In 1982, Joan Didion and her husband, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, went to El Salvador to observe the chaos and disorder during the Salvadoran Civil War. Didion and Dunne traveled around El Salvador for two weeks. The end product of their visit was a series of articles that Didion published in The New York Review of Books, and then expanded for her book Salvador, published in 1983.

Didion’s fine writing is on display throughout the book. The end of the first paragraph of Salvador gives the reader a preview of what is to follow, as Didion writes that to visit El Salvador is “…to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.” (p.13)

The Salvadoran Civil War was a brutal and bloody conflict, and Didion relates the grim details: “The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie.” (p.19)

Didion interviews several government officials, and at one point she and Dunne and some other journalists attempt to speak to a colonel but return without meeting him. “…nothing came of the day but overheard rumors, indefinite observations, fragments of information that might or might not fit into a pattern we did not perceive.” (p.45) I like that sentence very much, and it seems to be a good summary of the book itself.

Didion comes to no grand conclusions at the end of Salvador, and it seems the only thing we have learned is that it’s a complicated place and there’s no easy answer for stopping the killing. Indeed, the civil war would continue until 1992.

Salvador is a short book, just over 100 pages. Does it really need to exist as a stand-alone book rather than a long piece within a larger collection? Probably not. It’s a little unfair to expect anyone to turn out an entire book based on just two weeks of reporting, even if they are an author as talented as Joan Didion. Because of it’s length and the short amount of time Didion spent in the country, Salvador is inevitably going to feel like it’s just skimming the surface. Salvador is still an interesting book, but it’s not an essential one.

It's a terrific piece on the state of El Salvador in 1982, and the American delusions that were necessary to keep American hopes buoyed. But stylistically, this book is interesting because it marks a turning point in Didion's writing. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, we can think of Didion's genius as consisting in the recognition that the context and the person in it are inextricably linked, meaning you could find out about the place by approach it by looking inwards. Little things observed can be woven to create a narrative, which is simulataneously personal and insightful. In reporting on the horrors of El Salvador, the method fumbles:

This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of "color" I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story chat would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be il-luminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscure. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.

...I said that I agreed. The two of them were going back to the house Victor Barriere shared with his mother, L diminutive woman he addressed as "Mommy," the daughter of General Martinez, and, after I dropped them there it occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presence of obvious "material" and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread.

This was, for one, Didion actually risking something in herself, and recognizing that it's a whole other game. It's also a gesture towards the recognition that not everything can be captured through personal reflection, that certain lives are unspeakable, and can't be accessed. But despite this, in a way, it still continues that themes from before, of the experience of groundlessness.

Very interesting background on el salvador and clearly written

Fair warning, this is less of a book review and more of a rambly, personal musing written by me, the daughter of a Salvadoran. It seems stupid to even bother critiquing such a lauded book (and author), but if I influence even one person to see my father's homeland as a country worthy of respect, it will have been worth it.

In Salvador, Joan Didion detailed the two weeks she spent in the country in 1982. She is primarily concerned with the suggestions of war she sees around her, as she never actually witnesses any outright violence during her stay. She begins with an epigraph that ends with Joseph Conrad's "Exterminate all the brutes!" from Heart of Darkness. Certainly a puzzling choice of quote, especially considering Didion's biases towards the country of El Salvador that are prevalent in the book.

Didion mentions that El Salvador is a country of cultural impotence. She believes the country has no uniquely Salvadoran cultural products, as "there is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero. Some aspects of the local culture were imposed. Others were borrowed" (67). This seems, to me at least, a particularly insidious thing to say about a colonized nation, especially when the country has a rich artistic and literary culture. El Salvador has produced a number of remarkable poets and writers in particular. Salarrué, Claudia Lars, and Roque Dalton are just three of the most famous, though there are many more.

While reading, it is hard not to feel as if Didion centered the terror of the war around herself, an American who spent only two weeks in the country, with limited concern for the reality of the Salvadorans who lived with this everyday of their lives. Quotes from Salvadoran military leaders (funded by the American government), journalists, and an American ambassador abound, but the voices of the average citizen are absent. Didion described in dispassionate detail the burned, shot, gouged, and mutilated bodies of Salvadorans caught in the crossfire of the war, but she ignored their lived experiences.

There exists in Salvador no interest in the humanity of Didion's journalistic subject. To her, Salvadorans exist to have terror and violence enacted upon them. She ignored the viewpoint of the thousands of people who lived with this terror, but who still lived their lives; they married, partied, laughed, and existed in spite of the war going on around them, but you would not know this if your only knowledge of El Salvador comes from Didion's Salvador, which considering the size of the country, is entirely possible.

If you are interested in the history of El Salvador, and the civil war in particular, check out books written by Salvadorans themselves. Listen to them tell their own story and history. Here are just a few options: Roberto Lovato- Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas, Javier Zamora- Unaccompanied, Roque Dalton- Clandestine Poems/Poemas Clandestinos, Claudia Lars- Land of Childhood.

"Terror is the given of the place."
- Joan Didion, Salvador

  

In 1983, when Salvador was first published, I was nine. I remember those years as being ones where I heard about people disappeared, death squads, kidnappings, priests killed, nuns raped. Who left me in front of the television? It was the second major international crisis that became part of my childhood dreams. I remember 3-5 years earlier, being freaked out by the Iran hostage crisis. I was aware of angry protesters, machine guns, blindfolds, the Ayatollah Khomeini's rants and a huge dark hole of uncertainty.

While the Iranian hostage crisis shares very little DIRECTLY with the civil war in El Salvador -- excepting the disgusting way people treat each other, the screwed up way that America dealt with both Central America (El Salvador & Nicaragua) and Iran, and the lies we tell ourselves to pretend things are getting better -- these two countries did exist in my childhood nightmares. The FMLN, death squads and Tehran's angry students swirled together in my dreams. Thirty years later, as an adult, the boogie men of my childhood were recreated as I read Salvador. Didion writes like an orthopedic surgeon cuts: straight, deep, confidently and deep TO the bone. This book scared the shit out of me. It made me sad. It made me want the comfort of my mom. Tonight, I'm sleeping with the lights on.

A brilliantly pithy prose stylist - but this report doesn’t feel up to ‘book’ quality. No real central thesis or insight. 3 stars for quality of prose alone!

2.5 Stars!

The US is one of those countries which has interfered with or invaded so many countries within the last century that you sometimes lose track of some of the names. There must be millions of American children out there who will be totally oblivious to their nation’s role in the Salvadoran Civil War.

Of course the US may well have been the strongest supporters of the Salvadoran military government, by 1984 Reagan had spent close to $1 billion in aid, but they were not alone, they were helped by the Latin American dictators like Pinochet’s Chile and Videla’s Argentina.

Didion gives a grim yet compelling oversight into the death squads, Sheraton murders, the raped and murdered missionaries and some of the main players involved in the war, and there are some fairly graphic descriptions of the casualties.

Overall I thought there was a distinct lack of clarity, depth and focus with her reporting and as a result, this doesn’t make for particularly great reading and it made me long for someone like Kapuscinski who would have handled it a lot better and made the writing a lot clearer.

Ah, Madame Didion, how I love the way you take something visceral and awful, and write it as if you were observing it from a bathysphere, smirking and chain-smoking. El Salvador, as we know/knew, is/was a wreck. The point is that, as a privileged American, you can't possibly claim to "feel" what the people are feeling, or to write "objectively" about a situation that your own government, via its local proxy, refuses to let you examine objectively. Instead, the only way to approach the situation honestly in the moment is to contemplate its futility and horror from a distance. Preferably from inside your bathysphere.

This book is honestly bad and lessens my respect for Didion. She wrote this after a mere 2 weeks in El Salvador during which she seems to do little more than look at dead bodies, complain about the end of the Sheraton breakfast buffet, and dismiss the culture and insights of any Salvadorians she actually talks to.

"On this evening that began with the grandson of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez [1930s dictator] and progressed to 'Senorita El Salvador 1982' [Miss El Salvador Pageant] and ended, at 12:22 am, with the earthquake, I began to see Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a new light, as a social realist."

Joan Didion's chronicle of the political upheaval of El Salvador in the 1980s is suffused with the country's endemic atmosphere of fear and violence. Her experience of the country is of the unidentified bodies discovered daily, never to be claimed by family members for fear of a similar fate, the constant patrols of guards with automatic weapons, equally dangerous no matter what their allegiance. This terror industry becomes surreal when coupled with the pretense of improvement and stability put forth: statements from the American State Department about 'turning the corner' in its campaign for stability in Central America, supposed democratic elections about which there are no clear statistics, a festival put on to celebrate the traditions of an indigenous people all but wiped out. Didion interlaces information gleaned from interviews and newspapers with her own experiences. Very moving.

Struggled with this book more than I thought I would. Maybe I lacked some context on El Salvador at the time of writing. I did enjoy her framing of American action in El Salvador, and how meaningless or superficial it could really be.

Didion's previous non-fiction often revealed her sense that a malevolent absurdity pervades all things. So visiting civil-war-ravaged El Salvador in the early 80's may well have been provided too perfect a reinforcement of that view -- making this reporting much more of a subjective reaction than a journalistic attempt to understand the place. For Didion, a place where violence, official and casual, has become so ingrained in daily life, where truth had become hugely disregarded by both the Salvadorian and U.S. authorities, where the bloody human toll had become so absurdly high -- such a place defies analysis, summary, "normal journalism." I'm not completely convinced of that, but this book nevertheless provides, through her vivid and always-excellent writing, a harrowing and powerful vignette of a war-shattered place.