Johnson's view of Nicaragua in the Sandanista uprising. As expected-- the writing is exquisite. The plot is tight and moves fast, not waiting to answer questions, but allows the vagueness of the situation to unsettle the reader. The truth is malleable: is the protagonist a former aid worker, turned reporter, turned prostitute, a con artist, or something else entirely. The only thing that seems real-- even in its wartime surreality is Nicaragua.
A number of lines from the book have been excerpted for The Sprawl by Sonic Youth-- kind of strange to come across.
The quotes from WS Merwin added an interesting touchstone-- on the whole it feels like an excellent piece of reporting disguised as a novel of political intrigue.

Read this book only because I heard it was being turned into a movie and was a short read. However, I found it very hard to follow. I am not a fan of Denis Johnson's writing style. The two main characters didn't have names so it was hard to keep up with who was talking when. I felt like the story was all over the place as well. Hopefully the movie will be better.

This book just kept building up my already existing internal scream, the further this book went the more my internal scream intensified, the more the anxiety built up. This book is all emotional insanity and anxiety and frustration and defeat.
This book ended and I was left with this unending build up of anxiety and frustration.
A great story that I couldn't decide if I liked or hated through out the entire thing, same with the characters. It just made the story and the characters so human and real.
Unsure if I can recommend this, but it is well written and I'm left with a feeling of absolute uncertainty, so if you like that sort of feeling then maybe you'll like this story?

Denis Johnson’s prose is as usual amazing – like poetry. He has the ability of capturing a moment and mood like no one else, especially when that mood is degraded and hopeful at the same time. This book managed to exist in the realm of mythical imagination and visual reality at the same time, but unlike Angels it did skew more towards the mythic. It has science fictional elements too, like all sorts of terrain and environment collapse— a volcano?!

The influence of Sartre’s No Exit is clear, both for the way that the characters find themselves stuck with each other in Nicaragua, and for the way that the protagonist continually insists that they are actually in hell. The amusing departure from realism also takes place with character, as Johnson’s female protagonist is not especially female or feminine in her behaviors emotions communications and so on. She just feels like Johnson in drag, or at least one of his male protagonists, wearing a dress and prostituting herself as needed and drinking and drinking and drinking….

Orwell is another important intertext, but it’s a bit of a murky connection- the year is 1984 and it comes up a lot, the secret police are after them but they’re not really the secret police, and the whole thing is built as a spy / dissident plot with which the protagonist unwittingly gets involved. Ok, I guess in the end her love is tested, so that’s the 1984 connection. It feels like Johnson could have done more with that, but I’m not sure how.

The ending is sad, very Johnson. Overall I’m curious how the Claire Denis movie adaptation I’m about to see tonight holds up to the atmosphere of the book- I really hope she doesn’t just do “sexy Central American drama thriller” but that’s what the trailer suggests.

Sandinista McDonald’s is an all-timer opening scene.

Sort of a mystery set in Paraguay in 1884 amidst an unsettled government.

[1st read from 28/6/2022 to 30/6/2022] — 1⭐️

— i recently read a young adult book about someone wanting to marry at age 18 after their fiancé proposed to them right after confessing to cheating… and yet this was, in so many ways, worse than that.

disgustingly pretentious, desperately trying to be something it’s not and at times, oddly racist, with just the right tint of a white complex savior… literary fiction at its worst.

I love some of Denis Johnson's work: Train Dreams is one of my favorite books ever and deserved the Pulitzer the year it came out; Jesus Son is a classic as well. I just found the style and plot of this novel very difficult, and as a result, I increasingly lost interest. If it had been longer, I would have given up. I still preferred it to the horrors of Angels.

Loved this book beginning to end.

How do you square a plot this scrambled with prose this stellar? What do you do when the sentences assemble themselves into paragraphs of diamond-cast flawlessness, yet steadfastly refuse greater comprehension. Are the characters even close to people? Is it all just a great, masturbatory spinning from the author's fantasies? What the FUCK happens at the end of this book?

It kills me to admit, but I came down on the side of totally not caring if I understood entire swaths of the goings-on in this slim masterpiece. This book should come stamped with hazard symbols because it is molten, toxic, completely airless, a sliver of hell itself. Frequently my breath was turned to ash within my lungs. This, to me, is the very foundation of why I read fiction: to be so pierced by a sentence or turn of phrase that I am branded for life. To be so transported by the descriptions of muggy purgatory and blackened, emptied humanity, it is awe-inducing; so much so that I find myself laughing at such puny concepts as 'sensible plot' and 'believable characters.' This book is elemental in its black majesty.

I wrote out a vague description of what happens between the lead prostitute and the shadowy business brit here in the bowels of Nicaragua, but I deleted it because who gives a fuck? Let yourself be blasted apart by this prose. Struggle with it. We are not worthy to be touched by these pages, and yet here they lie anyway.

4.5

So this is where the lyrics to Sonic Youth’s “The Sprawl” come from.