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Review
- With an Introduction by Tim Adams
- 'A writer of haunting power and global vision who sees a world on the edge of nervous breakdown and is not afraid to deliver the news' Sunday Telegraph
- 'Didion is one of America's finest literary stylists, most penetrating reporters and acutest critics' The Times
- 'A precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer' Zadie Smith
- 'She is one of the true talents of our age' Colm Toibin
- 'It is quite impossible to deny the artistic brilliance of her reportage. She brings El Salvador to life so that it ends up invading our flesh' New York Times
- 'Didion has the instincts of an exceptional reporter and a novelist's appreciation for the surreal... Her clarity of style illuminates the vast darkness that engulfs El Salvador' Los Angeles Times Book Review
- 'Her tough, beautiful, surgically precise prose is like nothing else I've ever read' Donna Tartt
- Didion's latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking (Fourth Estate), is in its sixth printing
Product Description
El Salvador, 1982, is the height of a ghastly civil war. Joan Didion travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, considers the distinctly Salvadoran meaning of the verb 'to disappear' and trains a merciless eye not only on the terror there but also on the depredations and evasions of US foreign policy.
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12 reviews
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Vivid and haunting imagery and cause for reflection
24 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Joan Didion's portrait of El Salvador left me with vivid and haunting imagery of daily, commonplace disappearances and murders; of body dumps; of the Metropolitan Cathedral that the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero refused to finish, "on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence over its display;" of the ghostlike, dispelled National University ("It's not possible to speak of intellectual life in El Salvador"); of the United States' duplicitous role.
"Any situation can turn to terror. The most ordinary errand can go bad ... There is an endemic apprehension of danger in the apparently benign." Joan Didion makes it possible to imagine living this way, every day, with no escape, surrounded by brutal evidence of violent torture and death everywhere.
By the end of Ms. Didion's narrative, it becomes evident, if the reader did not already have some inkling at the beginning, that "American policy, by accepting the invention of 'communism,' as defined by the right in El Salvador, as a daemonic element to be opposed at even the most draconic cost, had in fact achieved the reverse." "To the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist ... where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared ... In other words 'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take."
Reading Ms. Didion's firsthand report of the two weeks she lived in El Salvador in 1982 has made me hungry for more details. Her account is no ranting, "liberal" narrative, despite discussing a highly politically charged topic. It seemed truly a dispassionate observation of a country's life and culture laid to waste--our tax dollars at work. Truly cause for reflection on our government's--and our personal--role and effect on the lives of people with whom we share this earth.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A depressive read
26 Aug 2007
Format:Hardcover
... and, unfortunately, it's all true.
This is one of the few books that have the distinction of being one of *the* most depressive reads of my entire life, but it left quite an impact on me. It made me realize how much the people of El Salvador suffered everyday, how they lived in unbelievable fear seemingly each and every day of their lives, how they were (and remain) good people, and how Saint Raygun Ronnie Reagan and Company knew exactly what those death squads were doing to innocent people - and gave them a hefty chunk of American taxpayer dollars and military equipment regardless (along with training some of those squads in American military camps!).
After finishing the book, I'm surprised Joan walked out of El Salvador with her life. Reading about her watching a young guy being forced at gunpoint into a truck knowing what was going to happen to him, about how body dumps were actually quasi-tourist attractions, how clothes were ripped off the dead so the living wouldn't go without (because the citizens were that poor!), of the contrived cultural festival in one town and how young men didn't dare be seen (lest they be taken away later on), of how there are armed men everywhere one goes, and of how she, her husband, and a journalist got out of a very sticky situation one day after visiting a morgue (which, according to her, is very accessible in the country. I don't know if it's the same a quarter of a century later) where rebels (or "freedom fighters" in Reagan's jargon?) surrounded their car and wouldn't move. If the journalist, who was driving, scratched the armed mens' car it wouldn't have been pretty and if they sped away, again, there would have been a problem. (The journalist was able to slowly back up and not hit anything, thereby saving everyone's lives).
I read the book literally (not looking between the lines of what she was saying) and envisioned living in El Salvador under such fear and it was not a pretty feeling. I feel bad for every innocent Salvadoran who has had to live in such fear and lawlessness, only to have one of the most powerful nations on the planet give money and military equipment to the people causing all the misery!
El Salvador and its people deserve *way* better!
Joan did a much better job than anyone at the major magazines (such as Time and Newsweek) could have ever done - and that was to bring the feeling of fear, dread, and misery up close and personal for everyone to experience. - Donna Di Giacomo
This is one of the few books that have the distinction of being one of *the* most depressive reads of my entire life, but it left quite an impact on me. It made me realize how much the people of El Salvador suffered everyday, how they lived in unbelievable fear seemingly each and every day of their lives, how they were (and remain) good people, and how Saint Raygun Ronnie Reagan and Company knew exactly what those death squads were doing to innocent people - and gave them a hefty chunk of American taxpayer dollars and military equipment regardless (along with training some of those squads in American military camps!).
After finishing the book, I'm surprised Joan walked out of El Salvador with her life. Reading about her watching a young guy being forced at gunpoint into a truck knowing what was going to happen to him, about how body dumps were actually quasi-tourist attractions, how clothes were ripped off the dead so the living wouldn't go without (because the citizens were that poor!), of the contrived cultural festival in one town and how young men didn't dare be seen (lest they be taken away later on), of how there are armed men everywhere one goes, and of how she, her husband, and a journalist got out of a very sticky situation one day after visiting a morgue (which, according to her, is very accessible in the country. I don't know if it's the same a quarter of a century later) where rebels (or "freedom fighters" in Reagan's jargon?) surrounded their car and wouldn't move. If the journalist, who was driving, scratched the armed mens' car it wouldn't have been pretty and if they sped away, again, there would have been a problem. (The journalist was able to slowly back up and not hit anything, thereby saving everyone's lives).
I read the book literally (not looking between the lines of what she was saying) and envisioned living in El Salvador under such fear and it was not a pretty feeling. I feel bad for every innocent Salvadoran who has had to live in such fear and lawlessness, only to have one of the most powerful nations on the planet give money and military equipment to the people causing all the misery!
El Salvador and its people deserve *way* better!
Joan did a much better job than anyone at the major magazines (such as Time and Newsweek) could have ever done - and that was to bring the feeling of fear, dread, and misery up close and personal for everyone to experience. - Donna Di Giacomo
12 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Incisive & Biting: The U.S. & El Salvador's Civil War
14 Oct 1997
Format:Paperback
For anyone interested in the 12-year bloody civil war in El Salvador and the U.S. complicity in that war, this is a absolute read. It is a slim volume in which Didion lays bare in a matter a pages the U.S.'s criminal involvement in El Salvador's internal political affairs in the name of the war against "communism." There are few books in its class. I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one sitting! It provides a quick study of the U.S.'s complicity in the murderous regimes in El Salvador in the 1980's.
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