was Dominican, from here, and had super-long hair, like those Pentecostal girls, and a chest you wouldn’t believe- I’m talking world class.’

It is only when Diaz strays from dissecting relationships that the electricity deserts his prose, or perhaps it is denuded of its equipoise, but his descriptive prowess more than compensates. ‘From the top of Westminster, our main strip, you could see the thinnest sliver of ocean cresting the horizon to the east,’ opens Invierno.

Sex sizzles in these stories, and Diaz takes pleasures in the drawn out foreplay of silences, glances and brushing skin. The countdown to coupling, when it begins, is irreversible. The poetry is thrown into the thrash.

In The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, we are told in no uncertain terms by our hero that his girl, Magda, is ‘rocking a dope Ochun-colored bikini that her girls helped her pick out so she could torture me, and I’m in these old ruined trunks that say ‘Sandy Hook Forever!’.’