Listen to previous podcasts from the Book Review.
In the New York Times Book Review, Leah Hager Cohen reviews Junot DÃaz's “This Is How You Lose Her,†a collection of stories that brings back Yunior, the narrator of several earlier stories by Mr. DÃaz and a character in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.†Ms. Cohen writes:
The book is billed as a collection of love stories, but for all the sexy bits and all the heartache, for all that four of the nine stories are named for lovers and eight of the nine revolve around relationships gone sour, DÃaz is most affecting when he's writing about the inescapable undertow of family history and cultural mores, about the endless difficulty of loving oneself. In fact, he's always writing about these more elemental quandaries, exploring the way they carry over and undergird the challenges to romantic love.
Ms. Cohen also writes that Yunior is “a gorgeously full-blown character,†and that “at this point it just seems lame not to refer to him as DÃaz's alter ego, so conspicuously do their biographies overlap.â€
On this week's podcast, Mr. DÃaz talks about his book and explains why he sees Yunior as more of a “bad doppelgängerâ€; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; Alex Witchel discusses her memoir “All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother's Dementia: With Refreshmentsâ€; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.
No comments:
Post a Comment