Word: didion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...JOAN DIDION approaches writing like an Impressionist painter. She places small dots quietly, to form distinct images. But step back from the painting, and the scene blurs. It is as if she washed her canvas with color, softening the detail, leaving an intense but somehow fleeting emotional moment. Like the Impressionists, she seldom makes judgments, preferring to let her images capture and sway the reader...
...White Album is Didion's latest collection of these images--20 essays written from 1968 to 1978. It is a brilliant albeit occasionally disjointed collage of impressions, written with her customary journalistic eye for detail and infused with emotion. The essays discuss the '60s, portray Didion and others, and sketch California life with wit and deadly accuracy...
...book resembles what Didion tells us about herself. In the revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...
...same sensitivity and emotional impetuosity that defeat her make her writing so effective. The book's disjointedness is at times a very deliberate reflection of Didion's own reactions to the years she describes. Her first essay, "The White Album," breaks into 15 vignettes; she cuts from image to image, splicing and assembling them. She views the '60s themselves as a series of improvisations on a discarded script, in a passage that reflects the tone of both the era and her book...
...Joan Didion phrase, in groups I am usually "neurotically inarticulate." The compliment was undeserved and I was embarassed at what I sensed was a condescending attitude. Any suspicions I might have had were swiftly confirmed a few minutes later. Picking up again her main themes of the constricting conditions of class, sex and race and their effect on writers, she apparently thought she was losing people's attention. Weary of the vertiginous heights of the merely abstract, she decided to provide everyone with a small object lesson: she inclined her head towards me and said pointedly in voice too loud...