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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
Great news for the ambiance… Rapid City getting a heat wave. Nice to read this with an iced drink. I actually quite liked Maria but I got the sense maybe you weren’t supposed to. I often got the men mixed up. In my head they all looked like Marcello mastroianni but with their shirts unbuttoned (because it’s California)
“I know what what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing.” Here, buried in the final pages of Didion’s wire tight prose, is our anti-heroine’s surprise: it seemed a coin flip, yet somehow she unlikely perseveres despite, or in spite, of herself. A study of nihilism in 1960s Hollywood and Vegas, Didion transports the reader unwillingly along a ride we can’t escape nor look away from. Highly recommended.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Sparsely described annihilations, set atop unwashed sheets drenched in sweat and sunset and liquor and shame, drifting through unlife, circling the drain, falling slowly for weeks and months, dying out loud to plugged up ears, screaming behind pursed lips, a victim of a dehydrating culture that wantonly sucks the blood out of young women to fuel the engines that rumble under the Hills and tosses them in the trash the moment the light slips past the horizon of their 29th year.
Didion’s prose here is terse, deadpan, and devastating. She describes a woman’s physical and social crumbling, her manic spiral, the many indignities she’s forced to suffer so matter-of-factly, but with so much implied weight.
Antiseptic, journalistic descriptions of the depressing minutiae of Maria’s life has the effect of treating her life as a microcosm of a larger culture. The lack of emotion in the prose says more than any fiery monologue of inner anguish ever could. The scant episodes, minuscule chapters elicit a fracturing psyche. The unfeeling descriptions evoke a canned out existence.
Didion constructs so much in so few words. The image of a “whatever the fuck” impassivity painted onto a sucked-out, once-beautiful face, framed with a crown of wind-whipped hair, top down on a stolen red Ferrari, hundred-ten on a desert road, not caring about anything, not able to care if she wanted to—“in any case she was stopped for speeding outside Tonopah.”
Brilliant. I mean, it has a reputation for a reason, of course, but even still.
Really wish Goodreads had half-star increments (an idea that’s all my own, extra original, one-of-a-kind).
4.5, nonetheless.
Didion’s prose here is terse, deadpan, and devastating. She describes a woman’s physical and social crumbling, her manic spiral, the many indignities she’s forced to suffer so matter-of-factly, but with so much implied weight.
Antiseptic, journalistic descriptions of the depressing minutiae of Maria’s life has the effect of treating her life as a microcosm of a larger culture. The lack of emotion in the prose says more than any fiery monologue of inner anguish ever could. The scant episodes, minuscule chapters elicit a fracturing psyche. The unfeeling descriptions evoke a canned out existence.
Didion constructs so much in so few words. The image of a “whatever the fuck” impassivity painted onto a sucked-out, once-beautiful face, framed with a crown of wind-whipped hair, top down on a stolen red Ferrari, hundred-ten on a desert road, not caring about anything, not able to care if she wanted to—“in any case she was stopped for speeding outside Tonopah.”
Brilliant. I mean, it has a reputation for a reason, of course, but even still.
Really wish Goodreads had half-star increments (an idea that’s all my own, extra original, one-of-a-kind).
4.5, nonetheless.
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
i need to go to therapy now lol
dark
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes