“The half-life of love is forever.” – This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Book Cover and Author (Pic from salon.com)

Junot Diaz’s sophomore work, This is How You Lose Her (Penguin), is just as inspired as his first novel. The thing that easily gets you his is wonderfully simple prose that you as a reader can easily connect with. This has been evident since the start from my first experience reading “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. His second work is not a novel; it is a collection of somewhat related stories.  One would easily identify the theme of the book to be about break ups specifically those of the tragic romantic kind but the book delves into other forms of loss as well, I would spare you the details of what other forms of loss you would read. 

The work reads like that of a semi-autobiographical kind, each story involves “Yunior” and you get the impression that the author put himself into this character. Yunior as a character is enigmatic, it’s either you root for him or you want to be him.

I’ve been reading more and more fiction about transplanted people living in America, the theme reverberates in me as I have a lot of relatives living in the US. In fact almost everyone here in the Philippines is related to at least one migrant worker.  This type of fiction has been gaining momentum as the world becomes more and more globalized (Kiran Desai, Jhumpha Lahiri), the dilemma of transplanted people adjusting to new cultures, identifying to the new country and the struggle to keep their identity makes for a compelling read. 

The author saved his best work in the last part of the book, this story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” is the ultimate in break up stories and of the long, dragging and arduous process of moving on. This story just killed it for me, it spans about 5 years from the break up. Junot Diaz is a master of the break up and moving on story.

Read NYTimes' review of the book here.

The book's Amazon page.