I hope to write more detailed reviews of these one day, as I had quite a few thoughts while reading these books this summer.

I came to this book via way of Didion’s book Political Fictions, a collection of essays on the cynical, shallow, and Machiavellian nature of American foreign policy and politics. It contained a long essay on the wholesale slaughter and political terror practiced by the government of El Salvador, and the way the Reagan administration actively hid, misdirected, and outright lied about it so they could continue their policy of supporting that government. In critiquing government’s cynical mendacity, Didion was playing to her strengths, and was brilliant.

In Salvador, Didion was ostensibly covering the same ground, yet here her prodigious gifts failed her. She wrote this book (extended essay, really) after a two week trip to El Salvador with her husband. Instead of critiquing policy, she was observing the country, its people, and the terror they lived under in a time of civil war. But here the brutally effective style that she had perfected — that way she had of utterly dismantling her subject with a cold-eyed stare, or a bit of ironic side-eye — was impotently ineffective. She did not really have access to the common folk, who almost certainly would not have talked honestly to her even if she had. She clearly had no more grasp on the country’s culture than most of her readers, and the insights she brought to bear as a foreigner on a quick trip failed to cut deep. She does convey a personal fear, but the fear of a wealthy, protected American in a dangerous place she would leave after a fortnight, not the bone-deep terror of a citizen trapped in an ongoing terror. Thus, the picture she leaves us with is a sterile, clinical snapshot. Didion’s coldly ironic style simply was no match for the visceral, preternatural terror that was civil war torn El Salvador.

This book didn’t give me what I want - it didn’t take me on a journey to meet a beautiful but tortured country, getting close to its people….
…but it gave me something else, something probably much more realistic. An honest account without any frills in the classic, cool and somewhat distanced Didion style that still leaves you with the feeling of having experienced the scene from the authors point of view, and with a sense of how it must have felt to be a (gringa) visitor in that place at that time.

In essence: Didion doesn’t pretend to know more than she does and she makes the reader feel her frustration and nervousness about exactly that state of not knowing, about the apparent impenetrability of the country and of “la verdad” / of the truth about what is happening, about which group is right or wrong (it seems most political actors belong to the latter…), about what “la solución” could really be.

It’s a snapshot of the country at a point in time 40 (!) years ago, and it still tells you a lot about its history, and maybe even its present and future (and how it’s entangled with US foreign policy…).

One comment regarding the publishing of Didion’s essays in general: Publishing some of her journalistic work almost half a century later, it would be very helpful if more historical context on the subjects of the different essays was provided, e.g. via footnotes or a longer introduction. The niche knowledge required about California in the 60s or - in this case - US foreign policy 40 years ago, makes it difficult for younger generations from different places of the world to enjoy her work without using Google ten times in every chapter. While her work is very literary, it also represents a historical chronicle of her time and I think it should be treated as such.

I would say that above all this book provides an insight into the worldview of American reporters in El Salvador at the time, and possibly across the globe at different times. Didion spends her days at various American hotels or interviewing various members of the ruling regime still mostly believing the rhetoric of ‘democracy’ and ‘progress’ yet finding herself a little confused when facts and figures constantly don’t add up, and I think towards the end coming to some sort of realisation that the reporters are themselves part of portraying conflict and the players in a certain way, a way which is in fact, quite far from reality. However, the conclusions she draws from this are bizarre – there are no real facts in El Salvador, the people there are intrinsically violent, devoid of culture, and sadly even the Americans’ best attempts to improve things are impossible. I found these views quite disgusting and constantly was left wondering why she then didn’t try to interview the other side, speak to the people fighting the regime or even local civilians, see if their facts added up better than the ones she had been fed by the regime, and actually do the role she claims to have set out to do – to find ‘la verdad’. To me it seems that one reason that she didn’t do this is her irrational (and yet I imagine fairly common among this milieu) and constant fear of the El Salvadorian people themselves. This means that despite Didion’s claims, this book tells us nothing about those who actually lived in El Salvador at the time, instead telling us about US reporters and how they navigated and interpreted the conflict. Therefore I would recommend this book, not to people genuinely interested in learning about El Salvador itself, but rather to anyone who has some background knowledge of the events in El Salvador around this time and who is interested in the psyche, understanding, and actions of US reporters in El Salvador instead.

This is not a report on the Salvadoran civil war. Do not expect to learn who is winning or losing. Everyone is losing. Joan Didion sticks to form in portraying the extreme disorder of life amidst crisis. This book is about the climate of senseless terror by the state and opposition, and the similar senseless of those uninvolved.

The style is morbid and obsessively detailed as you would expect. There is a fantastic revelation in the first half, when Didion goes to a mall and instinctively begins to catalog the products and manners of the guarded socIal, commercial world, when suddenly she realized she can’t write the sort of “color” she is known for documenting. This book is a testament to that resolve, that Didion is more than the social commentator she might be satirized as. The detail in Salvador instead revolves around truths and lies, of which there seem to be insufficient hard examples of either. Things are ineffable, a point that becomes a reiterative theme.

With all the shifty actors in this book, you will find little to root for. It’s not a story where Reagan is the bad guy or diplomats are the bad guys, because both of those are relatively distant to the nature of crisis as it occurs in El Salvador. Things are rounded but static: a deep-focus snapshot. There is no end to the story and there is no moral.

If I were just judging Joan Didion's prose, it would be 5 stars every time. But a few things about "Salvador" kept me from giving this book a 5 star rating.

But first, a disclaimer. I'm half Salvadoran. My American father and Salvadoran mother met in El Salvador and married in '77 and I was born in '79 in the States, just a few months after my parents decided to come back here. That said, I've never really spoken to them about the war. I've only actually only visited the country once, as a child, while the war was still going on. But my entire extended family continued to live there through the war and still do today.

So I come to the book with some ideas in my head about pre-Civil War El Salvador, as well as some knowledge of what happened both after Didion wrote this book and, even later, after the war ended.

As a snapshot, this is probably a somewhat accurate depiction of the country from an American who stayed there for TWO weeks. And that's my biggest problem with it. How can you really get a sense of this incredibly complicated war and truly get to know and understand the people and culture you're writing about from a scant two weeks on the ground? I think it's truly misleading to use this as a definitive examination of the country during the war.

This is a look at a very bloody war, but as graphic as the descriptions can be at times, it's actually a very sterile. You just see body counts, not people. There's no look at the culture (other than some off-base generalizations like "Salvadorans don't do numbers accurately") to really examine HOW the country got to be where it was in '82 when Didion wrote this snapshot. Lots of interviews with the US ambassador and high-ranking Salvadoran military officials but very little perspective of everyday people living day-to-day during this time.

Part of this could be because of when this book was written (1982, right in the midst of the awful war, not to mention smack dab in the middle of the Cold War) and a political point Didion may have been trying to prove, but whatever the reason, "Salvador" left me wanting.

Also, the insistence at calling the country Salvador drove me up a wall. I've never in my life heard the country referred to like that.

"The only enemy is totalitarianism, in any guise: communistic, socialistic, capitalistic or militaristic. Man is unique because he has free will and the capacity to choose. When this is suppressed he is no longer a man but an animal. That is why I say that despite differing points of view, we are none of us enemies."

This was a difficult and powerful read. Joan Didion perfectly described the horrors Salvador has faced in a way that drove home the graphic and vile nature while facinating the reader to want to learn why this was all carried out in this way.

The questions are much more complex than this book could answer, but it offered a perfect glimpse into the long and deep sufferings of El Salvador.

There is as a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth.

Salvadore has been sitting on my shelf for a long time and, in light of the recent Trump decision to end temporary protected status to Salvadorans, I decided to pick it up.

Didion spent two weeks in El Salvadore in 1982, leading to this relatively brief meditation on the pervasive violence and fear that permeated life during the civil war. Didion's writing is always good. Here is no exception. Her natural cool, almost remote, tone manages to add something to the aura of what she is describing - as if the distance in her voice is emblematic of people so inured to violence that it barely registers as something out of the norm of the day.

However, at the end of the day, the book is too much of a drive-by of a complicated conflict. I wondered exactly why Didion even made the trip if all if the takeaway was going to merely scratch the surface of what was going on. She dips her toe into the muddy waters of US involvement in El Salvador - ...it occurred to me that we were talking about the appearances of things, about how the situation might be made to look better, about trying to get the Salvadorean government to "appear" to do what the American government needed done in order to make it "appear" that the American aid was justified. But, again, it's kept close to the surface. For the most part, I came away with how afraid she was. Very afraid. I don't blame her. But, at the end of the day, the situation in El Salvadore is better served by proper deep dive by a proper investigative journalist.

For a good overview of US involvement in El Salvador:  https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/trump-and-el-salvador/550955/.

Joan Didion's description of early-1980s El Salvador is a terrifically bleak one. The reportage style is beautifully written and wonderfully, powerfully, and horrifically descriptive.
The content seems dated from the El Salvador I am aware of but the interviews with the politicians and ambassadors reflect some of the issues prevalent in the tiny Central American country today. The gulf between rich and poor still exists and Didion's frustration with the lack of access to balanced (or any) coverage of news within the country made me think that some things had not changed much in the nearly thirty years since publication.
The matter-of-fact reporting of some of the terrible murders that were occurring at the time, and the portraits given of the state of the bodies at their disposal, do still bring the true horror of the lawlessness of El Salvador to life. Of most poignancy was Didion's descriptions of her personal fears as she traveled across the country, and her musings on "high tea" in the serenity of the ambassador's garden.
As an insight into 21st Century El Salvador I do not think this provides much. However, as a provider of historical context for the reticence of many present day Salvadoran's to remain indoors after dark, it is invaluable and illuminating.

First El Salvador has moved on from this time period. While it is a part of Salvadorian history, the country has recovered. My first annoyance with this book was that she called El Salvador Salvador throughout the entire book. That’s like calling Los Angeles, Angeles all the time. The book touches on the subject from an Americanized point of view; it was quite interesting to see how she starts to see some of the picture. There is a great quote which expresses the feelings of the Salvadorian peoples altogether, “I guess you’d have to say they were more scared of the army than of the guerrillas…” For those of you, who are interested, check out the movie Voces Inocentes for an alternative perspective. There is more and more coming out about this time period in Salvadorian history and how the U.S. government played a significant role in the destruction of the lives of the Salvadorian peoples. For a more informative read try The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner.

"The only enemy is totalitarianism, in any guise: communistic, socialistic, capitalistic or militaristic. Man is unique because he has free will and the capacity to choose. When this is suppressed he is no longer a men but an animal. That is why I say that despite differing points of view, we are none of us enemies"

If you only care about the way the book it’s written, then I can only say you will enjoy it. It’s great-Didion great, which makes it straight forward, poignant, sharp, personal yet removed. It is the story of El Salvador told by an American that only spent two weeks in the country, whose biases seep through the story. Whether that makes it good or bad, I don’t know, but it definitely doesn’t make it the truest more loyal telling of a story of war. Furthermore, I don’t think Didion, or anyone that takes a magnifying glass to Latin American politics, found la verdad. I don’t think any Latinos do either. But she, as always, made a fantastic effort. The subject matter is raw and hard hitting, maybe even nonesensical, and that’s exactly the way she tells it.

If you’re American yourself, then the commentary on American intervention is vital. Its hypocrisy it’s clear, it’s intentions of aiding the people and stopping human rights violations are exposed as untrue. At least in this story, at least through Didion’s eyes. It’s our job to discern how true this is. We’re lucky to have so much evidence to draw out conclusions from.

Now, you may continue for the personal crap.

I want to- I need to, know more about Latin America. I often feel isolated from this... place, I suppose you could call it, a place I’m supposed to call home. I categorize it with a simple brush stroke of how “we are all the same” knowing that, that same has never been a good thing in my eyes. I do find it funny that I’m getting my facts from Joan Didion, who couldn’t be more gringa, which is probably just further proof of neocolonialism or other sociological concepts I do not want to be confronted with.

It’s hard to be from a place where most of its recent history is tainted with violence and abuse. It’s hard to look back, not long enough to even remotely strain your neck, and find nothing but horror in your path. It’s made harder, I believe, by knowing that if you looked around now, you wouldn’t find anything that different.

“El generalismo es la solución”, the alcabalas, the “tactic of solving a problem by changing its name”, the lack of information, the conformity, the commonality of terror, the abuse and violence and the ways in which they’re ignored... I wonder if these are the things that are intrinsically Latin American, or if the only intrinsic thing is general bad luck and bad taste in politicians. Either way, it’s painful to read. It’s painful to see Venezuela’s today in El Salvador’s yesterday, and it’s painful to know that they’re both some other country’s tomorrow (if not already its today). It’s painful to be Latin American, to have so little hope, to learn to live with so little.

“The luxury of the long view” is the antonym of the Latin American way of living. We have only the terrible now and the terrible here, and maybe the terrible ways in which we can extend the now and the here a second longer. That’s all there is, that’s all we’re allowed to plan for. Yet, I found it interesting, the way Didion describes El Salvador’s remoteness from the rest of the world. Even today, even when it’s hard to focus on anything else but the now, but the here, but the problema, we’re so wrapped up in the outside, trying desperately hard to look elsewhere, anywhere but here. It makes sense, I suppose, that we remain as contradictory as ever.

"Anti-communism was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take."