Давно хотіла добратися до Джоан Дідіон. Отож нарешті.
"І побрели до Вифлеєму" - мабуть, найвідоміший її збірник репортажів, який вперше вийшов друком 1968 року, а відтоді мав добрих кілька десятків перевидань (кілька вже в 2000-х).
Культова книжка для Америки, яка насправді є збірником текстів, писаних для різних періодичних видань. Саме так. Журналістські статті, яким усім уже завернуло за п"ятий десяток (окремі з"явилися взагалі на початку 1960-х), писані з різних приводів і з зовсім різними засновками, які в книжковій формі створюють, утім, цілком цілісне враження, а крім того, досі можуть бути цікаві читачам. І не тільки американським.
Авторку постійно згадують через кому з Т. Вулфом, як одну з причетних до явища "нової журналістики". Цікаво тільки, що сама Дідіон при цьому журналісткою себе не вважає (ну, так, дописувала в New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, New York Review of Books, кому там іще - Life, Esquire; а ще працювала у Vogue, вигравши в юному віці літературний конкурс і переїхавши після того в НЙ; але ж це ще не робить порядну людину журналісткою:) До слова, коли її називають письменницею, вона начебто не протестує, і для цього теж має підстави, адже в неї є також кілька доволі успішних романів і автобіографічних книжок.
Насамперед у "Вифлеємі" йдеться про Каліфорнію 1960-х, але також і ширше - про американську контркультуру того часу, показану без звичного замилування і рожевих окулярів. Хоча трапляються і доволі сентиментальні фрагменти, тексти-освідчення в любові до різних міст - від Сан-Франциско до Нью-Йорка, де вона в різні періоди жила. Або людей (дуже симпатично про Джона Вейна). В заголовному репортажі (який також і найбільший у всій збірці) фігурує історія, яку найчастіше цитують у контексті цієї книжки, - про батьків-"мрійників", які дають своєму малятку пробувати LSD (але похмурим тут є не тільки це)).
В іншому тексті авторка бере якусь начебто цілком поточну подію з кримінальної хроніки (жіночка з якогось провінційного містечка пристукнула свого чоловіка заради грошей), але так майстерно реконструює не тільки факти, мотивацію злочиниці, а й виписує саме середовище, що вже з цього одного тексту з головою занурюєшся в атмосферу тієї Америки 1960-х.
Більшість текстів авторка пише від свого імені, і ця свідома настанова на суб"єктивність тільки грає Дідіон на руку. Тим паче, що своїм "я" авторка не зловживає, хоч і не приховує його. Ну, і ще в неї ідеальна риса для хорошої репортажистки - неймовірно вишколене око до деталей і лаконізм.
Щоб трохи розбавити цей сироп, скажу, що насправді деякі тексти здалися не особливо цікавими. Але штука, мабуть, іще в тому, що книжка дуже американська. Важко на 100% відстрілювати всі алюзії і т.д. для людини, яка в Америці - і не тільки 1960-х - не жила.

joan forever!

i still like didion's longform (longest form?) writing the best, but in truth no one was doing it like her and no one is doing it like her and no one ever will.

absolutely one of a kind.

bottom line: the very best.

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tbr review

the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore

To jest wspaniale napisane, ale w ogóle mnie nie obchodzi :I

My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book.

I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values.

Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll.

I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper.

This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations that have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Unabashedly admitting a lifelong crush on John Wayne, a manufactured, wooden caricature of the American man.

Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where

". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."

Oh, don't we all?

My 2nd read. A classic. Many joys here but particular faves are Where the Kissing never stops (about Joan Baez's school for non-violence which her neighbours went to court to get banned), On Morality (why if you find a dead body in the desert you shouldn't just abandon it - kind of a precursor to Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home and the film Jindabyne that was made from it) and On keeping a notebook (self-explanatory). Listened to the audiobook - Diane Keaton's delivery is perfect, deadpan with occasional quirky curlicues which (apparently) some on audible found irritating - but if you read those reviews you'd never listen to an audiobook!

The immutable shadowed silhouette of Didion's coup cut moves threateningly across the dusted walls of a Californian city sprawl at dusk. A cackling laugh is heard as she overhears the still developing speech of a young budding counterculture, a broad image is spun in bland prose and then haughtily dismissed from her West coast perch of pure aestheticism. Everyone knows Joan Didion is better than them, but that you can physically experience that fact so strongly while simultaneously feeling as if you must be endeared by her provincialism leaves you paralysed. But Didion has already moved on, the bourgeoise eye of Sauron turned upon the last frontier, a rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem.

I first read Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem a half a century ago, when my friend Stephanie recommended it to me. Upon re-reading it, I was amazed to find that the book had not aged. I have, but the Didion's essays were as fresh as they day they were written. The title essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about the Hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was so fresh because there were no attitudes present in writing which would tend to age it.

In the essay "Where I Was From," she writes about the typical misapprehensions that Easterners have when visiting the Golden State. They think they have seen California, but have they?

They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips in which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.

How true! Back in 1971, when I first read the book, I had no idea of where I had been living for the previous four or five years. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

I was delighted that the book hit me as being so fresh, when so many of the books I re-read tend to be anything but.

Having recently read "Play It As It Lays," I was interested to read some of Joan Didion's non-fiction. Published in 1968, this collection of non-fiction captures the feel of America during the Sixties, when the counter-culture was in full swing, but optimism was losing its way.

The essay that gives its titles to this collection deals with Haight-Ashbury and paints a picture of hippies, not wandering the streets with flowers in their hair, but wandering, drugged and lost. This is a portrait of young runaways, toddlers given acid, the lost and the tragic. Another favourite of mine was that of a crime, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," of manipulation, greed and adultry.

I will admit that I often lacked understanding of this collection. I have never visited California and never felt inspired to do so. I was born in London and not until the Sixties, so my memories are that of the Seventies onwards. Still, this is a fascinating, if uncomfortable, portrait of a time and place.

After having read some of Joan Didion’s contemporary nonfiction, I decided to rewind and read some of her older works. This collection included some journalism, but also some of her own thoughts and opinions of the time and other matters. It was an interesting mix, but I thought it was definitely some good food for thought and had me shocked at some of the stories I read about.

Joan Didion certainly knows how to build a story or case without making it feel too sensationalised. Rather, her method is to make it seem like storytelling… It leaves us curious to know what happens next but also shockingly aware that this is someone’s reality at the same time. Being able to see how it works in a fictionalised context while being completely aware that it is nonfiction made me as a reader realise how easily reality can become distorted and subjective. Joan Didion gives us a picture to start with in her journalist stories, but we know there is something not quite right with the picture we have been given.

Which leads me on to marvel about how she knows the best way to set a scene. I felt engraved in lifestyles and places I’ve never been to in my own life. She gives us enough facts and uncanny details that makes us feel immersed without going too overboard. Maybe some high fantasy fiction writers need to take a page from her book.

Sometimes when approaching nonfiction you simply come to expect coded and complex language that will take you a long time to read. But her nonfiction is written in a straightforward and mostly simple way. She includes images that help you imagine the scene and clearly describes what you need to know.

I didn’t agree with all of her opinions or statements. But it was so interesting to read and think about her personal essays. I even discussed some of the statements and sentences with a friend as I was reading. So much food for thought. It made me think about myself, other people, whether I agreed or disagreed or something else entirely. She writes her personal essays in a way that allows us to know these are her opinions and views, but by no means the only or the answer to how things should have been done. I liked that it was so open and self-aware.

However, at times I felt she was a bit limited in how she judged or perceived the younger generation. I will try my best to explain what I mean. I felt like you can feel the age difference between the ones she is examining and herself. She understands them and sees the larger picture as to why what is happening is happening, but at the same time she doesn’t quite manage to get into their minds and see things entirely from their eyes. This was what I garnered from my reading experience. Although she tried her best to bridge the distance, she didn’t achieve it entirely while simultaneously, perhaps believing she did so. Which is why sometimes I felt unsure about some of the conclusions she reached. Nonetheless, it still made me think, which is ultimately a win. Because it helped me form my own opinions on the matter.

The final chapters focused on musings where the main focus was the setting. I found that to be a little boring except the last one which flipped back to her personal essay on New York and mental health. I think my favourites of hers are when she writes her personal essays or follows a news story, rather than just the setting and then goes from what has occurred in that space.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a classic of what was once called the New Journalism. It was written during the first decade of my life, and now, entering my sixth decade, I finally have made its acquaintance.

I use the word "acquaintance" quite literally; Joan Didion's voice infuses the pages of her essays inescapably. Having read this collection, I feel that I have met its author. I don't like her. The woman whose voice overwhelmed me in this collection strikes me as sharp minded, sharp eyed, yet cold and prematurely curdled; a person I might respect, to whom I could be formally polite, but I doubt I would enjoy her company.

Yet I loved her work. Her writing is strong, her phrases surprising and perfectly chosen. Her power to project her personality, however much I disliked it, into excellent essays of cultural importance, melding the personal with the public, was an alchemy that I found bewitching. Though I don't particularly like her, I find that I am glad that I met her.

What I've gathered from this is that the 60s were a weird and crazy time.
What I've also gathered is that Joan Didion is a wonderful writer.
Some of the essays felt definitely "of their time", others were weirdly relevant, some I didn't connect with at all, others spoke to me in a way I didn't expect. Overall, this if a fascinating book and a slice-of-life literary experience unlike anything I've read before.

The kind of read where you have to slowly digest over a span of days, I don’t think Didion is necessarily my taste however I think this was a really interesting and well thought out read, each essay was incredibly well written and planned I preferred her more personal essays towards the end of the book & it has made me more interested her personal work, such as my year of magical thinking… adding that to my cart next…