The literary career of the veteran American writer Joan didion was marked in his last years by tragedy. Because in the same way that we discover in the close example of a writer like Sergio del Molino a literature made placebo in his work «The violet hour«In the case of Joan, her most intense works start from that moment in which life splits in two after the appearance of fate on the scene.
Everything is punctuated by the unfortunate future, when it happens. Even more so, an aspect as creative as literature, where reason and imagination are combined, both punctuated by impressions that are unattainable by the intellectual and transformed as best as possible from the fantasy and the dreamlike, in that uncomfortable transition that can become the step of dreams upon awakening.
So Joan was intensity, a strange calm that somehow sublimates the loss. Resilience as an argument, not as an example because Joan did not write for coaching, his literature is much more than simple morals to go around.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Joan Didion
The year of magical thinking
An old friend of mine, a punk singer to be exact, the title of one of his albums "Time doesn't cure a fucking shit." A writer like Joan Didion, having nothing to do with the punk movement, does end up participating in the idea that that time after the tragedy is no longer lived.
Then there is only that kind of magical thought between the illusion, the complete fiction, the trompe l'oeils erected by reason to be able to follow the controls to simply survive and seek horizons in the perpetual twilight ...
In 2003, Joan Didion had to cope with the sudden death of her husband and the long illness of her only daughter. With a fascinating emotional distance, the author recounts her reaction to tragedy and grief in a book that overflows with honesty and has captivated millions of readers around the world.
We recover this work in a very special edition, with unpublished illustrations by Paula Bonet, one of the most renowned artists in Spain. Didion puts the words and Bonet embodies their essence, resulting in a detailed journey through pain, loss and survival in a moving artistic fusion.
a common liturgy
A novel loaded with that halo that surrounds perdition as an invincible force of destiny. Little things conspire to serve evil. From the shadows, the events, the circumstances and the characters who dare to approach them in surprise end up being devoured by the centripetal force towards the worst form of predestination.
Story of a personal and political tragedy that happens in Boca Grande, an imaginary Central American state dominated by political corruption, the distribution of power between members of the same family, arms trafficking and conspiracy.
The story brings together two apparently very different American women who, due to various circumstances, have ended up there. The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is the widow of the most powerful man in Boca Grande, she controls much of the country's wealth and knows practically all of its secrets. Grace tries to bear witness to the passage through Boca Grande of Charlotte Douglas, an upper-class Californian, ignorant to the point of innocence and whose daughter, Medin, has joined a group of Marxist radicals.
Written with the telegraphic speed and almost imperceptible sensitivity of the great Didion, this novel is an absorbing story about innocence, evil, and the ability of women to make sense of the world around them.
As the game comes
A novel from 1971. Other days in the life of the author in which she could face social and even moral struggles with the support of youth and the handholds of the precise vital companions. Thus Joan built this intensely critical but essentially vital feminist novel.
Because all the dressings are good in a story and each author focuses them at will to make people think about relevant aspects. But the most important thing is to tell something, to make your characters live so that the message is finally complete.
At thirty, Maria Wyeth is emotionally adrift and oblivious to everything around her. Her acting career has been limited to roles in third-rate films and she has always lived in the shadow of her husband, a renowned Hollywood director who has never allowed her to make her own decisions regarding her four-year-old daughter, confined in a medical center for children with special needs, or regarding your new pregnancy.
With a relentless gaze and unmistakable voice, Didion unceremoniously dissects American society in the late XNUMXs, exploring on the one hand the reality of being a woman in a society in which masculine needs have always prevailed and, on the other, capturing the state of mind of an entire generation that lives under the deception of appearances, amorality, the consequences of extreme liberalism and the general boredom of the contemporary individual.
Included by the magazine Time in his list of the best hundred novels in the English language published between 1923 and 2005, As the game comes it is considered, after more than four decades since its publication, a modern classic of American letters and one of the best novels of Joan Didion.
Other recommended books by Joan Didion
Troubled river
The hackneyed American dream made into a dream. Since the definition of what that dream was, which appeared for the first time in 1931 from the mouth of James Truslow Adams and which entrusted exponential prosperity to ability and work alone, without other conditions, reality has been responsible for converting the idea in a slogan orwellian.
At least in most of the cases where prosperity did not come and everyone insisted on keeping up the appearances that prosperity was just one last stroke of luck.
This novel takes us back to 1959. We inhabit the house of the married couple formed by Everett McClellan and Lily and with a final shot as an echo before the complete silence that extends through the residential neighborhood of replicated houses and symmetrical lives.
Because beyond the sinister fact, which serves as an excuse for the flashback that explains everything, the shot itself or rather the trigger is prolonged towards the general ideology of that middle class determined to thrive to move to a new social conquest, a gold rush that continues among the mimetic townhouse neighborhoods.
American frustration as the greatest tragedy, everyone convinced and almost abducted by the idea that without prosperity there is almost no identity. And without being anyone, living becomes that tragic ideal, even more so if you have made a valiant effort to escape from that middle class that tries to climb a wall where the slogan reads in gigantic letters “American Dream on the other side.”
An idea, a space and a time from which the author Joan Didion knows a lot. She herself grew up in that Californian setting of bright dreams like mirages under a blazing sun.
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