{"id":7472,"date":"2012-06-02T12:02:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T16:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=7472"},"modified":"2016-07-18T17:47:29","modified_gmt":"2016-07-18T21:47:29","slug":"junot-diaz-monstro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/06\/02\/junot-diaz-monstro\/","title":{"rendered":"Junot D\u00edaz: “Monstro”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Monstro\"<\/strong><\/span>\r\nby Junot D\u00edaz<\/span>\r\nOriginally published in the\u00a0June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/span><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Here’s my experience with “Monstro”: (1) feeling that it was the same-old-same-old\u00a0D\u00edaz, (2) building excitement at an interesting take on the end of the world, and (3) ultimate disappointment as the pieces failed to\u00a0develop (let alone come together) in any meaningful way. Let’s take that one at a time.<\/p>\n
One of my problems with D\u00edaz\u00a0is the sameness of his voice.\u00a0I find it a grating voice to begin with, but there’s not denying D\u00edaz\u00a0knows how to use\u00a0this completely informal voice\u00a0to make a narrative move forward quickly, leaving subjects out of sentences, mixing Spanish slang, the narrator successfully deflecting any responsibility for the ugly things he says about women and Haitians.\u00a0I can handle when an author explores similar territory many times over, but I generally fail to get nuanced changes with D\u00edaz. This story deals with the end of the world, but if you know D\u00edaz, the anticipation of the end of the world is not new; it’s just that here it becomes fact. Here’s how “Monstro” opens; if it weren’t for the strange disease, it would be much like most other D\u00edaz stories:<\/p>\n
At first, Negroes thought it funny<\/em>. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pas\u00f3?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Our narrator (who is unnamed, and I don’t believe it is Yunior\u00a0this time), is nineteen at the time of the end of the world. It begins it Haiti when people started becoming infected with the Darkness. Here’s where I started enjoying the story more. In establishing the Darkness and the exponential horror, D\u00edaz seems to be setting up for some fascinating ideas.\u00a0The infected start acting collectively. First comes the Silence, when nothing you did could get them to talk. Then the Chorus, when at different times of the day all of the infected, even those in comas, would bellow out something terrifying. Then the absolute need to group together:<\/p>\n
Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of the infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. [. . . .] Once viktims\u00a0got it in their heads to go, no dissuading them. Left family, friends, children behind. Walked out on wedding days, on swell business. Once they were in the zone, nothing could get them to leave.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Since there are already quarantine zones, that’s where the infected go. They will not\u00a0leave once there. Perhaps I just like Tarkovsky\u00a0too much, but this sounded like the beginning of something really interesting. And what was the narrator doing while all of this was going on? Chasing a girl. Back to familiar D\u00edaz\u00a0territory, and just when things were getting interesting to me. We take a relatively long detour from the developing apocalypse\u00a0and focus on the narrator and his college friend Alex. They’re both young (the narrator is nineteen), and have returned — bad timing — to the Dominican Republic from Brown University to do what young men free from worry do. One of Alex’s friends is the beautiful Mysty, and that’s who our narrator falls for. After several pages, we get back to the doom. There’s a climax, meant to further develop the story, and then we end fairly suddenly.<\/p>\n
You see, this is another excerpt. It may not even be that, as D\u00edaz has said he hasn’t written the rest of the book and isn’t even sure he’s going to, though the image that inspired the story in the first place has yet to occur. There must have been truckloads of genuine short, science fiction stories that would chase down interesting ideas; instead, The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0opted to publish a sketch with two story lines that fail to develop individually or merge together\u00a0from an author they published just one month prior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week’s New Yorker fiction is Junot D\u00edaz’s “Monstro.” Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[89,94],"tags":[1061],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-7472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-junot-diaz","category-new-yorker-fiction","tag-2012-new-yorker-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Monstro.jpg?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1Ww","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7472"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19432,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472\/revisions\/19432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7472"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}