Una liturgia común

by Joan Didion

The focus of this novel is a personal and political tragedy that takes place in Boca Grande, an imaginary Central American state dominated by political corruption, the distribution of power among members of the same family, arms trafficking, and conspiracy. The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is the American widow of the most powerful man in Boca Grande, and she controls a large part of the country’s wealth and knows practically all of its secrets. Grace is also an anthropologist who attempts to find scientific answers for the mysteries of human behavior. She tries to give voice to Charlotte Douglas’s passage through Boca Grande, an upper-class Californian woman who is ignorant to the extremes of innocence and who seems oblivious to the dangerous scenery in which she finds herself, leading her to an unfortunate end foretold from the very first chapter of the novel.   El enfoque de esta novela es una tragedia personal y política que ocurre en Boca Grande, un imaginario estado centroamericano dominado por la corrupción política, el reparto del poder entre los miembros de una misma familia, el tráfico de armas y la conspiración. La narradora, Grace Strasser-Mendana, es la viuda americana del hombre más poderoso de Boca Grande, controla buena parte de la riqueza del país y conoce prácticamente todos sus secretos. Grace es además una antropóloga que intenta encontrar respuestas científicas a los misterios del comportamiento humano, y trata de dar testimonio del paso por Boca Grande de Charlotte Douglas, una californiana de clase alta que es ignorante hasta la inocencia y que parece no darse cuenta del peligroso escenario en el que se mueve, encaminándose a un fin anunciado desde el primer capítulo de la novela.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Politics, Literature, American

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

LA DONNA SPEZZATA


Una foto di Joan Didion scattata da sua figlia Quintana Roo.

Il libro delle preghiere comuni è il testo base della comunione anglicana.
Mi chiedo se le preghiere comuni sono quelle più semplici, o invece comuni sta per collettive.

E mi chiedo cosa abbia a che fare con questo romanzo, visto che il titolo originale è proprio A Book of Common Prayer.
Domanda che rimane senza risposta, un grosso punto interrogativo dalla prima all’ultima pagina. Mai incontrato titolo più enigmatico.


Da tempo è previsto un adattamento cinematografico di questo magnifico romanzo, avrebbe già dovuto essere completato, e invece se ne sono perse le tracce. Qui, l’attore-regista Campbell Scott, incaricato della regia e del ruolo del marito di Charlotte.

Mi ha colpito la sensazione che in questo racconto di una donna narrato da un’altra donna, Didion sappia esattamente cosa scrivere, non perda tempo, ma sappia sfruttare quello a sua disposizione, senza eccesso, né di risparmio né di prodigalità.
Didion trattiene l’emozione, anche se il melodramma è alla base del mondo che descrive: si adopra per risparmiare parole e scegliere quelle sottotono facendo ampio ricorso all’ironia. Sa rimanere distaccata mentre penetra a fondo.
Eppure l’emozione mi arriva, in certi momenti perfino struggente.
Ghiaccio bollente, è la sintesi che mi viene alla mente per descrivere questa sensazione.

Due donne protagoniste, molto diverse.
La narratrice, prossima alla morte per malattia, che sembra saperla lunga, sul mondo la vita e la gente, ma non è mai saccente, mai un passo avanti agli altri: anzi, sembra preferire restare un passo indietro, per poter studiare meglio il proprio interlocutore - privilegia ascoltare piuttosto che spargere il sale della sua esperienza. È di rara onniscienza riguardo ai fatti che coinvolgono la protagonista, la fica norteamericana.


Christina Hendricks che dovrebbe interpretare Charlotte.

E Charlotte, intorno alla quale ruota la storia del romanzo – Charlotte così ingenua da credere che geografia e storia universali siano ricalcate sulla California e gli US in genere. Ma anche nella sua ignoranza, Charlotte è innocente, quasi vittima. È una preda, circondata da mariti che non brillano per empatia e comprensione, è una madre respinta dalla figlia cui forse ha sottratto attenzione una volta di troppo. Una figlia alla quale non ha saputo spiegare il mondo perché neppure lei madre lo ha capito. La morte la coglierà per caso, come per caso le è capitata tutta la vita.

Chi non ha più nulla di innocente, chi ha perso completamente ogni traccia d’innocenza è il mondo: nello specifico, il continente americano, il mondo nuovo.
È successo già tutto: l’assassinio di JFK e poi di suo fratello Bob, di Malcom X e Martin Luther King – il Vietnam è un carnaio senza uscita – Charles Manson – i figlio dei fiori si sono trasformati in ben altro – l’esercito di Liberazione Simbionese ha già rapito e cooptato Patricia Hearst (Marin, la figlia terrorista di Charlotte?) – l’11 settembre, il primo 11 settembre, il golpe cileno – e mentre Didion scriveva e stava per pubblicare, la guerra sporca argentina inventava i voli della morte e moltiplicava i desaparecidos…


Allison Janney che dovrebbe interpretare Grace, la narratrice.

Didion mi ha riportato con forza agli anni Settanta.
Come leggere un libro di Vidal. Come vedere quei film surreali dai dialoghi assurdi scritti da Jules Feiffer dove le star erano Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin, Donald Sutherland…

Joan Didion è stata una sorpresa che non mi aspettavo, e ancora faccio fatica a chiarire la mia reazione, il mio pensiero. Si dice che le cose migliori scritte da Didion siano di non-fiction, prima di tutto di giornalismo. Io ho cominciato assaggiando proprio la fiction: vuol dire che mi aspettano tante altre belle scoperte.


Joan Didion, che sarebbe stata la migliore Grace immaginabile.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a didion girl summer.

finding this book in a beachy bookstore while i was on vacation and needed something to read while sitting by a pool and trying to look mysterious (read: not sunburnt, not uncomfortable, not bored and ready to be the indoor kid i am)...heaven sent.

didion's voice is so strong that i'll always prefer her nonfiction (sorry, play it as it lays, you know you're different).

but this made me feel like an intellectual woman in a 70s book club, which is no kind of bad feeling. it was very of its time in a way that was fun to experience as a one-off read...although enough for me to know that i probably wouldn't have enjoyed a lifetime as a book club member in a groovy disco way.

it had a lot to say, and it did sometimes get bogged down in repetition and an unwillingness to be overt in doing it, but i felt transported. and that is enough!

bottom line: fun while it lasted.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didion is one of those rare authors that pens hypnotic sentences that weave into paragraphs that make you struggle to recall where you are and why there's drool on your chin. It doesn't matter if she's writing about a fictional banana republic or a non-fictional bout of depression from having outlived her husband and daughter, JD writes sentences that I want to climb into like a warm bed. Ones like this:

As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history.

There's a lot of dialogue in this book - more than I can recall in other Didion works - but it's wonderful, like something ripped from the second act of a Wilde play. Our narrator is telling us the story of Charlotte, Warren and Leonard - a love triangle that traps the worst human detritus in those three acute angles - all the while peppering the narrative with her own story in the fictional country of Boca Grande. This is a great place for Didion initiates to begin, a tremendous novel that packs so much into its small amount of pages.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narrator's single sympathetic glance his way. Charlotte Douglas, his ex-wife, is the kind of female character Didion is known for: numb, baffled, drifting in and out. I don't find characters like Charlotte very interesting, but Didion does draw a kind of poetry from their stunting and disappointment, their air of unfulfillment; and Didion's portraits have at least a documentary value, as we're littered with Charlottes, women who had an illusion of an idea of themselves at, say, age 19, but who soon hit a rock, settled for something, and in the subsequent years allow their spouses and lovers to talk over them, talk for them, while she warbles ineffectually over the souvenirs of youth.

[Jessica]

This starts out feeling like one of those Deborah Eisenberg stories set in a made-up Central American country, but pretty soon you orient yourself and realize you're in deliciously dated late-1970s Didionland. This entails being surrounded by characters who think, speak, and behave only like Joan Didion characters and not remotely like anyone in actual life, and reading gorgeously crafted and sometimes embarrassingly dramatic sentences. The novel is narrated by steely, Didionesque observer Grace, and tells the story of Charlotte Douglas, the wealthy, childlike, hypersensual, idiosyncratic mother of a Patty Hearst-type rich-girl-turned-revolutionary-terrorist. Charlotte is hanging around Boca Grande, a fake maybe-El Salvador where she has fled to escape her Joan Didion novel of a past and to submit the enigma of her existence to the former-anthropologist-cum-hobby-scientist-and-ruling-elite narrator's gaze.

I personally feel sentimental about the Bay Area in the 1970s, as it's the ground out of which I was grown, and this book fed my hunger for a glimpse of that time. This is actually just the second Didion novel I've read, but she has such a distinctive style that I keep wanting to make broad pronouncements about her fiction. There is almost no one I take more seriously than Joan Didion the nonfiction writer, but I find her fiction pretty absurd. I happen to love it, but it strikes me at many times as coming close to camp. Everyone is so rich and disoriented and the sex is all weird and women are these confused, fascinating creatures who are sort of hapless victims of often cruel, or at least detached men who have great success both in understanding and controlling the female characters and in navigating the world. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but I do like it. This book is fun and, as I said, very late-1970s. I read it on an airplane, in a hotel, and at my in-laws' house, and it's good for that kind of vacation. Definitely recommend this paperback edition with the lighter on the front and the lady's face and Cosmo blurb on the back.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool as a cucumber, cold as ice.

Nobody does detachment quite like Didion.

A says this, B does that, insert unexpected detail in the most journalistic fashion--something about an éclair, or gardenia, or trying and retying a scarf which whipped in the hot night wind.

The narrator is Grace Strasser-Mendana, dying of pancreatic cancer in a fictional Central American banana republic, but the protagonist is Charlotte Douglas. Who was Charlotte Douglas and why did she end up in Boca Grande? Her story is one of hearsay, but it's unexpectedly captivating.

I have mixed feeling about fictional countries, and do I have mixed feelings about this book. And if I was Didion I would insert here at least two more things I have mixed feeling about.

Just for the sound of it.

The rhythm of the thing.

The echo resounding from one page to the next.

Point being, I do like to feel things (sometimes), and this book seems to discourage it.

The moral of the story is: don't screw around in Central America if you are a norteamericana/o.

Or know when to get out.

"Unlike Charlotte I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed."

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion is a novel taking place in a fictional Latin American country, Boca Grande, in the midst of a lot of civil unrest and the underlying threat that a group of guerillas will overthrow the current regime. No doubt, relying on the background of her journalistic career of concise reporting and sublime sentence structure, Joan Didion brings us a novel that is of both innocence and evil. Our narrator is Grace Strasser-Mendana, an anthropologist who controls much of the wealth in Boca Grande having married into a family of power. Grace knows all of Boca Grande's secrets as well as the potential for unfathomable violence. She befriends Charlotte Douglas who knows nothing of the secrets of Boca Grande, arriving in search of her fugitive daughter, Marin. Charlotte can be described as a hapless heroine. The book's narrator describes her thus:

"She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge."

The book is largely one of flashbacks by the myriad of characters as we gradually begin to understand more of the drama that is unfolding in this volatile Latin American country as well as in San Francisco and New Orleans. Our narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, opens A Book of Common Prayer with the pledge, "I will be her witness."

[Gattalucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alla fine del primo capitolo ero perplessa. Dopo il secondo irritata. Allora ho cercato di contestualizzarlo. Prima edizione negli Stati Uniti nel lontano 1977. Certo, come ha detto qualcuno, il continente americano aveva perso la propria innocenza allora, e quindi, una scrittrice che riesca a dire quello che gli americani combinano in quello che considerano il loro “orto”, il continente sudamericano, (e non solo) dopo gli assassinii eccellenti nel loro meraviglioso Paese, non è impresa da poco. E probabilmente il caso di Patricia Hearst, ereditiera che dopo essere stata rapita da un gruppo di terroristi si unisce a loro rapinando banche e uccidendo, ha ispirato più scrittori negli U.S.A, come qui per la figlia della protagonista.
Buona l’idea della voce narrante, una donna, che, pur invischiata nel potere, sta morendo di cancro.
Ma ho dovuto arrivare al decimo capitolo per cominciare a provare piacere in quello che leggevo. Sicuramente belle quelle descrizioni ironiche di come guerriglieros e potere si comportano durante un colpo di stato, chiaramente ben orchestrato da chi ha loro procurato armi e quant’altro.
Non mi lamento quindi del soggetto o della trama, bensì, e qui si entra nel gusto personale, bensì dello stile della Didion.
Lo chiamano minimalista.
Tutti quei periodi di due o tre parole al massimo.
Con un ritmo sincopato
E sempre a capo.
Che una frase con due verbi perammordiddio e una congiunzione non si può.
Un misto tra una telescrivente e un monologo di Adriano Celentano.

Questione di gusti, ripeto, quindi niente contro la Didion, amici, non vi scandalizzate.
Ma amo stili differenti e con questo faccio fatica.
Mi dicono che L’anno del pensiero magico sia magnifico.
Spero però che il suo stile a quel punto sia cambiato.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I had recently read The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, I decided I' wanted to read some of Joan Didion's novels. This is the first one I read.

It's mainly set somewhere in Central America, about an American woman who is living there, for reasons which are never really fully explained, and narrated by another woman who owns almost the whole place.

It's really kind of a strange novel, without much in the way of a discernible plot, and the dialogue is really weird, with most of it not being anything anyone would actually say in real life. I thought it was an ok book, but didn't really love it or anything like that.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Play It As It Lays, this is a supremely disillusioned novel -- in people, in politics -- but the theater across which it plays out is sprawling and unique, from the pitch black personal-destructive recesses of the deep south to the revolutionary conflagrations of a small South American dictatorship. Ostensibly the story is Charlotte's, a complexly-shaded women adrift in her life until she washes up in Boca Grande, but equally fascinating, and obsessively observed, is our narrator, Grace, an anthropologist and semi-disinterested political manipulator who takes it upon herself to relate the events of the novel, despite or because of her own not so incidental involvement in them. Throughout, the rhythms and cadences of Didion's words, and the cultural-psychological weight behind her repetitions and reconfigurations, maintains a tightly controlled performance. It takes a little while to see how the parts could possibly all be in communication with eachother, but they are, with precision and coldly boiling insight.

[Tijana]

Na samom početku pesme "Makedonija" Dado Topić se onako koncertno rokerski razdere "Jen-dva-tri-jen-dva-jen-dva-jen-dva-tri" i to je odlična najava i signal upozorenja i bendu i slušaocima da se upravo prelazi na taj nepravilni makedonski ritam. Mislim da je Džoun Didion mogla slobodno da uvede neki sličan signal u ovaj roman.

Signal da će svaki paradoksalni iskaz biti propraćen nekom vrstom prekvalifikacije u idućem pasusu od jedne rečenice.

Za kojim će gotovo izvesno uslediti još jedan završni cinični jednorečenični obrt.

I to je u suštini okej, i funkcioniše gotovo uvek, ali u ovom srazmerno kratkom romanu nekako smo svesniji da je u pitanju tehnika nego kad čitamo njene eseje u kojima je zanatska veština bolje primenjena (životnije?) i manje vidljiva. Prosto kao da joj forma ne leži. A to je šteta jer je od početka vidljivo da Džoun Didion tačno zna kako roman treba postaviti i šta sve treba da sadrži, ali onda to ispadne nekako ravno i vidno konstruisano iako lepo i pametno napisano i često duhovito. Na primer, naratorka je sama po sebi super osmišljena kao uspešna antropološkinja koja je studirala kod Krebera i radila s Levi-Strosom i onda se razočarala u svoju nauku i prešaltovala na biohemiju i usput se udala za člana vladajuće porodice u imaginarnoj banana-republici i jelte uključila u strukture moći a sad lagano umire od raka i priča nam životnu priču Amerikanke koju je poznavala. Ali onda autorka uopšte ne iskoristi tako interesantnu premisu i intrigantnu ličnost nego razveze o beskrajno manje zanimljivoj Šarloti (koja deli mnogo više karakternih i fizičkih crta sa samom autorkom) i tome kako se ona, nakon što joj je ćerka odbegla u levičarske teroriste, bacila u spiralu očajanja i autodestrukcije koja se završava (saopšteno nam je na samom početku, nije ovo spojler) predvidljivom i prizvanom nasilnom smrću.
Baš kao i u esejima, Džoun Didion mnogo manje zanimaju šire političke implikacije a mnogo više pojedinci na čije živote te implikacije utiču i na njihove, da tako kažem, beslovesne reakcije. Šarlotin stadijum poricanja situacije u kojoj se našla za vreme romana dostiže epske razmere, ali u jednom trenutku knjiga baš oživi i poleti: kad se pojavi njen bivši muž, otac nestale ćerke, i njih dvoje zapadnu u oboma dobro poznati šablon grozne, zlostavljačke, uzajamno zavisničke veze. Njegov lik zasnovan je (kažu ljudi da nije moglo biti greške u prepoznavanju) na Noelu Parmentelu koji je mladoj Džoun bio mentor, više-nego-prijatelj i štagod; mogu samo da kažem da ako neko počne svoj svesni odrasli život s takvom osobom... to može dosta kasnijih problema da objasni.

I to je sve osim što bih napomenula da je hrvatski prevod s kraja sedamdesetih, koji nisam uspela da nađem u biblioteci AVAJ, objavljen pod (naizgled senzacionalističkim, a tek da vidite omot) naslovom La norteamericana, što je zapravo mnogo primerenije i tematski i kako god hoćete od molitveničkog originalnog naslova.

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative.
Maybe it is just something that happened.
Then why is it in my mind when nothing else is.

IN SUMMARY the above quote explains the entire novel. Of course “novel” is a loaded word when it comes to Didion; her journalistic essays and her fiction-prose always blur, which makes for awesome journalism and perplexing prose. I am perplexed as to why this novel exists. When I was finished with it – and I was glad that I was; too much time spent in such a stifling environment and it starts to rub off – I believe I wasn’t the only one perplexed. Didion was too.

What are we to make of Charlotte Douglas? Her grandiose vapidity is an easy target for social satire, but so is Hollywood, and LA culture, and third-world puppet regimes, and so is blatant, punishing misogyny. It might be just simple satire if the character of Charlotte wasn’t a distinct authorial stand-in for Didion herself. Which is perplexing. There is a current of masochism that runs straight from the depressing cesspool of Play It As It Lays right into this book, like Didion is trying to punish her younger self for being so stupid, like she wants to emphasize the criminally and damnably misogynistic former husbands to emphasize just how naïve and vain she felt she once was. This is uncomfortable, especially since it precludes said criminal misogy-dooshes from ever getting their comeuppance. What is comeuppance for someone that feels no empathy? Revenge against this kind of scum would be for them to finally feel for themselves what it feels like to treat someone so terribly; but if one feels no empathy then they are incapable of seeing how it feels. Every character in this novel, bar maybe the prime narrator (another Didion stand-in), seems like any reprimand would only be rationalized away, like a child getting spanked for doing something wrong and never making the connection between the wrong action and the physical pain of the spank.

After reading the synopsis I thought this would be a novel companion to Salvador, Didion’s excellent collection of journalistic essays on her time in Central America during the 80s, which for Central and Latin America, was a very black decade (re:genocide). This isn’t a companion to Salvador though, it is a companion to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, primarily for its key theme of the harmful effects that come from an inability to describe one’s own thoughts. Without the words, without the education in whatever form, to describe how one feels, one is vulnerable to every kind of atrocity. Not everyone that lacks this ability is stupid, just as not everyone that can’t read is stupid; they’ve just learned to deal with it, and after a certain point, it becomes easier to avoid than to apprehend. Meanwhile, the atrocities pile up.

Oh, but don’t worry: Even if you’re smart enough to understand yourself or your feelings or ascertain the contradictions of both, you won’t really be any better off. Things won’t make any more sense. What really happened and what you remember will be impossible to determine. It wouldn’t matter anyway.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several times during Joan Didion's Book of Common Prayer, one character will tell another that they "were wrong." In what almost seems irrelevant. Causes, love, politics, are all compromised. Wrongness is an empty term hardly worth the air it takes to utter the word. Nearly everyone is on the make. Lawyers can champion radical movements one day, hobnob with the beautiful people that night, and fly to Miami the next in order to seal a deal for Mirage jets. Air head college students join revolutionary movements and become air headed revolutionaries. Government bureaucrats (especially the ones overseas) are probably CIA. Didion's take on the 70s is razor sharp, and told through the forensic voice of Grace Strasser-Mendana, a rich and dying widow, who becomes fascinated with the personality and predictable fate of the neurotic bundle of nerves named Charlotte Douglas. Charlotte is both fleeing herself and searching for her Weatherman-like daughter. Boca Grande, an unstable Central American country, is as good a place as any for the unruly daughter to show up, or a grave to embrace you.

For a slim book, Didion packs a lot of story, perhaps too much, as she spends, arguably, too much time on Charlotte's first husband, Warren Bogart, an epic, poetry quoting asshole. Warren is one of the most abusive characters I've run across in all of literature (and I've read a lot). Didion knows this as well, and lingers a bit too long. But when the Didion (via Grace) put down comes, it goes to the bone -- and beyond. In a way I suppose it's worth it since Warren finally shuts his mouth. As I said, it's the 70s. Booze, drugs, threesomes in bed, machine guns, dinner parties, and cholera epidemics. Didion covers it all, and does so with admirable economy. I saw where some reviewers compared "Common Prayer" to Roth's American Pastoral. Well, in a way (daughters gone bad) it does, but for my money, Didion is much closer to the ground in capturing what the 70s were like. If you are a fan of Conrad's Nostromo, or Robert Stone's Flag for Sunrise, Didion's brutal examination of things American and Central American is a must read.

[kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

slow reading didion on a warm, sunny los angeles afternoon. there aren't many things better than that

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 3 out of 5]

The way I see it, Joan Didion's career breaks into three big phases. In the '60s and '70s, she made her name as the chronicler of how the dominant culture and counterculture clashed and coexisted - you get this from her famous collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (my favorite of hers), as well as her only novel to slip into the canon, Play It as It Lays. Then the global tumult of the '80s hit, with the Shah and the unholy right-wing alliance of Ronald "Satan" Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the political unrest in Central America and the Soviet-Afghani War and the Iran-Iraq War and the CIA going all-in on the cloak-and-dagger shit and jesus christ this is getting depressing, and Didion turned her attentions to commenting on the chaos abroad rather than the (far smaller, more contained and less destructive – your average American has no fucking idea how good they have it) chaos at home. This period of her writing has kind of become lost in the shuffle, but it produced some great work as well, like [i]Salvador[/i], [i]After Henry[/i], and [i]Democracy[/i]. In her third and by far most famous phase, she became reincarnated as the widow grieving for her husband, the mother grieving for her deceased daughter. These two books you know, [i]The Year of Magical Thinking[/i] and [i]Blue Nights[/i] respectively, and they’re fine books, certainly quite honest, but I pick up on the whiff of sexism here; the female writer comments on national and world events and Martin Amis bashes her for “not being a good mother” or whatever silly thing he said in his review of [i]the White Album[/i], but when she mourns her husband and daughter, wellllll we can define her as wife and mother now so we’re okay with Joan Didion. Needless to say, I am not having this shit, and I encourage anyone who’s read the two later memoirs and nothing else to get up on their early Didion.

But it’s the first and second periods I want to focus on here, since [i]A Book of Common Prayer[/i] strikes me as a sort of transition between them, and like many “transitional” works of art, it’s compelling but not always smooth. And yes, I’ll freely admit her work doesn’t always fit into this model as well as I’m proposing, since usually our models are only guidelines anyway (I’d be the first to admit 2001’s [i]Political Fictions[/i], as well as parts of [i]After Henry[/i], kind of scuttle my theory), but it’s a good way into my review so I’m sticking to the model, just so long as you understand that I’m not whole worlds of attached to it or anything. You can probably tell I’m still hedging about whether arranging a writer’s career into an arc is reductive, yet I see some of the concerns of both [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and [i]Democracy[/i] (her strongest novel out of the three I’ve read) here. From the former, she takes the power dynamics between women and men, the sense of insulation in the upper-middle class intelligentsia, and what happens the moment something unforeseen pokes into that bubble. So far, it might seem like the ideal setting for this book is the vision of either Los Angeles or New York City she articulates so well in her early works, but she didn’t set it in Los Angeles or New York City, she set it in the fictional Central American republic of Boca Grande, and these rich people’s lives are invaded not by addiction or surprise pregnancies but the political tumult and shadowy CIA operations I mentioned above. And I mightn’t need to tell you those latter two invasions are at the core of [i]Democracy[/i]. Oh, and did I mention that this book was released smack in between 1967’s [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and 1984’s [i]Democracy[/i]? Or that this book features by far the most about political violence, which would soon become a major concern of hers, she’d written up until this point? Like I say, transitional novel.

And like I say, the transition is awkward. This book’s major weakness is it seems to wander away from its central conflict too often, instead wandering into the conflicts between our protagonist, Charlotte Douglas, and her two ex-husbands, both of whom are long on menace and short on pretty much everything else. Which is a goddamn shame, because that central conflict offers us a lot to work with –Charlotte’s daughter joins a terrorist organization, she seeks out to find her and tries to come to terms with her acts of terrorism. Charlotte feels real, hardened in some spots and naïve in others, and it’s fascinating to see her interact with the world, but it would’ve been more fascinating to see her interact with the world of political unrest than her two non-character husbands (one is named Leonard and the other’s name I’ve already forgotten, so he’ll just be “Not-Leonard”) subtly and not-so-subtly insult both her and each other. Insults are the currency Didion invests, if you will, in this novel’s conflict, and they’re fine for the start but when your escalation essentially amounts to “more insults,” maybe it’s time to stop and reconsider where your project’s going and how you plan to get it there. And this, again, is a shame, because Charlotte is a compelling character and Grace, the narrator with substantial connections to Boca Grande’s political and economic elite, is as well; she swears up and down she’s not the story’s protagonist, but by the end I started to doubt that.

So I guess basically my problem with [i]A Book of Common Prayer[/i] is that it’s so transitional, Didion may have missed the fact that her setting presents a different and more meaningful set of conflicts than what she gives us. A question of emphasis, if you will. It’s sure not a question of prose, as this contains some of Didion’s strongest writing ever. I’d compare her sentences to claw-hammers; she’s got the blunt force of her minimalism and raw honesty when she needs it, but since she’s super intelligent about and insightful into national and world events while at the same time being one of the best writers currently living and in the inner circle of literary figures I admire most, she also has the claw end to pry ideas, characters, sentences apart and dig into what’s inside them. She’s also on-point as ever tonally, striking a nice combination of dread and irony. She is, in other words, a brilliant fucking writer, and that brilliancy shines even on a book like this, which is one of the weaker ones I’ve read by her on a whole. That’s at once comforting and frustrating; I feel such compelling material deserved a better novel. Well, that’s what [i]Democracy[/i]’s for!

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Razor sharp! Definitely think I’ll need to read this again at some point, quite sure I didn’t get everything on this first read!

Nevertheless… absolutely captivating!

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"𝘏𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘴 𝘨𝘶𝘯𝘴," 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥. "𝘐 𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘤𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘳."

Perhaps my favorite character in all of Didion's work. Charlotte Douglas, in fashion, in ferocity, is trapped in a made up Banana Republic, all out of sorts. This is Didion at her best. So dramatic. Borders on camp, but the sentences are concrete, too cold, and the sex is weird and the women are detached. It's Didionland in its prime in a very late-seventies-kind-of-way.

[piperitapitta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlotte Douglas, in transito.

La bella e misteriosa Charlotte, la fica norteamericana, come la chiamerà con disprezzo uno dei padroni del luogo, arriva a Boca Grande, la città in cui la luce è abbagliante e seducente, senza un perché, in fuga dalla vita, ma molto più probabilmente in transito, com'è sempre stata in ogni luogo ove abbia messo radici. O forse per restare per sempre.
Ce la racconta Grace, anche lei norteamericana, erede e moglie dell'ultimo grande padrone di Boca Grande, l'unica che in qualche modo sembra volerla comprendere, l'unica che anche dopo, pur senza averla mai amata, continuerà a cercare di raccontarla, di scoprirla, che esordisce dicendo Testimonierò per lei.
E la sua voce, che ci accompagna per tutto il romanzo, è a volte dolente, carezzevole, altre sprezzante, a tratti caustica e disincantata, ma sempre precisa, netta.
Altre volte si assottiglia, invece, fino a scomparire, e io ne ho sofferto l'assenza, perché «Diglielo da parte mia» non è il romanzo che sembrava essere dopo aver letto le prime pagine, ma tutt'altro, tutta un'altra storia, e il suo accompagnarmi, il suo tenermi per mano, mi rassicurava e mi faceva intravedere comunque la luce.
Boca Grande non esiste, ma è sempre esistita, «terra di grandi contrasti», ipotetico paese latinoamericano simbolo della bellezza accecante di tutti i paesi del Sudamerica e del Centroamerica, luoghi in cui dagli Stati Uniti ci si recava in cerca del buen retiro, o per vendere armi ai ribelli, o per sostenere i governi dittatoriali, o solamente per fuggire dalla vita. O per ritrovarla.
E Charlotte, sensuale e ingenua, ricca e viziata, ma anche il suo esatto opposto, capace di uccidere una gallina strangolandola a mani nude o di eseguire una tracheotomia in abito da sera, o di mettersi al servizio della povera gente per vaccinarla contro il colera, Charlotte con i suoi due mariti e le sue relazioni, in transito anch'esse, Charlotte con Marin, una figlia mai conosciuta davvero, in fondo voleva solo che le «cose andassero bene», come chiedeva al suo Dio in quelle preghiere comuni, semplici e consuete, quasi banali, forse le common prayer del titolo originale, che faceva la sera prima di addormentarsi.
Mi è piaciuta la scrittura di Joan Didion, una vera scoperta, uno stile asciutto, essenziale, e quelle frasi cortissime che sembrano incidere come un bisturi, ripetute a volte come un mantra, come una cantilena, che scivola sotto la pelle fino a diventare un'àncora alla quale aggrapparsi.
La sua è una scrittura esatta, sofisticata, magnetica, enigmatica come le azioni di tutti, a Boca Grande e negli Stati Uniti, come i ricordi di Grace, quella Grace che doveva e poteva essere l'àncora di Charlotte.
Avrebbe dovuto aggrapparsi anche Charlotte, a Grace, come ho fatto io.
Avrebbe potuto farlo.
Avrebbe dovuto farlo per tutta la vita.

Tutto quello che so ora è che quando penso a Charlotte Douglas che cammina nel caldo vento notturno in direzione delle luci di Capilla del Mar, sono sempre meno certa che questa sia stata una storia di illusioni.
A meno che le illusioni non fossero le mie.
[…] Non sono stata la testimone che avrei voluto essere.

[Donna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't remember the last time I was as grateful for a book to finally end. I think the author gave us a hint on page 164: "Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative." I really, really didn't enjoy the assumptive characters or their privileged drama. I wouldn't spend ten minutes in the company of anyone in this book in real life, so I'm not sure why I did spend so much time reading about them.

[Sharonlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. Didion is a genius. It's interesting to read something that was written so long ago, it seems another lifetime--and yet I was alive when it was written. The times were a-changing and the world that they lived in was so very different from what it became by the time I was an adult.

At some point, I was struck by some similarities between this book and another book that I really loved, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Neither is a real, named place (although Bel Canto seems to be based on something that happened in a South American country sometime during the 1990s, IIRC), but there's an evocation, especially in this book, of an equatorial country and its heat and poverty and corruption that makes me feel like I've been there, even though I'm as removed geographically from anyplace like that as I am from that period of time.

Anyway, glad I finally got to read it. It was a "found" book--someone put it out on their stoop in a box of other freebies. I'll have to think about letting it go the same way.

[christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion in my life, but sometime in November after seeing her nephew’s documentary about her, “The Center Will Not Hold,” I decided to read her again from start to finish. I like how she writes and I think she’s an enigma. I mean, do these stories have a touch of autobiographical? I’m dying to know. The Joan Didion Project is essays, novels, rewatching the movies she co-wrote with her late-husband. So far what I’ve learned is that “Play it as it Lays” is a better book than it was the last two times I read it and the movie, which is available for streaming for free on YouTube, is goddamn amazing watch it right now.
But the true gem, three and a half books and two movies in, is “A Book of Common Prayer,” a novel from the late 1970s set in a small, gang-controlled town in Central America and an American who married into the political fray, but has since been widowed. Grace Strasser-Mendenna is underbelly savvy and a solid voice in the family’s movements -- even plot moves against each other. And she’s got a story to tell:
Charlotte Douglas, also an America, shows up and causes a bit of a ruckus. No one is sure what she’s doing in Boca Grande, why she spends every day at the airport, and why she’s been flagged for special treatment by the government.
Grace tells her story from a place in the future. Grace’s daughter was on the lam, accused of a politically-motivated act of terrorism. Meanwhile, there is Charlotte’s hard-partying, opinionated first husband, who is as quick to social climb as he is to socially stage-dive and her second husband, a far better man, more supportive, who just doesn’t drive her mad like the first.
“A Book of Common Prayer” plays like a mystery novel, with rich characters slowly revealed. Boca Grande has a strong sense of place, both the temperature and the danger of the dueling factions. It’s all very tragic, you know the deaths are coming.

[Sarinys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sfolgoranti i primi capitoli, nei quali la scrittura saettante di Joan Didion sbozza personaggi e contesto con straordinaria abilità. Ne esce un esilarante ritratto familiare dei governatori di Boca Grande, piccolo paese dell’America Latina dove il potere viene trasmesso a colpi di finte rivoluzioni e complotti demenziali (in puro stile Bananas). Il romanzo prende una piega melodrammatica quando si concentra sulla protagonista Charlotte Douglas e sulle sue dolorose vicissitudini, spostandosi avanti e indietro nel tempo tra Stati Uniti e America del Sud.
Didion esplicita una stretta connessione tra Charlotte e la voce narrante Grace. Grace vede se stessa razionale e attenta alla realtà, e si descrive in contrapposizione alla distratta Charlotte, per la quale pare esistere soltanto il proprio mondo interiore. Ma Charlotte è solo apparentemente alienata dalla realtà, mentre Grace, come Charlotte, è capace di ignorare deliberatamente l’evidenza dei fatti. Didion sembra dire che il nostro rapporto con la realtà e con la Storia è sempre soggettivo, e che ciascun individuo sceglie cosa ricordare e come ricordarlo: la vita è qualcosa che continuiamo a raccontarci, passato, presente e futuro; sappiamo solo quello che vogliamo sapere. Tutto il resto è oblio.

[Francesca Marciano · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book a long time ago. I remember liking it much more then than I did now. I loved The Year of magical thinking, I loved Blue Nights and South and West. But here, in this early fictional work, her voice sounds too contrived, her writing seems forced, too removed. The repetitions. The short sentences. I felt an affectation that irked me. So three stars because i can't deny it, Didion is a masterful writer nevertheless.

[Marica · Rating 4 out of 5]

“La paura del buio è una combinazione di quindici amminoacidi”
Una lettura eccellente, potente e sintetica. La storia è ambientata in uno staterello del Centro America dal colpo di stato facile, nel quale vive spiaggiato un piccolo gruppo di norteamericani d'alto bordo: l'atmosfera è resa benissimo, mi ricorda l'amato Graham Greene. Il racconto è affidato a una donna di cui si vuole suggerire l'imparzialità ricordando la formazione da antropologa, diventata poi studiosa dilettante di biochimica (scienziata, quindi razionale e super partes). L'oggetto dell'osservazione è una norteamericana, Charlotte, capitata per caso a Boca Grande e lì rimasta. Dapprima la signora bionda viene vista come un'oca sexy e molto sciroccata la cui conversazione è difficile da seguire, bellissima la prima apparizione al cocktail party a bordo piscina: poi acquista spessore e si rivela personaggio problematico che cerca di rimuovere la propria vita precedente e qualunque contrarietà dedicandosi con acribia protestante a missioni encomiabili, o anche futili (di nuovo every day Nirvana). Didion semina varie idee fastidiose, quali che i caratteri del Sud (anche degli USA) credono di poter andare avanti a colpi di fascino personale e i caratteri WASP per merito personale, spero che non lo creda anche lei; e alcune scemenze pseudoscientifiche quali la molecola della paura del buio. Un'altra cosa che mi ha stupito è che qui, come in Pastorale Americana, c'è l'amatissima e mediocre bambina di ottima famiglia che trova un suo riscatto nel terrorismo di ultrasinistra e si esprime con proclami standardizzati e insulsi (mi ricorda certi anni 70). Che negli USA sia una piaga sociale e noi non ce ne siamo mai accorti? A me viene in mente solo Patricia Hearst. Comunque, questi sono i piccoli difetti che aumentano il sapore di un libro costruito magnificamente e costruito è la parola giusta: ha una struttura perfetta che consente all'autrice di raccontare la storia di una vita a ritroso e sviluppare sempre meglio il personaggio principale ma anche i personaggi di contorno. Deve essere letto con una certa attenzione ma ne vale molto la pena. Dopo La pazza gioia, candiderei Valeria Bruni Tedeschi alla parte di Charlotte.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

If _Play It as It Lays_ was Didion doing Chandler, this is her version of a Graham Greene novel, whereby a sophisticated viewer in a small former colony (in this case the Latin American Boca Grande) learns that the naivete of a stranger is the proper way to encounter the world.

Here, the sophisticate is the American-born wife of a former dictator of Boca Grande, and the innocent abroad is Charlotte, mother of a girl gone radical terrorist in the sixties, who has washed up in Boca Grande for, well, a novel's worth of reasons-- to reconnect with her daughter (indirectly), to expiate for her sins and those of her daughter (perhaps), to get away from both of the above strains.

I didn't love this one the way I did _Play it as it lays_, though. I kep feeling like Didion was missing the realities of life outside of the US. Yes, there's something bracingly cynical to see BG as just a plaything of the wealthy, and it suits the narrator, but I'm not sure it's the most interesting way to tackle the material.... I could say almost the same thing about the daughter-as-terrorist, that Didion here isn't able to get past her own prejudices to really give voice to the characters she is writing about.

It's not meant as much of an indictment, really. I like Didion, I like what she does. But I'm not sure that this book really plays to her strengths, or that she sufficiently stretches to successfully tell the story contained here.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

In some ways, similar to American Pastoral by Roth. Both with psychologically tormented protagonists, both with demented terrorist daughters. The drawback to A Book of Common Prayer is that Joan Didion's characters and narrator are lofty and bourgeoisie, but are also cold and hard to identify with. Charlotte Douglas is not as tormented nor driven as The Swede, and Marin never develops into a character with any substance, let alone the brilliance, like Merry's.

Maybe I am daft, but I did not feel like Boca Grande was a real place either. I know that it is an "imaginary" place, but I sat around looking at the island off of Florida "imagining" how that place could be the place in the book. Neither of them seem real to a landlocked Midwesterner such as myself, no offense to real Boca Grandeans.

There were some echo's of The Year of Magical Thinking in Common Prayer, and in someways I recognized parts of the stories of the young Quintana in the young Marin.

Common Prayer is best when Didion uses repetition to reinforce solid observations about Douglas's tragic life, but overall it is too undeveloped and unsatisfying a read.

[Betsy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A skillfully written but oddly unlikeable book detailing the crossed paths of a cold, analytical narrator and the star of the show, Charlotte Douglas. Charlotte is puppet and heroine, burned out trophy wife and battered survivor, ignorant of history and literature, but constantly reading. She drifts in and out of stores, in and out of beds, and in and out of reality. I will probably add a star or two as I realize that I am continuing to think about the book long after finishing it, but I did not enjoy the company of these wasted, wasteful people spawning damaged children and doomed governments.

[Grazia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lo stile.
Lo stile litanico, sincopato, minimale.
Lo stile litanico e sincopato all'inizio mi ha intrigato, ma alla fine mi ha abbastanza irritato.

E' una storia in cui tutti i personaggi si parlano poco o nulla, sicuramente non si capiscono tra loro e le cose se le mandano a dire.

Tre stelle per il contesto, ma molto frammentario.
Ecco.
Insomma.
Dalla lettura non si ricava molto.
Almeno io.
E di Yates, non ho trovato nulla.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, despite the title, this is not a Christian book about praying and shit like that. It’s a novel about human dislocation and the intractability of delusion, set against the backdrop of Central American revolution. Didion is best known for her nonfiction, but I proselytize for her novels every chance I get.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Didion y Joy Williams deberían pasar un día juntas, paseando por el desierto de Arizona, o conduciendo por una carretera solitaria, turnándose al volante, y hacer inventario de todas sus heridas y de la manera en que han decidido intentar cicatrizarlas. Esta novela es otra masterpiece de la introspección quirúrgica. Un viaje.