Joan Didion

[novella]

Any Didion fans out there?

Play It As It Lays and Slouching Toward Bethlehem are two of my favorites. After Henry and The Last Thing He Wanted are strange, very meditative like the earlier books, but leave something unfinished.

I'm starting Democracy now. I read the White Album years ago and can't find it now. I love the way Didion blends fiction and nonfiction and commentary into everything she does. Also, her disaffected sophistication is very hard to grab hold of.

Anyway, I find her writing fascinating. I'm going to get the new one about California (Where I Was From) when I see it.

novella

 

[Wabbit]

It's early. I am only on my second coffee so just for a moment I thought you had written, any dido fans out there. lol

Errrr... so I have a warped mind

Actually, I think Raven might be a fan

 

[sofy60]

The Year of magical thinking is absolutlely amazing!!

 

[beer good]

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion.

My first Didion; not my last. Harrowing little book, like a quick slip down the slippery slope of a mental breakdown. New York, LA, Vegas, Hollywood, drugs, sex, snakes under every stone, and fallout.

Lloyd Cole summed it up pretty well, even if his take on it seems weirdly optimistic and romantic. There's nothing romantic about Didion's version of the story; tight, insidious prose that slips under your skin.

5/5.

Now I need to read something happy.

 

[saliotthomas]

I read The years of magical thinking a non fiction about the loss of her husband.A little in the line of Roth patrimony,very interesting,clever and touching.Her prose is indeed very good,i must try to find more.

 

[pontalba]

I read The Year of Magical Thinking last year, and can't really say I enjoyed it much. Somehow it seemed to me she didn't plumb the depths of her feelings as deeply as she could have by a long shot. I felt as though she was only skating the surface.

It certainly didn't make me wish to read anything else of hers. I was sorry about that, as I had high hopes.

 

[saliotthomas]

That is what i liked about the book,no easy pathos.The cold and sometime clinical analysis of loss came to me a very reserved aproche.A strong charactere breached by the unavoidable,a desir to control and understand often shatered by the weight of sorrow.I have great respect for the discretion of her work and the originality of her ideas(about luck,mourning in modern society,the expectation of return of the dead...).

 

[pontalba]

That's an interesting way to look at it, and entirely possible. I felt that if she was going to write the book about the year, and her pain, it should be less reserved, and come out with it. But it's true that everyone deals with pain in a different manner. It couldn't have been easy to put all of that on paper.