I.. think I mostly enjoyed this?? Only read this bc the movie is apparently terrible and after finishing the book I can understand why this must’ve a pain to adapt, nothing is happening and yet too much is happening on every page how did she do this.......

Si possono dare cinque stelle a un romanzo di cui non si è sicuri di aver capito proprio tutto?

«Voglio dire potete provare a far quadrare il tutto ma alla fine a che serve?
Voglio dire non è che poi lei torna.»

The thing about thrillers is that, however stylishly they are written, they ultimately live and die by the the intricacies of the plot. At some point, the reader needs answers, and logic. Whatever writing devices are used to create mystery, suspense and anticipation - all the things that keep you turning the page, in other words - the reward in the end cannot come down to the ‘aesthetics’ of the writing alone.

Joan Didion’s writing is deliberately (and beautifully) bleak, staccato, unsentimental, and mystifying in a way that keeps you guessing what’s going. It’s particularly effective for this story because imperfect memory (from both the narrator and various characters) plays a big part in building intrigue about a crisis that was big news for a while, and then just vanished from everyone’s consciousness: the Iran-Contra affair in the 80s. As a reader, you may not necessarily like this kind of style, but you get why she’s doing it and it keeps you 4-star absorbed. Until the moment you, as a thriller-reader, demand that one thing every thriller-reader asks of a thriller-writer: a logical conclusion.

Hmmmmm....I am confused.

I really liked the writing style, and the narration was distinct and engaging. I also appreciated the lack of moralism in the novel. Yet, this book was so weird for me in the sense that it felt like Didion circles the central plot, flirts with it, instigates it ever so slightly, and then trails off into commentary that is not necessarily plot-forwarding but also not irrelevant? Only to come back to this on-and-off forward action and dish out some pretty blunt truths about the Iran-Contra Scandal, which contextualizes her narrative.

The ending went over my head. I feel that maybe, as a reader, I became too frustrated with the way Didion chose to tell this story that I began to discard her details, consequently missing what I think would have been the "big reveal" moments in her finale.

Pese a que este libro tiene muy buenos comentarios en Goodreads, me quedo con uno de los que leí: "Confuso y sin sentido".

Al comienzo, la historia tiene un hilo conductor y genera expectativas, pero de pronto todo es extraño, entran personajes sin profundidad, no se entiende qué hacen ahí, la protagonista parece vivir en una nebulosa donde nada ocurre, pero al parecer todo está ocurriendo.

Un misterio extremadamente misterioso, a tal punto, que comprendí poco y nada.

Cuando comenté que estaba leyendo este libro de Didion en el taller de escritura, la profe me dijo: "No era el libro para empezar con Didion", y concuerdo.

Ahora que lo pienso, la traducción me habrá jugado una mala pasada? Difícil saberlo.

There are those writers who write well about life and then there are those writers like Didion who excel in documenting the in-betweenness of life. The ambience of being between careers, between relationships, estranged from families and those folks who happen to be where they are less by choice and more by resigned indifference to elect to go anywhere else make up her characters' milieu.



She is in her element with vanquished characters who are jaded, spent and unable to gain entry back to the status quo. With The Last Thing He Wanted Didion's plays with the hardboiled parlance and atmosphere of a thriller with mixed results. While you'd think her distinctive wry style would easily translate to the reportage of a thriller, it tends to overwhelm what she tries to convey. You can see where she is entertained by the lingo of government-speak, the absurd quality of official reports design to reveal little while presenting the complete accounts of events and the rat-a-tat of interrogation banter, but after a while the narrative and character development being to suffer as Didion's treatment of revisiting scenes, as well as retelling moments tends to obscure the immediacy of the scene in favor of word play.



The protagonist Elena McMahon at first is rendered as a classic Didion character who disconnects from her career in PR for a presidential campaign. The most compelling aspect of this narrative is Elena's initial attempts to regain familial ties with her estranged father and daughter. The question of her father's dementia as opposed to possible duplicity is great. But, as the book descends into the the plot of a thriller, all the characters including Elena begin to talk alike--they all begin to sound like Didion speaking in wry detective-speak.



By the time you realize the tale has a romantic angle and begins to evolve beyond ironic stylized description, Didion disposes with the narrative post haste as if to say the tale isn't as important as the way as it is being presented. And because we quickly lose our connection to Elena as she descends into intrigue, and the other characters are interchangeable, the plot becomes secondary to the arch, hardboiled atmosphere that so entertains Didion, but eventually wore thin on this reader.

*I am not assigning star ratings in 2019 as a personal experiment*

I'm disappointed this was my first Didion because it was not for me. The book spent way too much time talking AROUND things, and I just don't enjoy those types of thrillers. Also, I read this because I found it on a Costa Rica reading list, and it is barely set in Costa Rica. It's set mostly on an unnamed Caribbean island and in the United States.

Tremeno bluf. Es un ejercicio pretencioso de intriga contínua sin sentido. Todos los personajes hacen las cosas que hacen porque patata. Sobre todo la protagonista, que acepta sustituir al padre en un encargo sin motivo aparente, y cuando todo parece que ha salido mal decide quedarse allí a ver qué pasa también porque patata. Y luego está lo del resto de personajes, Menganito se dedica a esto porque yo lo digo, y hace esto porque yo lo digo. Pero resulta que Permanganito en realidad era Juanito, porque yo lo digo. Y esto no es ningún spoiler porque toda la trama es un absurdo azaroso con cero desarrollo. Ahora eso sí, escrito como si todos lo estuviéramos entendiendo. También hay un romance que dura una línea. Y ya está. Como si poner el nombre de un personaje ya acarrerara toda la información que necesitas para entender a qué se dedica, cual es su objetivo, de donde coño sale y qué le motiva a actuar de aquella determinada manera... No sé explicarlo. Es como si te cuento Breaking Bad diciendo que hay indicios de que Walter White produce droga y parece que al final le sale mal, o no, quién sabe no la he visto. Y para terminar de rizar el rizo digo que Breaking Bad es una historia sobre la guerra fría porque hacia el final Hank dice, bromeando, que Walter trabajaba para la URSS. Tremenda sinopsis y menudo cagarro.
Me hace gracia que la sinopsis dice algo así como que vamos descifrando la figura de Elena hasta conseguir entender su papel en el tablero de la guerra fría. ¿Descifrar qué? Pretencioso hasta decir basta. Dicho mal y pronto... no perdáis el tiempo.

Un romanzo nettamente visivo; da l'impressione di stare vedendo un film. Un film di spionaggio, almeno in apparenza, perché in realtà non lo è. Joan Didion romanziera è pirotecnica, piena di sottigliezze, eppure scrive con grande scioltezza e chiarezza. La sua non è una prosa arzigogolata, ma lo è il sottinteso. Diciamo che ho apprezzato l'esecuzione e riconosciuto la penna dell'autrice che ho iniziato a conoscere, ma preferisco di gran lunga i suoi memoir.

When Joan Didion died last week, I decided to read this 1996 novel, because it was the only book by her I owned but hadn't yet read. It's apparently her final novel by choice. She lived another 25 years after publishing it and so presumably could have written more novels if she'd wanted. Its very Didion-like self-styled "not quite omniscient narrator" hints at why she preferred not to when she says that the story she wishes to relate "lacked coherence. Logical connections were missing, cause and effect." "If I could believe (as convention tells us) that character is destiny and the past prologue et cetera, I might begin the story" in one place rather than the other, she digresses, pages after she's already begun the story.

This skeptical journalist-narrator is obsessed with the obfuscations of official language, government circumlocution and media lies, the truths deliberately buried where no one will find them in newspapers, the calculated euphemisms and evasions of intelligence agencies. It's a beautifully anti-2021 novel for the end of 2021: you'd have to be out of your mind to believe mainstream news, still less to trust the experts, Didion distinctly implies. But this corruption of public language is just one variation on language and narrative's endemic debility. She remembers what she said to her daughter, tasked with writing a school essay about an event that changed her life:

I recall explaining that "change" was merely the convention at hand: I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted.

I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.

Significantly, what she says is different from what she thinks in this moment. She goes on to declare an interest "only in the technical," and, following a lengthy ode to the minutiae of how to pave airport runways, quotes the philosopher who inaugurated our late modernity when he told us that language could never be other than a lie:

I give you Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844-1900: "Where man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life—mountain and forest lines, as it were—then man's most inner will become agitated, preoccupied and wistful."

Yet somehow Didion's valediction to storytelling manages to tell a story, or at least to indicate where one would be if she could tell it.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a deconstructed political thriller. It might have been a 500-page airport paperback with chapter cliffhangers and smooth-running expository linear prose, with all the characters' thoughts given in exclamatory italics. Didion instead offers barely 200 pages of fragmentary narrative, metafictional digressions, false starts, conversations without quotation marks (and some with quotation marks), hypnotic repetitions, and a style so rhythmically minimalist that it reads like a prose poem from end to end, even after the overtly poetic overture, a requiem for the '80s boom, which turns the period's cliches into an aria:

Some real things have happened lately. For a while we felt rich and then we didn't. For a while we thought time was money, find the time and the money comes with it. Make money for example by flying the Concorde. Moving fast.

The story the nameless Californian journalist-narrator is trying to tell, and the questions she's trying to answer, are as follows. Why did Elena McMahon, a former Los Angeles reporter, first leave her rich husband and life as a West Coast society hostess to become a political journalist for the Washington Post? Why did she just as suddenly walk off that job in the middle of covering the 1984 Presidential election? Why did she go to Miami to reunite with her father, a man who "did deals," who was always looking for "the million-dollar payday," who intimates knowledge about his potential involvement in "the deal in Dallas" (i.e., the Kennedy assassination)? Why did she decide to help her dying father complete his final deal, running arms through the Caribbean to the Contras in Nicaragua on the secret behalf of the U.S. government? And how did the deal go so wrong? How did Elena—in her father's stead—get set up in a false-flag CIA scheme to assassinate the ambassador and blame it on the Sandinistas, thus precipitating open conflict? And how did Treat Morrison, CIA officer and self-styled "crisis junkie," end up going to island to investigate her? And how did they end up falling in love for the 10 days remaining to them? And how did it all end so tragically?

Answers come in hints and fragments. Her mother had recently died. She'd survived breast cancer. Somewhat disturbingly, she was uncomfortable in her wealthy L. A. lifestyle because she was just about the only "shiksa" there. She was middle-aged and wanted a drastic change, a new life, but also the old life, her lost youth, her mother saying, "Half a margarita and I'm already flying" on the Fourth of July when she was nine year old. As for Treat Morrison, his own wife had just died. He too came from the West, San Francisco in his case; his sister drowned herself. The narrator says at one point, mysteriously, "They were the same person. They were equally remote." The narrator says everywhere and all the time, as always in Didion's work, that you cannot finally explain anything about why people do what they do: we're all equally remote. It's not 100% satisfying characterization—Morrison in particular never comes clear; some of the scary gun-running side characters wouldn't be out of place in an action movie of the period—and only works in a novel if the novel is also a prose poem. The title, like a line of poetry, means more than one thing: her father's final bequest, Morrison's final romance, the last thing either man wanted for Elena.

Politically, The Last Thing He Wanted balances A Book of Common Prayer from almost 20 years before: if the radical left made all the trouble for Latin America in the earlier book, Didion here blames Reagan and the CIA and even "the Monroe doctrine," though I suspect she expects us to decide it's all one system in the end. In a contemporaneous New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani, who would later publish one of the endless Age-of-Trump laments on the death of truth, complained,

Despite Ms. Didion's nimble orchestration of emotional and physical details, despite her insider's ear for lingo, her conspiratorial view of history never feels terribly persuasive. It's hard to buy the narrator's assertion that history (or, at any rate, the sort of history she believes in) is ''made exclusively and at random'' by people like Elena's father. And it's harder yet to buy the suggestion that the people setting up Elena may have had something to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

In the end, what's meant to be existential angst feels more like self-delusion; what's meant to be disturbing feels more like paranoia.

Which makes me wonder if this novel—or, for instance, some of DeLillo's or Pynchon's books—could even be published in today's climate, when their intended educated middle-class readers sport signs on their lawns that say, "We believe science is real," a bit of epistemic naïveté that would set Nietzsche spinning in his grave, a rotation soon to be joined, no doubt elegantly, by the woman who once wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," with which aphorism she intended not to laud our inventiveness but rather to stress our desperation.

Didion comes back again and again to the moment where her heroines make a wild attempt at existential escape from the confines of their lives, only to find themselves in some other, larger trap, here no less than the U.S. empire itself. The moment of transit, though, is what interests her. So much of this novel takes place in inherently intermittent settings: hotels, airports, airplanes, airstrips. The narrator chooses to begin her story in a hotel: the moment when Treat Morrison arrives on the nameless island ("The name would get in the way," she lectures her presumably bourgeois audience who might have vacationed there and thus will miss the political import), when he sees Elena for the first time in a hotel coffee shop, in a white dress, eating a chocolate parfait with bacon. The mystery of persons and events. She will end in a white dress, too, the last time he sees her, "her white dress red with blood."

The novel concludes with the narrator's hotel reverie: the political personae of the end of the American century gather for a conference in the Florida Keys about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger and then some names I don't recognize are in attendance. But she imagines Elena and Treat reunited there, too, amid the tropical elegy for the American century. She proffers the saving grace of that ultimate lie of language and narrative, the fairy-tale ending: "I want those two to have been together all their lives." I give you Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: "We have art lest we perish of the truth." And why not? We're going to perish anyway, with or without art. The only way not to die completely is to be remembered. By writing sentences and stories good enough to last, for example, which is what Joan Didion did. I'm happy to commemorate her for it here: hail and farewell.

i was going to rate this 3 stars because it's good writing, clearly very intelligent and stylish and full of concrete detail. but somehow the concrete detail is too concrete in that it's harsh and solid and there isn't much space for feelings or even much of a narrative, like an expense account or log.

and i found the plot inscrutable but not inscrutable as in truly intricate (like many real conspiracy plots) because at the end when it was all woven together... all two? threads? it turned out to be a pretty nothingburger of a story.

i did not actually know anything about joan didion i didn't know she was a journalist so with that context it made more sense, initially i expected something more sensitive (yes probably because she is a woman but maybe more so because her name has always seemed so evocative 2 me)

but it was really the most sensitive line of all, the last line, that made me give this 2 stars. like we were being thrown scraps of a narrative as an afterthought. well i found the scraps qUite uninteresting to chew on

i turned off the stove mid sautee when i remembered i had not yet read the reviews for this book! interested to see what these 3.43 stars are all about...

The Last Thing He Wanted was fine. It was a really quick read, told from the persepctive of a nameless narrator. It's a thriller/action novel about a woman who gets swept into the Iran-Contra Affair. After Elena McMahon finds herself stuck on an unnamed island, the narrator discusses the overarching circumstances, circumstances manipulated by actors outside of Elena's periphery, which brought her there. Overall, this novel was entertaining but not super spcecial. Joan Didion has written more meaningful novels, more throught-provoking works.The Last Thing He Wanted is not either of those things. However, as far as books go, I enjoyed reading it. The Iran-Contra Affair is a particularly interesting circumstance that most historical fiction doesn't discuss, and I was happy to hear about the mystoire of the US Government through fictionalized journalistic accounts. While I'll probably never think about it again, I liked how Joan Didion sets fiction over real-life events.