This is the second time in a year--almost exactly--that an author died the day I finished reading their book. Losing Joan Didion feels especially sad. I've never been able to tell quite why she felt so familiar to me whenever I read her books, but she is one of my all time favorites. I love her cool aloofness, possibly masking personal moral panic, and her sometimes justified disdain for other people and the ways they live. It must take such fearlessness to observe the world the way she did, and then to write it all down. (In that way we are not at all similar.) We're not from the same generation, the same demographic, and we don't seem to share much external sensibility, but she always felt like a strange lefthanded mirror image of myself. I especially love  Play it as it Lays,  The White Album, and  Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

"This is a country that cracks Americans"

Interesting but couldn't fully get into it (I am probably not entirely in the right headspace for a book like this)

It's 1982. Argentina is trying to reclaim the Malvinas (or to claim the Falklands...), Margaret Tatcher is sending the Navy to get things under control and win the elections, Paul Theroux is travelling "narrowly, around the entire coast" of Great Britain, to write "about a country in its own language", which "was a great advantage, because in other places one was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffled obliqueness—one was always seeing the country sideways" (N.B.: I love The Kingdom by the Sea). Joan Didion is spending some two very intense weeks in El Salvador and discovering that Gabriel García Márquez was after all a "social realist." I find it truly amazing that below the exquisite elegance and precision of Didion's prose is always a substance of observation and thinking that's fresh and original and relevant. In the case, we can appreciate the similarities with the US today, as it keeps morphing into a cesspit of a Police State, and thankfully also the difference yet to be gained until the absolute disregard for human life then prevalent in El Salvador (which has meanwhile gone in the other direction and become a normal, more humane country).

I'm re-reading Lucius Shepard short story of the same title. An excerpt: "Tecolutla was a village of whitewashed stone tucked into a notch between two hills. From above, the houses-with their shadow-blackened windows and doorways-looked like an unlucky throw of dice. The streets ran uphill and down, diverging around boulders. Bougainvilleas and hibiscuses speckled the hillsides, and there were tilled fields on the gentler slopes. It was a sweet, peaceful place when they arrived, and after they had gone it was once again peaceful; but its sweetness had been permanently banished."

Fine writing and terrifically atmospheric, but at thirty years' remove, Didion's weary (and wary) apolitical stance--her insistence that it's impossible to tell what's happening or who's responsible and that the violence is all pretty much aimless--feels less like insight and more like giving up. Having just read the remarkable Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, this felt slight and nearly trite.

Finally finished this after losing my copy for like a year. I think that her whole deal about involving herself and her own fallibility as a narrator into the text works especially well in these articles. Mirrors what she's talking about in terms of people from the US involving themselves in this conflict despite lacking some fundamental ways of understanding what life in El Salvador was like at the time. Fascinating, ambiguous exploration of American role as attempted savior/Salvador of the region. She's also just truly the ultimate master of ending on a quote—the last line of this book about Reagan saying he's sure the US will achieve political stability in Central America says so much even without her explaining her ideas about the stories we tell ourselves vs. the confusing realities of the world.

Also, my copy is a first edition and the dust jacket calls her "Miss Didion" like a million times. What's up with that?

What an amazingly well written great piece of non fiction, Madame Didion! Salvador is a must read for any student of Latin American Studies! I have all the context and I was living it, in Guatemala City. She describes the shocking events we all lived day by day in 1982. What is crude and hard for me to read is her visceral description of the otherwise endearing people of El Salvador, “there is a vocation for terror”. Any pointless encounter can progress into a confrontation with “aimless authority”.
Hard to read but very helpful. Four decades later she enables me to revisit a horrific period of terror where my own father was murdered by the leftists guerilla in 1982.

This is like 2.5 rounded down to 2 stars. 2 feels mean because this is more "eh" than a bad book. Honestly I started with a round up to 3 but when I finished writing this review I changed my mind.

I appreciated this for her experience through the lens of an American visiting El Salvador during a super volitile time. It just felt like... This isn't the book you want to start with if you're looking to understand historical context or a larger view of what happened during the war.

This was written in 1982. Things were not good. If you're American at this time though, and you're seeing newspaper articles and seeing snippets of TV news pieces, and you want to learn more? This is probably a good read. I feel like I lacked the understanding of historical background to "get" a lot of this. Like current day, if I read a similar book about say Ukraine or Palestine, I'd recognize some names or dates or events that would be like "oh right I remember that, so this is what was happening!".
But 40 years after the events, reading this book? It doesn't have the same effect as I'm sure it did in it's time.

Also, annoying, and the reason I rounded that half star down - Didion has a tendency to write looooong sentences. They have many commas, parentheses, semi-colons. Over and over. To the point where I found myself rereading pages because by the time I got to the end of a weirdly long sentence I forgot what it was about. So distracting.

Didion's prose is precise and exquisite, but I struggled with her interpretation of her experience. She argues against continued U.S. involvement in El Salvador's civil war, which seems like the "right" argument, but one based primarily on her fear for her own safety (understandable but not actually relevant to the formation of U.S. policy) and secondarily on her complete dismissal of the value of Salvadoran culture and, ultimately, Salvadoran lives. Her story covers a two-week time period during which she overgeneralizes her own terror as the experience that all Salvadoran citizens must be having, yet the only Salvadorans whose stories she recounts are the ones currently in power (who are likely afraid-but for different reasons than Didion) --and a few besieged writers (who, admittedly, are likely experiencing a fear very similar to Didion's except perhaps even more intense since they can't easily leave the country). In addition, she criticizes the quality of the cultural artifacts she encounters--crafts, dances, religious ceremonies--and informs us that El Salvador "has always been a frontier, even before the Spaniards arrived. The great Mesoamerican cultures penetrated this far south only shallowly. The great South American cultures thrust this far north only sporadically." It's hard for me not to interpret such statements as dismissive. If no self-respecting culture has ever invested in it, why should "los norteamericanos"?

Much of her argument derives from the slipperiness of the language used by Salvadoran leaders and U.S. diplomats alike that purposefully obfuscates both the war and its outcomes. Readers of Latin American literature will be familiar with these examples in their form if not their details. The work is important because of the time (Cold War) and audience (American general public) for whom she published. Her work certainly demands that readers become more critical of Cold War rhetoric and diplomatic decisions, but while she argues against some of the tools of American imperialism, Didion is unable to free herself from the inherent chauvinism on which that imperialism relies. The contradiction makes for a bizarre yet thought-provoking read.

Lack of depth. I found her sweeping, knowing observations about the people and culture of el salvador to be mostly pretty ignorant and they started to annoy me.

didion is probably the best i’ve read at capturing sense of place, but despite her best efforts (and i believe she did try) two weeks somewhere wholly unfamiliar, sheltered from most of it and interacting mostly with members of high society is obviously insufficient.

when she does write about the architecture, or individual experiences with local people, it’s pretty brilliant. she is still incredibly perceptive, and is clear in laying out the horror of the situation, and the consequences of an aggressive, cruel and fundamentally irredeemable US foreign policy.

Didion does an incredible job speaking to the feel of El Salvador in 1982. To note: this book is no substitute for the extensive historical and political analyses of the country. Great nonetheless!!

Didion's Salvador is not the macro view of El Salvador in the 1980s that some might hope. Rather, in a manner similar to that of Kapuscinski, Didion displays the range of emotions and feeling that one might have suffered or enjoyed in a similar situation. In my experience, these kinds of books are crucial to understanding the broader issues of a place like El Salvador, and even if this first person narrative doesn't have the accuracy that some might crave, it gives you the raw detail and emotion of an area that is vital to one's understanding.

Di mana El Salvador? Kenapa dengan El Salvador? Enggak salah emang, realitas Amerika Latin lebih edan, seedan yg digambarkan dalam karya fiksi, bahkan lebih.