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The Enigmatic World of Junot Diaz

M. Fouzul Kabir Khan
The Cheater's Guide to Love by Junot Dfaz published in The New Yorker has a dramatic beginning:
"Your girl catches you cheating...She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you're a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty!"
The rest of the fiction is about yearnings for the unforgiving fiancee from year 0 to year 5, when the fiction ends with the protagonist realizing that, "The half-life of love is forever.”
The yearnings for the unnamed exsweetheart are rather deep.
"You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you're a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes, like you always swore you would, so that the two of you can dance together. You claim that you were sick; you claim that you were weak. And every hour, like clockwork, you say thatyou're so so sorry."
The post separation feelings are actually more complex than simple yearnings. After being dumped, "...you run around with sluts like it’s the good old days, like nothing has happened.” But when Elvis advises, "Find yourself another girl," Yunior replies, "Nothing saca nothing...No one will ever be like her."
Junot Dfaz, an accomplished author, was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of several literary prizes such as MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and
PEN/O. Henry Award. An alumnus of Rutgers College and Cornell University, Dfaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology.
The fiction is remarkable for its sparse prose. There is a very detailed description of the emotional trapeze of the Yunior, from denial to pleading to contemplating suicide to hope:
"You stop sleeping, and some nights when you're drunk you have a wacky impulse to open the window of your fifthfloor apartment and leap down to the street. But (a) you ain't the killing-yourself type; (b) your boy Elvis is over all the time, stands by the window as if he knows what you're thinking; and (c) you have this ridiculous
hope that maybe one day she will forgive you.”
To all that build up, there is a blunt two word riposte from Dfaz: "She doesn't."
Similarly, while the adulterer is going through all the tribulations, and the reader is dying of curiosity to know what was going on behind the mind of the unforgiving exlover, Dfaz provides no inkling except the brief remark in the opening paragraph, "...she swore she would never forgive. I'll put a machete in you, she promised."
In spite of Yunior's multiple relationships interspersed throughout the fiction, the prose is without any intimate physical details. In the minimalist and restrained hand of Dfaz, the best tool for a voyeur is his imagination. Salacious details
are not present, neither needed, to engage the reader.
Like his prose, Diaz is also frugal with the number of his characters; there are only a few of them: Yunior, the cheater himself; the cheated sweetheart - we do not know much about her except that she is an uncompromising native from Salcedo; Elvis, Yunior's son; and Elvis's wife Arlenny. Yunior's flings, such as the law student or Noemi, get occasional mentions.
The Cheater's Guide to Love is laced throughout with delectable figures of speech and imageries, such as,"...to defend Boston from uncool is like blocking a bullet with a slice of bread" or "It feels like you're being slowly pincered apart, atom by atom". There are complex ones: “Every time you think about the ex, the loneliness rears up in you like a seething, burning continent..." or simpler ones, such as, "You know you can't live a lie." They either soothe or reverberate in one's ears and vision.
I must admit that there is a generation gap between authors such as Junot Dfaz and readers such as me. One realization I had while reading this work is the mainstreaming of some of the profanities that initially had uncomfortable rings to my rather unaccustomed ears. Added to that, my generation is familiar with a dictionary but not the so-called 'urban dictionary' that in the beginning affected my readability of Junot Dfaz. For example, I had to consult the 'urban dictionary' several times to understand the meanings of words such as sucia and cuero, quoted in the first paragraph. There are many such words. However, having crossed the communication barrier, in the end, I enjoyed the fiction.
This work by a Facebook generation writer is remarkably candid and moral in its own way - in its emphasis on lasting bonds over ephemeral or fleeting relationships. Why?
".. .because love, real love, is not so easily shed."
Overall, The Cheater's Guide to Love is a good read from a parsimonious and an exceptionally gifted writer.
DrM. Fouzul Kabir Khan is a former Secretary, University Professor and a connoisseur of fiction.