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A review by sophill15
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion
4.0
Made up of excerpts from Didion’s notebooks, South and West provides an exquisite insight into Didion’s process as a writer. As always her acute observations brilliantly capture place and time, but here you can almost see the thought process behind the writing and how the observations are put into words and formed into complete sentences. Here and there sentences appear again in slightly refrased form – as if Didion is experimenting and trying to find the best way to put her thoughts into words.
At the the same time the book is also an attempt to make sense of a home, of a large country divided. A country where “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.”
Endlessly fascinating as both an insight into an author’s process and as a snapshot of the American South and West.
At the the same time the book is also an attempt to make sense of a home, of a large country divided. A country where “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.”
Endlessly fascinating as both an insight into an author’s process and as a snapshot of the American South and West.