pretty cursory introduction to the political turmoil of early 80s El Salvador, and I’m sure, as that of a white American woman visiting for a mere two weeks, Didion’s insight is lacking somewhat. That being said I knew nothing at all about El Salvador so I found even the basic facts really interesting (and grim), and Didion’s prose is perfect as always.

Two El Salvadoran women are in and out of my house on a regular basis and as I started reading more about immigration issues in the current political climate, I started to become aware of my utter lack of context for the history of immigration between the US and Central and South America. Growing up on the East Coast, I have more fluency in the immigration waves from the 1600s to the 1900s out of Europe and Africa (using the term "immigration" euphemistically here in a lot of ways), and this felt like a massive gap in my historical understanding. Starting with a 100-page essay from 1981 / 1982 by Joan Didion isn't exactly a comprehensive survey of El Salvadoran history by any stretch, and certainly it raises issues of "who" gets to speak on an issue...but the shortness and the pedigree of the writer were hard to deny, and so I grabbed it as my entry point.

For being 100 pages, it's dense and meandering and lives in a very gray area between reporting and personal essay. She took this reporting trip AFTER she wrote "A Book of Common Prayer" although it felt like I could see some similar underpinnings.

What I will say is this -- this is a damning companion piece to PROPHET'S SONG, which I read only two weeks ago. Dystopia is a fictional genre only to some of us lucky few, and maybe only for a short time.

I have more reading to do.

Didion visited El Salvador for a fortnight in 1982 and this short book expanded upon her New York Review of Books essay.

“Terror is the given of the place” and Didion tries to illustrate this with a montage of incidents and anecdotes which include the humour of the absurd, as you don’t want to think about the details of the horror of the commonplace deaths. This can be theoretically understood from Didion’s descriptions of the body dumps, the government death squads and the“disappearances”, but is numbing.
Didion’s book is not only about the impact of the terror upon her and her thinking, but also the way in which the American military and diplomatic presence had to view the situation in order to justify their involvement in assisting the government. She is not opining whether the US presence in El Salvador is right or wrong, just trying to present her impressions and the record of her conversations from a two week visit.

“...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.”

Hmm. As a personal longform essay and as an example of writing in general, Salvador is emblematic of Didion's jaded, biting wit. I highlighted many sentences and phrases, just because they were so sharply written ("...a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote.") As a work of journalism and reporting, the essays in Salvador fall a little flat for me. A lot of the events feel muddled in her account, such that I had to look up the Salvadorean civil war on Wikipedia to fill in the missing gaps later on. She's good at capturing the horror of being in a country in the midst of civil war -- that much isn't surprising. But it feels like a lot of the despair is coming from being sequestered in a hotel room, which feels more removed than I would have preferred in a journalistic piece. I'm thinking of her other works that I loved, like The White Album, and what I appreciated was her perspective and engagement of being in the frontlines (i.e. California in the 1960s-70s; capturing the idea of writing what you know). Here, it feels like she's many steps ahead of us, in terms of her critique of the Cold War-era politics of the time, but with an unspoken expectation that the reader needs to meet her where she's at.