Drown
by Junot Díaz
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 2329)
As when you're listening to some old piece of music you never thought much of, it could be a long ago seemingly throwaway pop dance number like This Old Heart of Mine by the Isley Brothers, or some slyer more college-degreed album track like let's say Listening Wind by Talking Heads, and you suddenly jump up and think but - but really, this is a masterpiece! - it's not just another painting-by-numbers from Motown, it's not just another sneery too-clever construction you skip while you're trying ...more
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There are several recurrent themes running through this collection (the lost father, the regained father, the lost love, brotherhood, betrayal--often sexual) but the one I found most striking was that of facelessness.
You would think that facelessness is synonymous with invisibility, but here it is not. There is something within that facelessness, which makes the person all the more visible--scorned, pitied, hated, feared, and by some, treated with great kindness. The faced want the faceless...more
You would think that facelessness is synonymous with invisibility, but here it is not. There is something within that facelessness, which makes the person all the more visible--scorned, pitied, hated, feared, and by some, treated with great kindness. The faced want the faceless...more
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Read in May, 2008
I'd read a large chunk of Junot Diaz's novel OSCAR WAO which was in an anthology I have called 'Rotten', and I thought it was brilliant. So witty and like he was a leaf blowing and twizzling on the breeze as he told the story, having fun and the words just falling from his mouth and on to the page. So I bought this collection of short stories by him, and, although enjoyable, his style is not varied enough for me to really think this an excellent collection. The corrupt and dirty background to hi...more
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Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
Humans
I was lucky enough to have seen Junot Diaz read, and that cabròn was hilarious! His talk was fresh, lewd, direct, sly, sweet, and honest. Exactly like his writing. He spoke of how Hip Hop had informed his life and work, and how a writer must use experience to shape their art; auto-biography and fiction helix together. His street talk and easy manner reminded me of the slick Mexican kids I grew up with(with due respect for the differences in Latino cultures). No amount of vernacular speech coul...more
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Read in February, 2002
One of the coolest things that ever happened to me was I got to participate in a creative writing workshop with Junot Diaz. My girlfriend was in the class also, which was the first time we had a class together. We had been living together for a little while, and even though we were very much in love at the time, whe would do certain shit that really got on my nerves, like for example always being late (as in over an hour late!) for everything. So on the first day of class, she came in (predictab...more
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From Publishers Weekly
The 10 tales in this intense debut collection plunge us into the emotional lives of people redefining their American identity. Narrated by adolescent Dominican males living in the struggling communities of the Dominican Republic, New York and New Jersey, these stories chronicle their outwardly cool but inwardly anguished attempts to recreate themselves in the midst of eroding family structures and their own burgeoning sexuality. The best pieces, such as "Aguantando...more
The 10 tales in this intense debut collection plunge us into the emotional lives of people redefining their American identity. Narrated by adolescent Dominican males living in the struggling communities of the Dominican Republic, New York and New Jersey, these stories chronicle their outwardly cool but inwardly anguished attempts to recreate themselves in the midst of eroding family structures and their own burgeoning sexuality. The best pieces, such as "Aguantando...more
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Read in May, 2008
WOW! Just freaking wow!!!
I picked this book up because I enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. When I started to read it, I thought that this felt like a handful of failed starts to similar novels. But the further that I read into it, the more I realized what it was that Junot Diaz was doing, painting a complete picture out of multiple fractured pieces.
The writing in this book is remarkably sparse, short with details and full of space where you are asked to interject your own im...more
I picked this book up because I enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. When I started to read it, I thought that this felt like a handful of failed starts to similar novels. But the further that I read into it, the more I realized what it was that Junot Diaz was doing, painting a complete picture out of multiple fractured pieces.
The writing in this book is remarkably sparse, short with details and full of space where you are asked to interject your own im...more
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Read in June, 2008
I got this from the library after reading Diaz's short story Alma in the New Yorker which I absolutely loved.
I liked two stories in Drown: Ysrael where the narrator and his brother conspire to unmask the kid with no face, and Aurora, a gritty and depressing account of the drug dealing narrator's love for a crack whore. Aurora's narrator reappears in Drown, which I didnt like at all. The ...more
I liked two stories in Drown: Ysrael where the narrator and his brother conspire to unmask the kid with no face, and Aurora, a gritty and depressing account of the drug dealing narrator's love for a crack whore. Aurora's narrator reappears in Drown, which I didnt like at all. The ...more
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As far as technicalities are concerned, Drown is a 200-page collection of short stories that traverse all sorts of landscapes, topics, and familial shortcomings. In the novel's opener, "Ysrael," the narrator allows us to glimpse into moments from his childhood as he iterates the story. Ysrael, the character, is a young boy whose face was mutilated by a ravenous pig, and the former conceals his mangled face with a mask that is seldom removed. Rafa – the narrator's brother – a...more
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This is the first book I've read for pleasure in quite awhile. I raced through it, read the whole the thing in about 24 hours. Usually books of short stories take me awhile because I never quite engage with the characters, but these stories are connected by a single narrator and a cast of recurring characters. I might argue that the book is really a novel, not short stories, but that's neither here nore there. The narration just pulls you in and the manner in which he describes life that is ...more
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Read in July, 2008
Ten short stories about Dominican people living in the DR and in northern New Jersey. Many stories have characters in common, and a recurring theme is a young man telling the story of his father, who abandoned his family in the Dominican when the narrator was a boy, started a family in the New York area, abandoned his New York family, and sent for his original family. There are also forays away from family drama and into idiosyncratic life for Dominican people in the US and the DR.
The storie...more
The storie...more
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Read in January, 2008
Diaz's stories provide a glimpse into the struggles - economic, familial, emotional - of poor/working-class immigrants. The stories are gritty and dripping with realism. The stories are not packed with insights, but when the story telling is this good, the description alone is enough.
Drown is the anti-Jesus' Son. The prospect of success hovers over virtually every story in this collection. Maybe "success" is just a myth, but the characters in Drown suffer for it nonetheless. The ch...more
Drown is the anti-Jesus' Son. The prospect of success hovers over virtually every story in this collection. Maybe "success" is just a myth, but the characters in Drown suffer for it nonetheless. The ch...more
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Read in September, 2007
Seeing Junot Díaz read from his new novel the other night reminded me of how I've been wanting to read this collection for years. In person he is charismatic, opinionated, humble, and full of wit (and so personable!). He reads from his own writing in staccato (and says that if you read Tolkien aloud, you'll find that it sounds "bananas"), and follows his commentary with a self-conscious "yeah?" (as in, "you agree with me . . . right?") -- which is interesting becau...more
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Read in April, 2008
i picked up this book because i really wanted to read "the brief wondrous life" but it was still in hardcover. drown it was, and i loved it. it's not this terribly deep read. what it definitely is is a very realistic account of the immigrant experience, in this case, the dominican experience. diaz creates very vivid and memorable characters surviving in harsh conditions in their homeland or in the promised land of the U.S. because the characters appear across most stories, you end...more
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Junot Diaz is flat out one of the best "young writers" writing today. There is no room for arguments; I will take no dissenting voices into my ears, into my consciousness. No. This collection of short stories was so engaging, so vivid and palpable (it's one of those books that would be called 'colorful' by middle aged liberal suburban librarians "a colorful and exciting series of short stories about the Dominican and New Jersey and the places in between"). The characters ...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommended to James by:
Franciscorecommends it for: Short Story lovers
It really deserves a 3 1/2 but alas, goodreads allows for no middle ground. I felt the stories were well crafted and had some great moments in them...but not all of them resonated with me. The first story is the best in my opinion. He hits all the right notes and by the end your aching. The rest of the stories were very well written, but just didn't have the emotional heft...there were some spectacular images that really came through in several of the endings. It was like he was saving the right...more
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Read in September, 2007
It's like, mostly what I think is good about this book has to do with its voices and their honesty (which should read: particularity). But also, the way that larger kinds of social history play out in the context of this one person's life--it's like the sort of thing that happens in, say, <em>Invisible Man</em>, where there's the Harlem riots, and there's the (Second? Third?) Migration happening, but it's all happening around the bildungsroman dealing with this really present 'I' n...more
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I love Junot Diaz, wholly and absolutely. I actually bought this book when I was in high school, and I was in my 'judge a book by it's cover' phase of choosing and reading books. I didn't read it though until his story 'Wildwood' (soooooooooo good, and illustrated by Jamie Hernandez! Love!) in the New Yorker summer fiction issue. They're fantastic short stories. When he spoke at the New Yorker festival, he said these stories weren't necessarily autobiographical, only because he couldn't fit all ...more
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Read in June, 2008
Having read Drown right after finishing Diaz's fantastic The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, perhaps I was set up for a disappointment. While Drown is occasionally great -- it's a collection of short stories -- it's just not comparable with <i>Oscar Wao<i>. I think what I missed most was the humor; several of the stories were so bleak that I found them hard to get through. Interestingly, I preferred the stories in this collection that had a definite Domincan c...more
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Read in January, 2007
recommends it for:
everyone
Found this on our bookshelves. Can't put it down.
BTW, Diaz has a novel out now, reviewed in this week's NY Times book review.
This was as great as everyone says. Reading it is like a vacation to a place where you meet a lot of local people who are interesting. The twist here is that I at least really don't want to hang with the characters in these stories - the drug dealers and junkies and low-wage workers who in general and understandably don't have much in common or much sympathy with s...more
BTW, Diaz has a novel out now, reviewed in this week's NY Times book review.
This was as great as everyone says. Reading it is like a vacation to a place where you meet a lot of local people who are interesting. The twist here is that I at least really don't want to hang with the characters in these stories - the drug dealers and junkies and low-wage workers who in general and understandably don't have much in common or much sympathy with s...more
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