Review - This Is How You Lose Her by: Junot Díaz

Title: This Is How You Lose Her

Author: Junot Díaz

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Pages: 213

Format: Hardcover

Source: Turkish edition, personal purchase

Description:

On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. 

In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

My thoughts:

My first thought right after finishing the book: Junot Díaz is a very funny guy who forms very good sentences! I'm always on the lookout for new authors to discover and have a good time with. I bought this book at the book fair in Istanbul last year just because it was on sale: I had no idea who the author was or what the book was about. It took me a while to get to reading it, but it did come at a time when I really needed something funny and clever to merge into.

This Is How You Loser Her is about this guy called Yuann who's kind of a player, the women he ends up losing and how he loses them. I laughed a lot at Yuann, I must admit, not so much with him. Then I got sad when I saw him get sad due the consequences of his stupidity. There were numerous times I got mad at him due to his attitude towards women and how he treated them, too.

As someone who described and believes in love in Gabriel Garcia Marquez terms, it feels weird to me that most women prefer to read love stories written by other women. Of course, they're fun, and it's probably true that women understand women better than man, but then I haven't really seen anyone who's in search for men who write about love and relationships. I think it's rather refreshing to get a man's take on it, and this book is worth reading even if to help protect yourself from men like Yuann.