The Half-Life of Love is Forever - Review for "This Is How You Lose Her" by Junot Diaz (r1)

    Once upon 2013, Junot Diaz published a new book called "This Is How You Lose Her" and I read it in one day. This alone should tell you how I feel about the author's work.

     This short novel is seperated into a number of vignettes, most of which are narrated by the familiar voice of Yunior, from the novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". All of them center around one single idea: love. It's true that love can take a million forms, and can act as the motivation for so many things. Here, in Diaz's work, love motivates dominicanos to move to the United States, save for a house, steal, cheat on their fiances, start over, and return to the same person over and over again...but there's also so much more.

     Diaz's fiction runs right to the point: Yunior and the other speakers are to the point, calling life as it is without so much as a blink. With a seamless integration of Spanish and English, Diaz shapes a world that is easy to navigate, and pierces us at the center. Relationships are forged, fall apart, and as the lovers, brothers, mothers, and fathers continue their lives, we ask ourselves questions and remind ourselves of times when we too lost love, fought for it, found it, and let it change us for the good and the bad.

     I think the best part about this novel is the way it ends. Normally, I hate endings, but Diaz has this profound habit (as I saw in "The Brief Wondrous...") of taking every statement he could possibly make throughout the whole work and slapping it on thick right at the conclusion. Two statements stand out: "The half-life of love is forever", and "...sometimes, all you get is a start."