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112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
"Roberto D'Aubuisson is a chain smoker, as were many of the people I met in El Salvador, perhaps because it is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote."El Salvador in the early 1980s was a place of detentions, death, and disappearances. Joan Didion spent two weeks there with her husband and this book, which is the nonfiction counterpart to A Book of Common Prayer, is the result. In its brevity it reminded me Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place. Full of brutal images and vivid juxtapositions. Death comes to mean nothing within in these pages as bodies are disfigured, decapitated, and dismembered to be scattered as carrion for the vultures. Didion is not here to pass sentence, or to come to any conclusions as to America's (highly problematic—what a surprise) involvement but merely to record the facts and the terror, which included a massive earthquake, with language as sharp as barbed wire.
This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of "color" I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.The vagaries of U.S. involvement in the Third World did not begin forty years ago, but El Salvador indicated that somehow, Washington did not know at all how to deal with right-wing (or even left-wing) violence.