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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully insightful and provocative collection of stories,
By A Customer
This review is from: Drown (Paperback)
Junot Diaz has been hailed as one of a new breed of East Coast talents. His insight into the Spanish American experience in the US can be deservedly labeled as profoundly moving and richly complex. It is astonishing how little attention has thus far been paid to this element of American culture, but let's hope that Diaz's work will go some way to redressing this imbalance.The stories in Drown focus on characters who have managed to survive domestic abuse, pandemic crime and crippling prejudice. Despite the recurrent and critically important theme of social dislocation, Diaz doesn't seek to simplify or patronize. His characters are individuals who make a convincing attempt to breathe beyond the pages of the book. Diaz is a sympathetic narrator and his characters are emphatically three-dimensional. In the first story, told from the perspective of a young boy, his bullying and adulterous father is contrasted with his benevolent and loving Mother. However the father is not all beast and despite the misery he inflicts, the man is also full of a bitter regret for all that he has allowed to be lost between himself and his wife. Despite their innate fragility, Diaz's characters have a revitalizing vigour. I think of the schoolboys who feel remorse for hunting and taunting the school freak, and the lover who regularly forgives his largely absent girlfriend who steals from him to feed her drug habit. These and other characters disappear, sometimes to return or more frequently indefinitely lost in a haze of pollution and dirt. I recommend this book as an astonishingly effective piece of literature. More than this, there are, to my mind, few contemporary parallels. Buy it, read it, recommend it.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
voted best year after year,
By
This review is from: Drown (Paperback)
This book has been on my reading list for a creative writing course I teach for several years now, along with Maya Angelou, Michael Frayn, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jenny Diski. And every year students have unanimously proclaimed this the best written and most impressive book on the reading list. Diaz has an ability to make writing seem effortless and artless. His settings and characters are real, the situations believable and the narrative voice compelling. He does not pander to the reader, retaining Spanish words with no glossary but they are used in a way that makes sense in their context and they provide a flavour of speech and thought that takes us into his world. The only writer I could fairly compare him with is Raymond Carver - the same truthfulness and directness - but stylistically Diaz is the superior writer. Recommended for any aspiring writer.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Already a classic,
This review is from: Drown (Paperback)
DROWN by Junot Diaz spoke to me like no other work of fiction that I've read in many years. It was the first time where I saw myself in the characters and felt that I knew them intimately. They were like my own family, brothers, cousins, mother and father that I could almost feel that the stories were right out of my own childhood.
Diaz's stories about Domincans in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. The stories perfectly capture the struggle with poverty in the characters' native country as well as the United States. But these stories are not didactic pieces but rather human stories about family, love, and loss. With characters so real, that the reader will wonder when they will see them again.
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