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4.5 rounded up One to re-read and re-visit for sure, but I found Didion's 1984 novel Democracy to be smart, perceptive and more multilayered than it perhaps first comes across. Apparently the novel takes it's name from Henry Adams novel of the same title which tackles corruption under the second Adam's administration, and I think if you're familiar with the political climate of 1970s America and the Vietnam War then you'll likely "get" this novel more than I did. Regardless, Didion's writing shi...
As much as I am a fan of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," I think that this is my favorite Joan Didion book. It presumes so much on the part of the reader -- that we already know about the intricacies of the characters' lives and the underbelly of the Vietnam War, and more so, that we care about any of it. In this book, Didion does not seem to write at all for the reader. She seems to be writing to answer some question whispering to her inside her own thoughts. While the novel "The Descendants" (I
“fourteen pink dresses all hanging next to each other. didn’t anybody ever tell her? she didn’t look good in pink?”
I don't usually mind when writers insert themselves into their own work. I generally like postmodern fiction/metafiction. I also appreciate it when an author intentionally plays with the traditional "linear" narrative, when "plot" is not "beginning, middle, and end", in that order. Didion does all of those things in Democracy, and she is obviously a talented writer, yet Democracy just doesn't "do" it for me. In Democracy, she comes off as an egotist in her intrusions and ramblings, and she isn't...
i read like mj from the spider-man trilogy: https://youtu.be/6H4iKjHSVgAit took me some time to get into this one, but once i did i thoroughly enjoyed it. i especially liked the fact that our narrator was something of a character within the story themselves.
Not to be a lesbian, but I love Joan Didion.
Ah...Joan Didion’s Democracy…opaque, discursive, mysterious, hums with a sense of quietly lurking menace, fragmented time, a time, Didion observes...as "Joan Didion," inserting herself into her work of fiction, an observer in this novel, who is relating her imaginative yarn as a journalist's quest for an assembled-and-organized meaning, a "Rosebud," to all these disparate snippets of time, place, personality, calling cards, rumors, last-minute flights to exotic destinations, press clippings, pho...
At first sight the words charm and harm differ in one letter only but the contrast in their meaning is dramatic. Strangely enough, 'Democracy' by Joan Didion has charmed me and harmed me at the same time.‘Democracy’ has charmed me. The first thing that enchanted me instantly was Joan Didion’s writing style. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. The unsettling, highly addictive rhythm of her sentences, with many cadenced repetitions and anaphoras, resonated with me like music which go...
The first meeting of Inez Christian and Jack Lovett at the ballet - the beginning of Lovett's "grave attraction" that would last over twenty years - is the sexiest scene I've read in a while:Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark glasses...pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One glass...
Damn, so many of the reviews for this book are terrible. I kind of want to get a gazillion votes for this review just so that it will come before some of the nonsense in the other reviews. Any talk of post-modernism or meta-fiction or there being too many characters in this novel (there aren't that many, more than say the one in certain Beckett works, but less than in a Dickens or Pynchon novel), also plug the ears in your head that listen when you are reading to any of cries that the book is du...
Structurally this book sort of demolished my mind. I'm in awe.
Sublime. Didion probably doesn’t know Marguerite Duras, and probably wouldn’t like her work if she did, but this is a gorgeous American palimpsest of Durasian ideas and styles: call it VIETNAM SONG.
In a review of another book by Joan Dodion, I said if one was willing to go back and re-read parts of the book that didn't make much sense, or simply re-read the entire book one might truly realize how great a book it was. The same can be said for her book, "Democracy." The first fifteen to twenty pages of this book were quite confusing, made especially so by the author switching from first person to third person narrative.But once this reviewer went back and re-read those pages, I was surprisin...
Nominally, this is a novel about a senators wife. In practice, it is also about American colonialism on a micro and macro scale. It is about Hawaii as a colonial state, and Vietnam as a colonial state, and about how national and corporate interests are effectively the same, and how thin and poorly veiled the narcissism of political actors is and how apt the phrase "political actors" actually is. It does this by telling a story about a senator's wife, in love with a spy.It does this in 234 pages,...
