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One school of criticism argues that the short story is not a narrative; it is the arresting of a narrative process. A smooth flow of events is ruptured in the course of the story by an instant of revelation, often delivered through a potent visual image. The contrast sought is between narrative and image; between experience and epiphany. In "Ysrael", the first story in Junot Diaz's collection Drown the all-important "image" is the horribly mutilated face of a boy, which is kept hidden behind a mask. As they grow up in the Dominican Republic, the narrator and his brother become obsessed with ripping the mutilated boy's mask off. Their quest to expose the horrifying face echoes the short story's structural drive towards the climactic "image"--and drives the story irresistibly forward. Subtle parallels between the narrator and the mutilated boy (both their fathers are in America) hint that the mutilated face is a mirror image of the protagonists themselves, a grotesque emblem of their life in the Dominican Republic.
"Ysrael" is Junot Diaz at his best, a skilful convergence of social commentary and technical achievement. In the ten stories in Drown--set in the Dominican Republic or the Dominican barrios in New Jersey--the literary qualities for which we prize short stories--their exiguous prose, surprise lyricism, their points of epiphany--are translated into perfect psychological equivalents of an immigrant community's experience of alienation and dislocation. Drown's world is one of drugs, violence, and racial discrimination, told through a first-person narrator who's both enmeshed in the world and differentiated from it by the quality of his sensibility. It's not all grim stuff, though. "How to date a Browngirl, Whitegirl, Blackgirl, or Halfie" is the technical tour de force of the collection--a wry, poignant piece in which a knowing narrator guides the reader through the subtleties of sexual success in a multicultural society. (White girls are the easiest to score with, apparently).
The last story in the collection is the most complex and textured. "Negocios", chronicles the passage of the narrator's father as he migrates from the Dominican Republic to the United States. The narrator is profoundly ambivalent towards his father. Ruthlessly exploited as a Spanish-speaking immigrant to the United States, the man also forgets his family back home and starts another one in America--which, in turn, he abandons as he returns to his original family. "Negocios" is a beautifully paced story, and has the feel of a prelude to a more important work. That work is soon coming. Mr. Diaz, we are told, is busy finishing his first novel. Aravind Adiga 
Americas | Europe, Africa & Asia
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Drown
by
Junot Diaz
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