If I had read this book in the context of my Latin American history class, I would have appreciated its perspective. The book is a valuable work of current events, or at least it was in the 80's when it was published, but as a work of literature, I was unimpressed. The 107-page book is filled with poorly integrated block quotes that could have been cut down. There's hardly a story in the book. As a reader, I was unsure what the narrator was doing in El Salvador in the first place. I feel like she should have made herself more of a character to develop tension etc. If she was going for more of a journalistic approach, then she should have left herself out of it altogether. It also would have helped to get a lot more of the history of the country to provide a context for the events described. I don't think the average person has much background knowledge about El Salvador.

KILL ME NOW. Dry as a bone. Hot take - sometimes Didion hits big time, but sometimes she misses big time. Painful to get through. Like crushing up a bitter pill to dilute in ice cream, or something, I kept on having to break to get through this. And I'd break to do things like the dishes. When dishes are the award... never a good sign.

I'm a Joan Didion fan, primarily because of the way she uses language. She creates breezy, yet complex sentences that are not at all pretty in their depiction of the oddness of reality. And she uses repetition in a way that drives home what she wants to say, rather than in a way that irritates, as in the case of the opening of her novel Democracy:

The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.
Something to behold.
Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.
He said to her.
Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.
Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.
He said:..."

In such novels she alludes to exotic islands locales and strange, subtly dangerous situations, the vagueness of which seems the biggest threat, since the characters can't be sure about if, when or how they'll be hit. All they suspect is that the probability is high.

I wondered how she achieved that affect — of not giving me quite enough information, yet compelling me to continue — until I read Salvador, her essay-length book of her journey during the early 1980s to El Salvador during a civil war in which nobody was sure of the who the enemy was, or more disturbing, why so many people were being disappeared at a time when the Reagan Administration was insisting all was on the brink of getting so much better.

The numbers, the money, dates, incidents: everything of that time and place, according to Didion, was open to interpretation, leaving the country without any reliable information, except for the fact there were bodies left on the road — almost any road you took — every day. She used that steamy, tropical atmosphere, along with the hotels where she stayed and the vague statements of the officials she talked to in her novels Democracy and Play It As It Lays, and even to some degree inThe Year of Magical Thinking about when her husband died.

If you're a reader who loves Didion and finding the source of an author's inspiration, Salvador might be the book for you.

compared to Didion’s other nonfiction, i liked this work more. i’ve had a hard time feeling like she doesn’t interact with what she’s writing about, but with Salvador, she does. some of the cultural events she mentions are lost on me as someone who wasn’t alive in the 80s, but i still appreciate her account of what happened.

This was assigned reading in an elective course I took called "Crisis in Central America" when I was a freshman, and then assigned again in Fr. Schroth's Writing for Mass Media course in the journalism program, sophomore year of college. It's kind of a dense intro to Didion's work; until then I'd only read the essays "Goodbye to All That" and "On Keeping a Notebook." (It's also the first inkling of the deeper, synthesized reportorial work Didion would do in the latter half of her career.)

I've read it a few times since, mainly to study her moves and her ability to take place and information (documents, clippings) and meld them together into a long, persuasive, journalistic essay. When I first read it, I didn't know she'd become my favorite writer. Reading it now really brings back to life the '80s preoccupation (especially on college campuses) with what was going on in Central America, Iran-contra, the killings, etc.

didion used 108 pages to make a devastating civil war about herself

My god, am I not a Didion fan? This is a real blow to my status of pretention.

I really didn't like this at all. I'm not sure if this is any indication of her later, and more popular works, but I really didn't appreciate the way that Didion discussed a lot of the gruesome events and chaos in El Salvador during the war in the 1980s. She writes with almost no compassion, and somehow with some sense of knowledge and condescension despite the fact that she was only there for two weeks (I really don't think that that is enough time to be enough of an authority on the topic to write an entire book). She was disparaging of the people and described a lot of the horrors that she heard about with what I felt was a disturbing distance. Additionally, I knew very little about the war going into this novel and she gives almost no context. She discusses the politics of the country and US involvement as well as her conversations with some of the major players without ever explaining the basics of the situations. If you are interested I would recommend a quick wikipedia research session before picking it up (if you're like me and don't really know anything about El Salvador or the war). Overall, this book really just frustrated and disappointed me, especially given that Didion is such a hyped author. Not sure if this means that I won't like anything she's written but it has definitely put any of her other works I'd potentially be interested in on the back burner until I can forget about this one.

3.5

I upped my rating after having a night to think about it. I felt indifferent (or is it ambivalent) after finishing it last night but it's still haunting me. I'm going to try and figure it out.

It took me a long time to finish Salvador. From the date, I can see that it's been almost exactly three years. It was always there in my bag; I snuck in a few pages here and there for a few minutes here and there. Thinking about it now, given the collective psychic trauma we've had to endure throughout the last four years, I can see that I actively avoided this book. US experimentation with inducing political dystopia had come home in a real way.

"It was certainly possible to describe some members of the opposition ... as 'out-and-out-Marxists," but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition ... as a 'broad-based coalition of moderate and center-left groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction: to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along with most of the American press, the Catholic Church, and, as time went by, all Salvadorean citizens not of the right. In other words there remained a certain ambiguity about political terms as they were understood ..., where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it comes eventually to mean something else may be ... the Procrustean bed we made ourselves," (p. 94).

And here we are. 2021.

I won't comment on the specific sociopolitical or cultural commentary of Salvador but will say that it's a critique of US neoimperialism/neocolonialism/neoconservatism as viewed through Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and what it's wrought in places like Salvador, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

I suppose that if Didion had spent two weeks in Afghanistan, she may very well arrive at the same exact book but with a different title and more contemporary names. That too is also the point, as "names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of a name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named. ... This tactic of solving a problem by changing its name is by no means limited to government," (p. 63).

The continual/cyclical displacement of names marks El Salvador as not so much a country but a forever process of displacement. As Didion points out, it exists in only five-year horizons, in which every montanza, every killing, resets the horizon. It's not so much the events themselves that are important (in fact, they're irrelevant), but the repetition itself, and what's left in the wake at the end of each cycle. It is bound by its history to the point of being ahistorical itself. "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," (p. 73).

There is a lot to unpack here, especially when thinking about Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.

I think most people who read Joan Didion know what they're getting into. Sharp, transparent, almost mundane prose that obfuscates an ineffable sense of violence, misanthropy, and weariness. It's the language of post-traumatic stress and the sites of violence are no longer in the faraway jungle (which in a helicopter flyover, Didion sees is actually not that far away) but are now the church, the embassy, and the Sheraton.

What happens to the psyche when the safe places are now the danger and home, is the place of evil. How do you reconcile that?

dark and absurd. The chaotic terror that U.S. intervention creates, and the inability to speak of that same terror without fear of disappearing.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I know Didion is a journalist by trade but I’ve always known her for her fiction and memoirs. This was a mix of both.

What I liked:
She doesn’t downplay the violence at all. There’s nothing sugarcoated, and she from the amount of interviews she did it was clear she was searching for the truth. There were some really interesting insights and analysis of Salvadoran culture, some of which were true and some of which were not. Her thoughts on how the Spanish word “to disappear” translates into English was apt, and I really liked that she chose to write this through the perspective of an American. She points out how so much of American media twists the conflict into ways that are palatable for the American public; and also how the Salvadoran government manipulates the narrative into what the United States wants to hear.

What I didn’t like:
This read like an “Intro to Latin America” college reading at times. There was too much information and not enough explanation- I think this is written for people who already have in depth knowledge and interest into the Salvadoran Civil War and the country itself. Since this is me, it was an easy read, and although I was very rarely tripped up by the acronyms and names of important figures that she doesn’t give a title to, I don’t think this would be a good book for a normal person, who might have 0 knowledge of the Salvadoran Civil War. I also didn’t like the way she handled Indigenous culture here; although its just passing comments, and she does get the history mostly right, there was a level of pretentiousness when she describes how disconnected many Salvadorans are to indigenous culture. Well, duh, Didion, as you just explained like two paragraphs ago: it was criminalized and there was a genocide. Of course the average Salvadoran isn’t exactly entrenched in Indigenous folklore and traditions during a festival especially when there’s literally men with guns walking around.

Regardless, it was a perspective I haven’t seen and I feel like it shouldn’t be judged as harshly for not having all the knowledge and context since this was literally written in the beginning of the war, before so many major events occurred. Keeping that in mind, I feel like its fine for someone with baseline knowledge of the war already who’s looking for some first hand accounts in a less new reporty way than most primary sources for the time.