te veel namen maar goed xd

“I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. ‘I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere isn’t it,’ she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?’”

###

I was in something of a rut. I'd tried three or four new-to-me novels, and none of them were providing what I was seeking, which was nothing less and nothing more than, simply, style. I figured, well, Didion has style in spades— I should read the novels of hers I've yet to. A wise choice on my part.

I loved this one, which is as great as Run River, the two of them only a notch or two below the flawless Play it as it Lays. While reading, I kept returning to an idea I've had for some time, which is that when a writer writes in two disciplines thought to be opposing — fiction and non-fiction — I often find that, contrary to what one might think, one finds more of the writer's interior life in what they commit to saying in their fiction. Didion is more on display in this novel, I would argue, than she is in many of her most-loved essays. And her mind is one that I just love to watch move through messy predicament after messy predicament. Her focus here, as it so often is in her work in both disciplines, is (paraphrasing her) concerned with the ways in which our investments in one another are too freighted for us to ever see the other clear.

I find that such an interest makes for a remarkable and riveting novel.

I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion in my life, but sometime in November after seeing her nephew’s documentary about her, “The Center Will Not Hold,” I decided to read her again from start to finish. I like how she writes and I think she’s an enigma. I mean, do these stories have a touch of autobiographical? I’m dying to know. The Joan Didion Project is essays, novels, rewatching the movies she co-wrote with her late-husband. So far what I’ve learned is that “Play it as it Lays” is a better book than it was the last two times I read it and the movie, which is available for streaming for free on YouTube, is goddamn amazing watch it right now.
But the true gem, three and a half books and two movies in, is “A Book of Common Prayer,” a novel from the late 1970s set in a small, gang-controlled town in Central America and an American who married into the political fray, but has since been widowed. Grace Strasser-Mendenna is underbelly savvy and a solid voice in the family’s movements -- even plot moves against each other. And she’s got a story to tell:
Charlotte Douglas, also an America, shows up and causes a bit of a ruckus. No one is sure what she’s doing in Boca Grande, why she spends every day at the airport, and why she’s been flagged for special treatment by the government.
Grace tells her story from a place in the future. Grace’s daughter was on the lam, accused of a politically-motivated act of terrorism. Meanwhile, there is Charlotte’s hard-partying, opinionated first husband, who is as quick to social climb as he is to socially stage-dive and her second husband, a far better man, more supportive, who just doesn’t drive her mad like the first.
“A Book of Common Prayer” plays like a mystery novel, with rich characters slowly revealed. Boca Grande has a strong sense of place, both the temperature and the danger of the dueling factions. It’s all very tragic, you know the deaths are coming.

Je n'ai absolument rien compris à ce que j'ai lu.

This is the first Didion I have ever read and I'm thinking this wasn't the best introduction to her work. Her writing style is great, with a strong author's voice and a unique structure to her sentences. However, in my middle-brow heart, I prefer my fiction to have a fairly conventional plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. This novel is more like a series of vague vignettes. Beautiful & evocative, but vignettes.

Charlotte is a maddening protagonist. I think that is Didion's point? To portray a certain type of American woman in the 1970s? One that is unable to understand who she is, unable to feel her own emotions, because she has spent her life disassociating from herself and is now bereft of the parts that make us human. Charlotte is like a Stepford wife. A beautiful woman going through the motions.

I was more drawn to the narrator, Grace. From the opening throwaway lines where Grace mentions her mother died when she was 8, her father died when she was 10 and then she lived alone in a South American hotel from 10-16, I was intrigued. Wait a minute....what??? That's it?! That's all the information the reader gets? I wanted to be reading about Grace's life, not Charlotte's life. Grace's life seemed a million times more interesting. Instead I was stuck with the ditherings and ramblings of Charlotte. Sigh.

I enjoyed the 1970's San Francisco setting of part of the book. Didion knows that world well. When the book was set in the fictional Boca Grande, I didn't care for it as much. This leads me to believe my next book of hers should be a non fiction set in California, either The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Her writing pulled this novel up to a weak 3 star rating, but it's not a book I recommend reading unless you are a huge fan of the author and want to read all her works.

# Popsugar challenge 2020 A book that passes the Bechdel test

I will be better able to articulate my thoughts on this book soon but for the time being all I can say is: I wish there was a support group established for anyone (me) who read this book and is just left with a laundry list of questions about why and how and what Joan was thinking when she created this novel?

This was my first dive into Didion’s fiction and it did not disappoint. For anyone who has read her work before, her voice is so clearly evident in this book. Joan is absolutely all over the pages and it becomes hard, at times, to distinguish character from author (at least for me). I choose to believe that Joan was intentional in her focus on the story rather than the aesthetic in this novel. You may be frustrated, as I was, by an inability to fully picture, physically, the characters in this book. Instead, Joan asks you to evaluate their actions as individuals against an environment that is crumbling. It is an intimate look at power, sex, femininity, nationality, and overall identity amongst a group of people who are impossibly unpredictable.

This is a re-read for me :)

First of all, despite the title, this is not a Christian book about praying and shit like that. It’s a novel about human dislocation and the intractability of delusion, set against the backdrop of Central American revolution. Didion is best known for her nonfiction, but I proselytize for her novels every chance I get.

An imaginary Central American republic rotting under sweltering heat, festering with disease, literal and figurative.

An odd and fragile American woman. Her abusive former husband, her dejected current husband. Her plane-jacking revolutionary daughter.
A dying narrator.
Death.

Didion masterfully unravels her story, her characters, in this striking short novel. As usual her writing flows effortlessly - or almost: on a few occasions her « formula » shows through, making some passages slightly forced and artificial.

Still an incredibly enjoyable read!

A week of uncommon prayer:

"Dear God, is there any likable characters in this book?"
"Dear God, will there be a plot? Please, I beseech and implore you..."

An interesting character study of a feminine soulless spirit at its worst (the spirit, not the character study). Ruminations of apathy and mortality, motherhood and marriage, American expatriatism and Latin chauvinism, and most of all, running from the past only to unfortunately meet it in the future. Not uplifting. Wish I had read it during a snowy day in February rather than sunny May afternoons.

But the writing style doesn't suck - instead, it sucks you in till the very end. Thank God for that.

after reading MIAMI recently, it was great to read this and have a more clear understanding on how didion used real life experiences and reportage to fuel her novels ... well, this one anyway, and also THE LAST THING HE WANTED. the crystal clear tight-as-a-drum language hangs on every page and the plot ... well, you'll just have to read for yourself.

This was originally published on The Scrying Orb.

Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors and working through her fiction, I can basically bullet-point what a book will contain:

- A detached heroine, probably in her thirties. A woman becoming unhinged.
- Cruel men in positions of power over the heroine, who have jobs that give them financial and social clout that allow them to be 100% assholes without much consequence (lawyers, producers, etc). The men may be just as detached as the women, but they exude at least the appearance of control.
- A lost child.
- A stomach churning body horror scene, probably relating to the above bullet point, involving a botched abortion or miscarriage or horrifying birth.
- Actually it doesn’t have to be tied to birth. Vaginal blood, arriving in one way or another, and being integral to at least one crucial scene and maybe one shock scene. Maybe they’re the same scene. In A Book of Common Prayer, a bomb goes off outside a birth control clinic and a doctor jumps in fright while inserting an IUD and punctures his patient’s uterus. Meanwhile, the protagonist (who is working at the clinic) is on her period and this is important.
- A disorienting disconnect between how much money the characters are spending and how much money they can possibly have/make; it’s not merely like those sorts of books where seemingly everyone is rich. In A Book of Common Prayer, the protagonist has left her husband and has no job, and is somehow jumping from airport to airport with ease.
- Sex is scary and bizarre, but also understated. When it happens, it is mentioned casually or in a scene much later than when it actually happened. It’s generally inexplicable why the heroine is having sex with whomever she is having sex with.
- Depression and depravity are omnipresent. Everyone is sad or an asshole, but probably both. Hope or escape is generally represented in the (lost) child.
- Physical and spiritual despoilment in fictional third world countries, mirroring the protagonist’s own fall/state of mind/ennui.
- A cold, detached narrator who is not so cold and detached as her self image had her believe before the plight of the subject/protagonist came to pass before her very eyes.
- Just enough hope or possible freedom to make the utter dashing of said hope/freedom sting (but you knew it was coming anyway).

Yet. The writing is so good, so biting and sharp and uniquely Joan Didion that I keep on reading, even as the books become indistinguishable. Plus, they’re really short and move at breakneck speed, so there’s not enough time to get bored.

(Also while looking for the cover image online, I discovered this book, written in 1977, is suddenly going to have a movie adaptation starring Christina Hendricks come out this year???)

LA DONNA SPEZZATA


Una foto di Joan Didion scattata da sua figlia Quintana Roo.

Il libro delle preghiere comuni è il testo base della comunione anglicana.
Mi chiedo se le preghiere comuni sono quelle più semplici, o invece comuni sta per collettive.

E mi chiedo cosa abbia a che fare con questo romanzo, visto che il titolo originale è proprio A Book of Common Prayer.
Domanda che rimane senza risposta, un grosso punto interrogativo dalla prima all’ultima pagina. Mai incontrato titolo più enigmatico.


Da tempo è previsto un adattamento cinematografico di questo magnifico romanzo, avrebbe già dovuto essere completato, e invece se ne sono perse le tracce. Qui, l’attore-regista Campbell Scott, incaricato della regia e del ruolo del marito di Charlotte.

Mi ha colpito la sensazione che in questo racconto di una donna narrato da un’altra donna, Didion sappia esattamente cosa scrivere, non perda tempo, ma sappia sfruttare quello a sua disposizione, senza eccesso, né di risparmio né di prodigalità.
Didion trattiene l’emozione, anche se il melodramma è alla base del mondo che descrive: si adopra per risparmiare parole e scegliere quelle sottotono facendo ampio ricorso all’ironia. Sa rimanere distaccata mentre penetra a fondo.
Eppure l’emozione mi arriva, in certi momenti perfino struggente.
Ghiaccio bollente, è la sintesi che mi viene alla mente per descrivere questa sensazione.

Due donne protagoniste, molto diverse.
La narratrice, prossima alla morte per malattia, che sembra saperla lunga, sul mondo la vita e la gente, ma non è mai saccente, mai un passo avanti agli altri: anzi, sembra preferire restare un passo indietro, per poter studiare meglio il proprio interlocutore - privilegia ascoltare piuttosto che spargere il sale della sua esperienza. È di rara onniscienza riguardo ai fatti che coinvolgono la protagonista, la fica norteamericana.


Christina Hendricks che dovrebbe interpretare Charlotte.

E Charlotte, intorno alla quale ruota la storia del romanzo – Charlotte così ingenua da credere che geografia e storia universali siano ricalcate sulla California e gli US in genere. Ma anche nella sua ignoranza, Charlotte è innocente, quasi vittima. È una preda, circondata da mariti che non brillano per empatia e comprensione, è una madre respinta dalla figlia cui forse ha sottratto attenzione una volta di troppo. Una figlia alla quale non ha saputo spiegare il mondo perché neppure lei madre lo ha capito. La morte la coglierà per caso, come per caso le è capitata tutta la vita.

Chi non ha più nulla di innocente, chi ha perso completamente ogni traccia d’innocenza è il mondo: nello specifico, il continente americano, il mondo nuovo.
È successo già tutto: l’assassinio di JFK e poi di suo fratello Bob, di Malcom X e Martin Luther King – il Vietnam è un carnaio senza uscita – Charles Manson – i figlio dei fiori si sono trasformati in ben altro – l’esercito di Liberazione Simbionese ha già rapito e cooptato Patricia Hearst (Marin, la figlia terrorista di Charlotte?) – l’11 settembre, il primo 11 settembre, il golpe cileno – e mentre Didion scriveva e stava per pubblicare, la guerra sporca argentina inventava i voli della morte e moltiplicava i desaparecidos…


Allison Janney che dovrebbe interpretare Grace, la narratrice.

Didion mi ha riportato con forza agli anni Settanta.
Come leggere un libro di Vidal. Come vedere quei film surreali dai dialoghi assurdi scritti da Jules Feiffer dove le star erano Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin, Donald Sutherland…

Joan Didion è stata una sorpresa che non mi aspettavo, e ancora faccio fatica a chiarire la mia reazione, il mio pensiero. Si dice che le cose migliori scritte da Didion siano di non-fiction, prima di tutto di giornalismo. Io ho cominciato assaggiando proprio la fiction: vuol dire che mi aspettano tante altre belle scoperte.


Joan Didion, che sarebbe stata la migliore Grace immaginabile.