She is conducting an affair with a married man. Yunior's macho perspectives power all but one story - the beautiful and more formal 'Otravida, Otravez', which is narrated by Yasmin, a hospital laundry worker. (Which really is unfair, you try to say, since Laxmi is from Guyana, but Alma ain't listening.)Įach story dances with infidelity, each is kinetic, virile, and moves perfectly each majestically exposes desire and inconstancy, less a moral waltz, more venereal merengue. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter? She calls you:Īnd worst of all that you like curried pussy. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüenzería. In 'Alma' his own diary busts him to his college girlfriend: result as follows. Prior to this there's a wry gallows charm to his promiscuous ineptitude. He's also extremely funny and, though frequently pitiful, is not self-pitying, even in midlife when he instigates the most catastrophic of his heartbreaks. Yunior's narrative style is a mixture of identities and languages, Spanish slang, English slang, sci-fi, highbrow, street, Ameri-vario-cana.

To none of them is he faithful he appears constitutionally incapable.ĭíaz is master of the coruscating hip demotic. Other paramours are less suitable: his brother's care-home plaything, his teacher, married women. Yunior, bookish, bright, but prone to dope-smoking and apocalyptic nightmares, has regular girlfriends, some of whom he's smitten by – the chic-geeks, 'alternatinas', and Latinas. He learns his trade in womanising young, from his father, who takes him along on his 'pussy runs', and his older brother, Rafa, a handsome tearaway who will die prematurely of cancer after sleeping with half the New Jersey female population. Though not set in strict chronological order, the stories span Yunior's life from childhood through to middle age. Infidelity, cultural typing, family and emigrant dynamics recur and reconfigure throughout. The story acts as a primer for the collection. 'I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes …' But Yunior can't recognise the end of the relationship, nor his culpability. The couple go on holiday to the Dominican Republic, abandoning Yunior's relatives in the dusty countryside for an exclusive coastal resort, where everything finally breaks down. Yunior contorts himself into positions of penitence, but Magdalena withdraws. Why didn't he just deny it, his friends ask.

Magda calls him 'a typical Dominican man, a sucio, an asshole'. She finds out, via a helpfully detailed letter – 'shit you wouldn't even tell your boys drunk' – sent to her by the other woman. I n 'The Sun, the Moon, the Stars', the first story in a new collection by Junot Díaz, the author's serial narrator, Yunior, a young Dominican-American, cheats on his girlfriend Magdalena.

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