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jwageman 's review for:
South and West: From a Notebook
by Joan Didion
An unintentional thread through my recent reads: the writer's meticulous attention to detail. In this book, Didion's attention is directed towards the American South as she travels through several states. I listened to this on audiobook, so I'm curious about how the book is formatted in print, since the text is her notebook from these travels, rather than finished essays. Most of it still read like long excerpts from essays, though, with coherent thoughts, detailed scenes, and broad claims.
It's perhaps not fair to evaluate a person's notes, but the casual racism was jarring to listen to at times, since it often came descriptively, without commentary. The sexism less so, since this was followed by more reflection and critique.
My favorite parts were the moments of being immersed in scene. I was less certain about the sweeping claims Didion made about the South (and later, the West) as a whole, but she states these in such compelling language, that they were striking nonetheless.
"I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center."
"Southern girls are notoriously husband-hunting, but I guess that's the same anywhere. It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger. And I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes? Or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
"I am trying to place myself in history. I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it... In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it."
It's perhaps not fair to evaluate a person's notes, but the casual racism was jarring to listen to at times, since it often came descriptively, without commentary. The sexism less so, since this was followed by more reflection and critique.
My favorite parts were the moments of being immersed in scene. I was less certain about the sweeping claims Didion made about the South (and later, the West) as a whole, but she states these in such compelling language, that they were striking nonetheless.
"I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center."
"Southern girls are notoriously husband-hunting, but I guess that's the same anywhere. It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger. And I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes? Or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
"I am trying to place myself in history. I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it... In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it."