When I started this I had the thought: “this is like The Things they Carried for girls!” I still think that rings true; Didion plays with that same concept of explicitly constructed narrative and the question of truth. But she focuses more on what she knows best: the journalistic world and the cyclical stories it creates, the real effects it has on “real” people, and the scary thought that the information we think we know (about ourselves, our loved ones, politics and news) is never really that simple. Absolutely loved it!

First book I did not finish in a very long time so I’m allowing myself to put it in my Reads List.

I was very surprised to not like this. I have not read any lengthy texts by Didion (yet) and I’m disappointed this was my first read (but I’m not giving up on my girl just yet). The writing was fast-paced but I think in its quickness I got lost. Didion is a big deal, having been revived and read lately by twenty-year-old girls who feel intimately intertwined with her words, and not feeling close to her writing feels like sacrilege. Is it just me??

There’s something about Democracy I couldn’t quite grasp. Perhaps because I’m not American. Perhaps because I simply didn’t enjoy the writing as much as I thought. Perhaps I just had exaggerated expectations.

I won’t count this as my first Didion. I’ll think of Democracy as a toe dipping and hope Play It As It Lays (Didion’s next read on my tbr) changes my mind!

Ah...Joan Didion’s Democracy…opaque, discursive, mysterious, hums with a sense of quietly lurking menace, fragmented time, a time, Didion observes...as "Joan Didion," inserting herself into her work of fiction, an observer in this novel, who is relating her imaginative yarn as a journalist's quest for an assembled-and-organized meaning, a "Rosebud," to all these disparate snippets of time, place, personality, calling cards, rumors, last-minute flights to exotic destinations, press clippings, photos, oddly angled interviews, flash back, flash forward, all against the backdrop of the 1975 American evacuation from Southeast Asia...a time, a fantastic time, captured in the detached, almost surreal DidionVoice, observently, taking all into consideration as what one character notes as "'the long view' (by which) I (Didion) believe she meant history, more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it," a characterization various men and women of a certain disposition, including a central character, the well-heeled political wife Inez Christian Victor, tend to deny by virtue of their own experiences but yet are randomly, indiscriminately swept up in...

This is a novel of ellipses. Things fall apart, but they also trail off… Haunting, with sentences so sharp and surprising and economical and hinting at such depths of facticity and reasoned consideration that I had to stop and stare at these...these...these gists of worlds below the surface, trying to imagine how Didion manages to thread so much together into tight, lucid epigrams and aphorisms.

That said, a Didion “like” does not mean “for every taste.” She seems to piss off as many people as she delights. I'm a Vietnam-era vet, and the evacuation is vivid in my memory, as is the surreality of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and there were still Jack Lovett-style cowboys/international men of mystery aboard when I joined the US intelligence community. I enjoyed—no, I delighted in--the book's patient, deflecting discursiveness more than most readers will. Reviewers go off on her for her seemingly random structures.

As some literatus has blurbed on the back cover, "Didion can dissect an entire society with a single phrase." Well, here, she dissects a world at a very specific moment in chaotic time. I’m absolutely stuck on Joan Didion and have begun ripping through her oeuvre, fact, fiction, essays and all. I really go for her gonzo style…

What a fabulous book! Just loved it.... Witty, raw, humane... I really adore Didion....

Second read, liked it even more….

Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward!!!

Excellent novel. I’ve never read something written quite in this style before and it truly astounded me. Reading this novel felt almost like I was living life with the characters, it was so real and human. Didion once again moves me with her striking literary ability.

Touch and go when it comes to premise and focus but that Didion style elevates. She has a way of writing about politics as if she and her characters are above, below, within, and without all at once- mirrors how being within the political structure feels even if it keeps her from nailing any one tone and truly digging in. At times that trick can read like a hyperfocus on aesthetics- but Joan always gives enough of a wink to let the reader know that that too is sardonic.

At first sight the words charm and harm differ in one letter only but the contrast in their meaning is dramatic. Strangely enough, 'Democracy' by Joan Didion has charmed me and harmed me at the same time.

‘Democracy’ has charmed me.
The first thing that enchanted me instantly was Joan Didion’s writing style. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. The unsettling, highly addictive rhythm of her sentences, with many cadenced repetitions and anaphoras, resonated with me like music which goes smoothly straight to your heart.

I was flabbergasted by Didion’s ability to affect me so much with so few words. Isaac Babel points out, 'No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place' and it seems so true in Joan Didion's case also.

Although 'Democracy' provokes strong emotions, it’s far from sentimental. Her style is harsh at times, like her characters. Ah, the way she depicts the feelings flowing between Inez and Jack every time they meet! It made me think of 'Casablanca': scarce words, extreme tension.

The descriptions in "Democracy' are concise but the world she paints with words bursts with colours and smells: 'When Inez remembered that week in Jakarta in 1969 she remembered mainly the cloud cover that hung low over the city and trapped the fumes of sewage and automobile exhaust and rotting vegetation as in a fetid greenhouse. She remembered the cloud cover and she remembered lightning flickering on the horizon before dawn and she remembered rain washing wild orchids into the milky waste ditches.'

Trying to analyze the mechanisms Joan Didion uses to make her prose so original and mesmerizing, would be like catching her words in the net and pinning them like exotic butterflies. Sorry, I’m not going to do that. I prefer to let them float around me and watch them in awe and just sense them with delight.

As for topics and genres, “Democracy” reminds me of a multilayered cake. Don’t expect any sweetness though! It’s more like a strong espresso which will burn your lips and make your heart pulsate faster. You will discover many floors of Didion's amazing construction. Politics, modern history, family, love, writing a novel, being a writer, to name just a few.

It’s a novel, a love story, a crime story, a reportage and an essay at the same time. The narrator is Joan Didion herself who happens to know some characters in person and who shares thoughts about creating this novel and writing in general. The structure of 'Democracy' made me also think of a film. Gosh, the scene in the bar could be dazzling, with Inez dancing not as 'you or I or the agency that regulated dancing in bars might have defined dancing'.

My experience with this novel proves that reaching out of comfort zone can be extremely rewarding. It was Orsodimondo, who got me interested in Joan Didion’s works, and I am very grateful for his encouragement.

‘Democracy’ has harmed me.
Everything I try to read now seems tasteless and colourless compared to Joan Didion’s novel.

Sublime. Didion probably doesn’t know Marguerite Duras, and probably wouldn’t like her work if she did, but this is a gorgeous American palimpsest of Durasian ideas and styles: call it VIETNAM SONG.

don’t ask me what the plot was. i still don’t know.

This was a really good book. The dialogue between the characters was awesome and very humorous. I think that she fashions the main female character after herself and the daughter after her own daughter. I really enjoyed it.

"We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it."

“Colors, moisture, heat. Enough blue in the air.”