6/12/2023 0 Comments Slouching towards bethlehem amazon![]() ![]() ![]() I'm not sure if there's any subject she could make dull- if one exists, it's been omitted here. Didion is engaging start to finish, as good a writer at 75 as she was at 35, or vice-versa. And given the length of this book (1122 pages), the time-span it covers (forty plus years), the enormous geography (an incomplete list: New York, California, Mexico, Hawaii, El Salvador, Miami, Washington), and the range of subjects (crime, politics, hydrology, civil war, personal history, social history, and more), you might expect it to be a difficult read. Her non-fiction is the opposite of easy reading: the sentences uncurl slowly, and sometimes you don't quite know where she's taking a paragraph or a page until the last few words, when suddenly everything stabs into focus. Situations where what's being said and what's being done are at odds and places where the postcard picture hides ugly, painful truths. Joan Didion is the Shakespeare of things that don't quite add up. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |