Word: didions
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NONFICTION: Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman Eleni, Nicholas Gage ∙Frida, Hayden Herrera ∙ Lectures on Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov Salvador, Joan Didion ∙ White Mischief, James...
...weeks Didion neither gets nor expects to get to the bottom of who is doing what to whom and why. She is clearly unsympathetic toward the Salvadoran government and skeptical about a U.S. policy that would polarize the region into extreme leftists and rightists. But Didion is no pundit. Her strength is in conveying atmosphere and her own sense of horror, although this is not always completely convincing. Seated one night on the porch of a restaurant with her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion notices a shadowy figure in a truck and a man with a rifle...
...Didion is more consistently effective when she puts faces with the numbers of the dead. The face of one corpse has been carved to look like a cross. Others have had their mouths filled with dirt or their own genitals. There are recountings of the killings of American Agricultural Advisers Mark Pearlman and Michael Hammer in the dining room of the Hotel Sheraton, the same place where Free lance Writer John Sullivan was last seen alive. She reminds us of the four North American churchwomen who were murdered in 1980, the 50 students killed when government troops attacked the National...
Against such atrocities, civilized people with good prose styles reach for the requisite quote from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Didion repeats the line from Kurtz's report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: "By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." The U.S. embassy gives the author a more sophisticated version of this 19th century optimism. The exercise of will and power now reuires a public relations consultant. Says one embassy official: "We could come in militarily and shape the place up. That...
...Didion, El Salvador is "less a 'story' than a true noche obscura. " The assessment is a bit melodramatic, yet her dark night is full of the sort of detail that Didion knows how to use so well: the beach towels at the San Salvador super market that are printed with maps of Manhattan that pinpoint Bloomingdale's; the local woman who gets out of a taxi in a provincial town and leaves behind the scent of Arpege; the dubbed television version of The Winning Team, starring Doris Day and Ronald Reagan, in which the now U.S. President...