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Salvador
"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror–its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
Joan Didion
102 books17.1k followersJoan 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 418 reviews
March 19, 2013
If I were just judging Joan Didion's prose, it would be 5 stars every time. But a few things about "Salvador" kept me from giving this book a 5 star rating.
But first, a disclaimer. I'm half Salvadoran. My American father and Salvadoran mother met in El Salvador and married in '77 and I was born in '79 in the States, just a few months after my parents decided to come back here. That said, I've never really spoken to them about the war. I've only actually only visited the country once, as a child, while the war was still going on. But my entire extended family continued to live there through the war and still do today.
So I come to the book with some ideas in my head about pre-Civil War El Salvador, as well as some knowledge of what happened both after Didion wrote this book and, even later, after the war ended.
As a snapshot, this is probably a somewhat accurate depiction of the country from an American who stayed there for TWO weeks. And that's my biggest problem with it. How can you really get a sense of this incredibly complicated war and truly get to know and understand the people and culture you're writing about from a scant two weeks on the ground? I think it's truly misleading to use this as a definitive examination of the country during the war.
This is a look at a very bloody war, but as graphic as the descriptions can be at times, it's actually a very sterile. You just see body counts, not people. There's no look at the culture (other than some off-base generalizations like "Salvadorans don't do numbers accurately") to really examine HOW the country got to be where it was in '82 when Didion wrote this snapshot. Lots of interviews with the US ambassador and high-ranking Salvadoran military officials but very little perspective of everyday people living day-to-day during this time.
Part of this could be because of when this book was written (1982, right in the midst of the awful war, not to mention smack dab in the middle of the Cold War) and a political point Didion may have been trying to prove, but whatever the reason, "Salvador" left me wanting.
Also, the insistence at calling the country Salvador drove me up a wall. I've never in my life heard the country referred to like that.
But first, a disclaimer. I'm half Salvadoran. My American father and Salvadoran mother met in El Salvador and married in '77 and I was born in '79 in the States, just a few months after my parents decided to come back here. That said, I've never really spoken to them about the war. I've only actually only visited the country once, as a child, while the war was still going on. But my entire extended family continued to live there through the war and still do today.
So I come to the book with some ideas in my head about pre-Civil War El Salvador, as well as some knowledge of what happened both after Didion wrote this book and, even later, after the war ended.
As a snapshot, this is probably a somewhat accurate depiction of the country from an American who stayed there for TWO weeks. And that's my biggest problem with it. How can you really get a sense of this incredibly complicated war and truly get to know and understand the people and culture you're writing about from a scant two weeks on the ground? I think it's truly misleading to use this as a definitive examination of the country during the war.
This is a look at a very bloody war, but as graphic as the descriptions can be at times, it's actually a very sterile. You just see body counts, not people. There's no look at the culture (other than some off-base generalizations like "Salvadorans don't do numbers accurately") to really examine HOW the country got to be where it was in '82 when Didion wrote this snapshot. Lots of interviews with the US ambassador and high-ranking Salvadoran military officials but very little perspective of everyday people living day-to-day during this time.
Part of this could be because of when this book was written (1982, right in the midst of the awful war, not to mention smack dab in the middle of the Cold War) and a political point Didion may have been trying to prove, but whatever the reason, "Salvador" left me wanting.
Also, the insistence at calling the country Salvador drove me up a wall. I've never in my life heard the country referred to like that.
September 18, 2017
"Terror is the given of the place."
- Joan Didion, Salvador
In 1983, when Salvador was first published, I was nine. I remember those years as being ones where I heard about people disappeared, death squads, kidnappings, priests killed, nuns raped. Who left me in front of the television? It was the second major international crisis that became part of my childhood dreams. I remember 3-5 years earlier, being freaked out by the Iran hostage crisis. I was aware of angry protesters, machine guns, blindfolds, the Ayatollah Khomeini's rants and a huge dark hole of uncertainty.
While the Iranian hostage crisis shares very little DIRECTLY with the civil war in El Salvador -- excepting the disgusting way people treat each other, the screwed up way that America dealt with both Central America (El Salvador & Nicaragua) and Iran, and the lies we tell ourselves to pretend things are getting better -- these two countries did exist in my childhood nightmares. The FMLN, death squads and Tehran's angry students swirled together in my dreams. Thirty years later, as an adult, the boogie men of my childhood were recreated as I read Salvador. Didion writes like an orthopedic surgeon cuts: straight, deep, confidently and deep TO the bone. This book scared the shit out of me. It made me sad. It made me want the comfort of my mom. Tonight, I'm sleeping with the lights on.
- Joan Didion, Salvador
In 1983, when Salvador was first published, I was nine. I remember those years as being ones where I heard about people disappeared, death squads, kidnappings, priests killed, nuns raped. Who left me in front of the television? It was the second major international crisis that became part of my childhood dreams. I remember 3-5 years earlier, being freaked out by the Iran hostage crisis. I was aware of angry protesters, machine guns, blindfolds, the Ayatollah Khomeini's rants and a huge dark hole of uncertainty.
While the Iranian hostage crisis shares very little DIRECTLY with the civil war in El Salvador -- excepting the disgusting way people treat each other, the screwed up way that America dealt with both Central America (El Salvador & Nicaragua) and Iran, and the lies we tell ourselves to pretend things are getting better -- these two countries did exist in my childhood nightmares. The FMLN, death squads and Tehran's angry students swirled together in my dreams. Thirty years later, as an adult, the boogie men of my childhood were recreated as I read Salvador. Didion writes like an orthopedic surgeon cuts: straight, deep, confidently and deep TO the bone. This book scared the shit out of me. It made me sad. It made me want the comfort of my mom. Tonight, I'm sleeping with the lights on.
July 8, 2012
Didion's prose is precise and exquisite, but I struggled with her interpretation of her experience. She argues against continued U.S. involvement in El Salvador's civil war, which seems like the "right" argument, but one based primarily on her fear for her own safety (understandable but not actually relevant to the formation of U.S. policy) and secondarily on her complete dismissal of the value of Salvadoran culture and, ultimately, Salvadoran lives. Her story covers a two-week time period during which she overgeneralizes her own terror as the experience that all Salvadoran citizens must be having, yet the only Salvadorans whose stories she recounts are the ones currently in power (who are likely afraid-but for different reasons than Didion) --and a few besieged writers (who, admittedly, are likely experiencing a fear very similar to Didion's except perhaps even more intense since they can't easily leave the country). In addition, she criticizes the quality of the cultural artifacts she encounters--crafts, dances, religious ceremonies--and informs us that El Salvador "has always been a frontier, even before the Spaniards arrived. The great Mesoamerican cultures penetrated this far south only shallowly. The great South American cultures thrust this far north only sporadically." It's hard for me not to interpret such statements as dismissive. If no self-respecting culture has ever invested in it, why should "los norteamericanos"?
Much of her argument derives from the slipperiness of the language used by Salvadoran leaders and U.S. diplomats alike that purposefully obfuscates both the war and its outcomes. Readers of Latin American literature will be familiar with these examples in their form if not their details. The work is important because of the time (Cold War) and audience (American general public) for whom she published. Her work certainly demands that readers become more critical of Cold War rhetoric and diplomatic decisions, but while she argues against some of the tools of American imperialism, Didion is unable to free herself from the inherent chauvinism on which that imperialism relies. The contradiction makes for a bizarre yet thought-provoking read.
Much of her argument derives from the slipperiness of the language used by Salvadoran leaders and U.S. diplomats alike that purposefully obfuscates both the war and its outcomes. Readers of Latin American literature will be familiar with these examples in their form if not their details. The work is important because of the time (Cold War) and audience (American general public) for whom she published. Her work certainly demands that readers become more critical of Cold War rhetoric and diplomatic decisions, but while she argues against some of the tools of American imperialism, Didion is unable to free herself from the inherent chauvinism on which that imperialism relies. The contradiction makes for a bizarre yet thought-provoking read.
November 23, 2024
I came to this book via way of Didion’s book Political Fictions, a collection of essays on the cynical, shallow, and Machiavellian nature of American foreign policy and politics. It contained a long essay on the wholesale slaughter and political terror practiced by the government of El Salvador, and the way the Reagan administration actively hid, misdirected, and outright lied about it so they could continue their policy of supporting that government. In critiquing government’s cynical mendacity, Didion was playing to her strengths, and was brilliant.
In Salvador, Didion was ostensibly covering the same ground, yet here her prodigious gifts failed her. She wrote this book (extended essay, really) after a two week trip to El Salvador with her husband. Instead of critiquing policy, she was observing the country, its people, and the terror they lived under in a time of civil war. But here the brutally effective style that she had perfected — that way she had of utterly dismantling her subject with a cold-eyed stare, or a bit of ironic side-eye — was impotently ineffective. She did not really have access to the common folk, who almost certainly would not have talked honestly to her even if she had. She clearly had no more grasp on the country’s culture than most of her readers, and the insights she brought to bear as a foreigner on a quick trip failed to cut deep. She does convey a personal fear, but the fear of a wealthy, protected American in a dangerous place she would leave after a fortnight, not the bone-deep terror of a citizen trapped in an ongoing terror. Thus, the picture she leaves us with is a sterile, clinical snapshot. Didion’s coldly ironic style simply was no match for the visceral, preternatural terror that was civil war torn El Salvador.
In Salvador, Didion was ostensibly covering the same ground, yet here her prodigious gifts failed her. She wrote this book (extended essay, really) after a two week trip to El Salvador with her husband. Instead of critiquing policy, she was observing the country, its people, and the terror they lived under in a time of civil war. But here the brutally effective style that she had perfected — that way she had of utterly dismantling her subject with a cold-eyed stare, or a bit of ironic side-eye — was impotently ineffective. She did not really have access to the common folk, who almost certainly would not have talked honestly to her even if she had. She clearly had no more grasp on the country’s culture than most of her readers, and the insights she brought to bear as a foreigner on a quick trip failed to cut deep. She does convey a personal fear, but the fear of a wealthy, protected American in a dangerous place she would leave after a fortnight, not the bone-deep terror of a citizen trapped in an ongoing terror. Thus, the picture she leaves us with is a sterile, clinical snapshot. Didion’s coldly ironic style simply was no match for the visceral, preternatural terror that was civil war torn El Salvador.
March 18, 2025
A quick lesson from Central America, now that we've apparently reached this stage in American autocracy. Should this continue, expect many more headlines in the coming weeks/months concerning people who have been 'disappeared.' Absolutely disgusting.
* * *
Didion—unsurprisingly—is highly critical of the United States's highly problematic involvement, but she is also strangely dismissive of El Salvador as a country worthy of a place on a map or in a history book. Neither one position nor the other quite satisfies her. Her sentences are the usual razor blades and death, sometimes the deaths of thousands, quickly comes to mean very little. Dead bodies—those that are discovered and identifiable—are disfigured, decapitated, and dismembered, to be scattered as carrion for the vultures. For a much warmer take on Central America, try Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement.
...I recalled that the Miss Universe contest itself had been held in San Salvador in 1975, and had ended in what might have been considered a predictable way, with student protests about the money the government was spending on the contest, and the government's predictable response, which was to shoot some of the students on the street and disappear others. (Desaparecer, or "disappear," is in Spanish both an intransitive and a transitive verb, and this flexibility has been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students, there being no equivalent situation, and so no equivalent word, in English-speaking cultures.)
* * *
"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 death. and disappearances. Joan Didion and her husband spent two weeks there in 1982 and this book, a nonfiction counterpart to A Book of Common Prayer, is the result. In its brevity it reminded me Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, but where Kincaid strives for lyricism and writes from a place of deep personal experience, Didion flies in and flies out and records an impression, which sounds much more dismissive than I intend for it to be.
Didion—unsurprisingly—is highly critical of the United States's highly problematic involvement, but she is also strangely dismissive of El Salvador as a country worthy of a place on a map or in a history book. Neither one position nor the other quite satisfies her. Her sentences are the usual razor blades and death, sometimes the deaths of thousands, quickly comes to mean very little. Dead bodies—those that are discovered and identifiable—are disfigured, decapitated, and dismembered, to be scattered as carrion for the vultures. For a much warmer take on Central America, try Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement.
October 16, 2014
Okay, it is perhaps unfair to expect of what is clearly a "minor" work like Salvador the same thoroughgoing insight that Didion displays in her major non-fiction books like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. That said, I was not impressed by this book.
Salvador made me realize that Didion is not, in fact, a natural reporter. She is too reclusive, too depressive, and does not seem to thrive on human interaction and experience the way born reporters do. This didn't matter for Slouching Toward Bethlehem, because it was essentially crticism, in which Didion could get by on her brilliant intelligence and total cultural mastery. Not so for Salvador, in which Didion's mordant wit sours into mere cynicism.
In order to be successful investigating a foreign culture, Didion would have to want to actually engage with that culture. But that is not really what she wants to do here. Instead, Didion sits in her hotel room, getting duly depressed by El Salvador and American foreign policy. This is not edifying.
The problem is highlighted in a passage toward the end of the book, when Didion makes a rare foray into the country itself, this time to a sort of improvised "indigenous crafts fair." Didion finds much to be disgusted about here, primarily the phony nature and cultural poverty of the whole thing. This is fine, but at this point I would expect someone reporting on this event, however stage-managed it might be, to attempt conversation with some of the participants. Instead, Didion is content to tell us her take on things--jaded disgust--and render the "indigenous" folk with a sort of murky speculation that failed to illuminate her supposed subject. This was less journalism and more an exercise in kneejerk malaise.
Salvador made me realize that Didion is not, in fact, a natural reporter. She is too reclusive, too depressive, and does not seem to thrive on human interaction and experience the way born reporters do. This didn't matter for Slouching Toward Bethlehem, because it was essentially crticism, in which Didion could get by on her brilliant intelligence and total cultural mastery. Not so for Salvador, in which Didion's mordant wit sours into mere cynicism.
In order to be successful investigating a foreign culture, Didion would have to want to actually engage with that culture. But that is not really what she wants to do here. Instead, Didion sits in her hotel room, getting duly depressed by El Salvador and American foreign policy. This is not edifying.
The problem is highlighted in a passage toward the end of the book, when Didion makes a rare foray into the country itself, this time to a sort of improvised "indigenous crafts fair." Didion finds much to be disgusted about here, primarily the phony nature and cultural poverty of the whole thing. This is fine, but at this point I would expect someone reporting on this event, however stage-managed it might be, to attempt conversation with some of the participants. Instead, Didion is content to tell us her take on things--jaded disgust--and render the "indigenous" folk with a sort of murky speculation that failed to illuminate her supposed subject. This was less journalism and more an exercise in kneejerk malaise.
November 4, 2022
Joan Didion was a rancher's daughter from Sacramento who voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. She appeared to be wavering until she went to visit El Salvador in the 1980s. In her short book Salvador, she comes face to face with the profound disconnect between what the Ronald Reagan administration is saying and the ghastly realities of the murderous Roberto D'Aubuisson and the widespread massacres of Salvadorans earmarked for death for no apparent reason.
Her writing style is, as usual, awesome:
Her writing style is, as usual, awesome:
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.
February 27, 2023
Fair warning, this is less of a book review and more of a rambly, personal musing written by me, the daughter of a Salvadoran. It seems stupid to even bother critiquing such a lauded book (and author), but if I influence even one person to see my father's homeland as a country worthy of respect, it will have been worth it.
In Salvador, Joan Didion detailed the two weeks she spent in the country in 1982. She is primarily concerned with the suggestions of war she sees around her, as she never actually witnesses any outright violence during her stay. She begins with an epigraph that ends with Joseph Conrad's "Exterminate all the brutes!" from Heart of Darkness. Certainly a puzzling choice of quote, especially considering Didion's biases towards the country of El Salvador that are prevalent in the book.
Didion mentions that El Salvador is a country of cultural impotence. She believes the country has no uniquely Salvadoran cultural products, as "there is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero. Some aspects of the local culture were imposed. Others were borrowed" (67). This seems, to me at least, a particularly insidious thing to say about a colonized nation, especially when the country has a rich artistic and literary culture. El Salvador has produced a number of remarkable poets and writers in particular. Salarrué, Claudia Lars, and Roque Dalton are just three of the most famous, though there are many more.
While reading, it is hard not to feel as if Didion centered the terror of the war around herself, an American who spent only two weeks in the country, with limited concern for the reality of the Salvadorans who lived with this everyday of their lives. Quotes from Salvadoran military leaders (funded by the American government), journalists, and an American ambassador abound, but the voices of the average citizen are absent. Didion described in dispassionate detail the burned, shot, gouged, and mutilated bodies of Salvadorans caught in the crossfire of the war, but she ignored their lived experiences.
There exists in Salvador no interest in the humanity of Didion's journalistic subject. To her, Salvadorans exist to have terror and violence enacted upon them. She ignored the viewpoint of the thousands of people who lived with this terror, but who still lived their lives; they married, partied, laughed, and existed in spite of the war going on around them, but you would not know this if your only knowledge of El Salvador comes from Didion's Salvador, which considering the size of the country, is entirely possible.
If you are interested in the history of El Salvador, and the civil war in particular, check out books written by Salvadorans themselves. Listen to them tell their own story and history. Here are just a few options: Roberto Lovato- Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas, Javier Zamora- Unaccompanied, Roque Dalton- Clandestine Poems/Poemas Clandestinos, Claudia Lars- Land of Childhood.
In Salvador, Joan Didion detailed the two weeks she spent in the country in 1982. She is primarily concerned with the suggestions of war she sees around her, as she never actually witnesses any outright violence during her stay. She begins with an epigraph that ends with Joseph Conrad's "Exterminate all the brutes!" from Heart of Darkness. Certainly a puzzling choice of quote, especially considering Didion's biases towards the country of El Salvador that are prevalent in the book.
Didion mentions that El Salvador is a country of cultural impotence. She believes the country has no uniquely Salvadoran cultural products, as "there is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero. Some aspects of the local culture were imposed. Others were borrowed" (67). This seems, to me at least, a particularly insidious thing to say about a colonized nation, especially when the country has a rich artistic and literary culture. El Salvador has produced a number of remarkable poets and writers in particular. Salarrué, Claudia Lars, and Roque Dalton are just three of the most famous, though there are many more.
While reading, it is hard not to feel as if Didion centered the terror of the war around herself, an American who spent only two weeks in the country, with limited concern for the reality of the Salvadorans who lived with this everyday of their lives. Quotes from Salvadoran military leaders (funded by the American government), journalists, and an American ambassador abound, but the voices of the average citizen are absent. Didion described in dispassionate detail the burned, shot, gouged, and mutilated bodies of Salvadorans caught in the crossfire of the war, but she ignored their lived experiences.
There exists in Salvador no interest in the humanity of Didion's journalistic subject. To her, Salvadorans exist to have terror and violence enacted upon them. She ignored the viewpoint of the thousands of people who lived with this terror, but who still lived their lives; they married, partied, laughed, and existed in spite of the war going on around them, but you would not know this if your only knowledge of El Salvador comes from Didion's Salvador, which considering the size of the country, is entirely possible.
If you are interested in the history of El Salvador, and the civil war in particular, check out books written by Salvadorans themselves. Listen to them tell their own story and history. Here are just a few options: Roberto Lovato- Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas, Javier Zamora- Unaccompanied, Roque Dalton- Clandestine Poems/Poemas Clandestinos, Claudia Lars- Land of Childhood.
March 22, 2012
Fine writing and terrifically atmospheric, but at thirty years' remove, Didion's weary (and wary) apolitical stance--her insistence that it's impossible to tell what's happening or who's responsible and that the violence is all pretty much aimless--feels less like insight and more like giving up. Having just read the remarkable Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, this felt slight and nearly trite.
November 27, 2010
I've always been in love with Joan Didion's reportage, with the dry, affectless, distanced language that suddenly, powerfully, yields razor-sharp insights. "Salvador" is the finest of her post-1960s writing---- a picture of a ghostly, fear-haunted country at the beginning of the 1980s. Didion catches the emptiness of official language and press releases, the utter and all-consuming cynicism of a society where conspiracy is assumed and random death a fact of daily life, the empty streets and villages haunted by jeeps full of killers and where certain corners and vacant fields are known body dumps. If you read this, listen to Bruce Cockburn sing "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" in the background: it's the only song that catches a trace of Central America in the nightmare years of the early and mid-1980s. "Salvador"'s politics are clear, but not designed to be a polemic or an expose. Didion leaves you with something much more disturbing.
July 22, 2025
A journalistic exploration into the tricky situation that was El Salvador in the late 20th century. I always like reading anything by Didion, because her writing style is something I find to be so unique and nearly exclusive to her. I'll have to find other books on El Salvador, too, or maybe some documentaries, since this was just so interesting.
April 30, 2018
I really didn't like this at all. I'm not sure if this is any indication of her later, and more popular works, but I really didn't appreciate the way that Didion discussed a lot of the gruesome events and chaos in El Salvador during the war in the 1980s. She writes with almost no compassion, and somehow with some sense of knowledge and condescension despite the fact that she was only there for two weeks (I really don't think that that is enough time to be enough of an authority on the topic to write an entire book). She was disparaging of the people and described a lot of the horrors that she heard about with what I felt was a disturbing distance. Additionally, I knew very little about the war going into this novel and she gives almost no context. She discusses the politics of the country and US involvement as well as her conversations with some of the major players without ever explaining the basics of the situations. If you are interested I would recommend a quick wikipedia research session before picking it up (if you're like me and don't really know anything about El Salvador or the war). Overall, this book really just frustrated and disappointed me, especially given that Didion is such a hyped author. Not sure if this means that I won't like anything she's written but it has definitely put any of her other works I'd potentially be interested in on the back burner until I can forget about this one.
August 23, 2025
Reading Salvador was my return to reading Joan Didion. Nearly two and a half years ago I made my introduction with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a book I had mixed feelings on. I was interested in reading more from Didion but it wasn’t until I found this copy of Salvador for one dollar last weekend that I finally did so.
Based on the title and reputation of Didion you might imagine that this is a story about a Latin lover but this is something very different. Salvador is a collection of essays Didion wrote when she spent two weeks in El Salvador in the early 1980s during the Salvadorian Civil War.
This is a subject I was mostly unfamiliar with before reading this book. The US sponsored conflicts of Central America in the 1980s are one of the many events conveniently forgotten in American history books. Even in its time this conflict was something that got minimal coverage, as Didion points out in this book. Outside of this book and some of the hardcore records of early 80s punk bands, I really cannot think of any real record of these events in American media.
While a short overview of these events, I found this book to be a great introduction and a highly engaging read. Didion offers enough first hand detail along with history of the country to get unfamiliar readers into the subject without feeling too overwhelmed. If you are someone who is looking for more detail or analysis this is not the place, although I would hope the sparse page count would give you enough heads up to know this ahead of time.
I was surprised reading as this book is very different from what I knew Didion for previously. I knew she covered world events but I didn’t know her background in covering events such as these. This is a great piece of war journalism that really puts you in that moment, even reading it decades later.
While I enjoyed this rather short book as a whole I will say I thought it started stronger than it finished. I found the dark and grim descriptions of violence to really capture the severity of the time and place. While informative, I found the later essays covering the political and historical aspects to be less engaging.
This book has me interested in reading more Didion as it really showcases her range as a writer. She leans more into the world of a Hunter S Thompson than an Eve Babitz with this one. The fact that she could do both was her strongest skill as a writer.
Based on the title and reputation of Didion you might imagine that this is a story about a Latin lover but this is something very different. Salvador is a collection of essays Didion wrote when she spent two weeks in El Salvador in the early 1980s during the Salvadorian Civil War.
This is a subject I was mostly unfamiliar with before reading this book. The US sponsored conflicts of Central America in the 1980s are one of the many events conveniently forgotten in American history books. Even in its time this conflict was something that got minimal coverage, as Didion points out in this book. Outside of this book and some of the hardcore records of early 80s punk bands, I really cannot think of any real record of these events in American media.
While a short overview of these events, I found this book to be a great introduction and a highly engaging read. Didion offers enough first hand detail along with history of the country to get unfamiliar readers into the subject without feeling too overwhelmed. If you are someone who is looking for more detail or analysis this is not the place, although I would hope the sparse page count would give you enough heads up to know this ahead of time.
I was surprised reading as this book is very different from what I knew Didion for previously. I knew she covered world events but I didn’t know her background in covering events such as these. This is a great piece of war journalism that really puts you in that moment, even reading it decades later.
While I enjoyed this rather short book as a whole I will say I thought it started stronger than it finished. I found the dark and grim descriptions of violence to really capture the severity of the time and place. While informative, I found the later essays covering the political and historical aspects to be less engaging.
This book has me interested in reading more Didion as it really showcases her range as a writer. She leans more into the world of a Hunter S Thompson than an Eve Babitz with this one. The fact that she could do both was her strongest skill as a writer.
March 12, 2022
Salvador by Joan Didion is compelling, like all of her work, but it rests on a two week reporting visit to El Salvador in 1982 that has its understandable limitations (even if Didion buttressed her book with a good bit of research before and after her trip.)
At this point I would think you could get plenty out of this book if you knew something about El Salvador in the 1980s but if not, all you would get is Didion's sharp writing--perhaps that's enough.
Back then El Salvador and all of Central America were red hot topics. People like myself involved in foreign affairs studied Central America carefully. There were acronyms and personalities and storylines that had Washington riveted in the Executive Branch, on the Hill, and in the media and think tank world. Basically, the plot had to do with "fighting communism" in the western hemisphere, particularly in terms of Cuban support for Nicaragua and the Sandinistas.
El Salvador boiled with violence that was only ancillary to that Cold War scenario. Didion correctly portrays the U.S. as attempting to buttress El Salvador's government and make it strong enough and stable enough to keep the commies out, but the fact is that the military and the paramilitary and the guerrillas weren't necessarily at war over communism in the western hemisphere
The conflict in El Salvador had different roots. There were fourteen family groups who controlled huge tracts of land; that gave them the wherewithal to control the banks and to an extent the government. Poverty in El Salvador was extreme if you weren't born into one of those fourteen families. So there was a socio-political uprising that went on for years and years, and in a very self-interested way the military established itself as arbiter and spoils-keeper, generally supporting the rich, generally not supporting the poor, and always battling with the rebels (let's skip the acronyms, there were different groups of rebels). The U.S. problem was that the military and paramilitary (arms of the government, after all) committed all manner of atrocities. So how could the U.S. funnel money to human rights' violators? Didion catches this question in a basic way and adorns it with the atmosphere of menace and fear that permeated the country. Somehow the U.S. did keeping funneling money to El Salvador's government.
I visited El Salvador even more briefly in 1987. The situation was as bad or worse than ever. San Salvador, the capital, had suffered a terrible earthquake the year before. There was rubble along the roadside everywhere, large piles of dirt and bricks. Napoleon Duarte was president. He was a centrist, a former mayor of San Salvador, and a Notre Dame-educated engineer. I was a member of a small group that met with him. He was attuned to resolving all of El Salvador's problems but lacked the resources to do much, a pretty battered guy who could be shot anywhere and at any time because he knew exactly what was going on. My group then moved to a luncheon/discussion with representatives of business (the 14 families.) We were harangued about the United States privileging human rights over fighting communism. (Again, I don't think that communism really was the incendiary dynamic in El Salvador.) I had the distinct impression that these guys had what they had and intended to keep it; they weren't giving anything away; in fact, they were the source of funding of paramilitary activities intended to guard their riches. Then we met with the Minister of Defense, Vides Casanova. His schtick was that he needed more money, equipment and training so he could deal with both the rebels and the paramilitaries...and squeeze money out of everyone, including the U.S. (which was supplying $100 million a year in military aid at the time.) Of course, Vides Casanova and others presided over thousands of atrocities during their time in power.
Didion basically makes the case for viewing El Salvador as a bad place to spend two weeks and for considering U.S. policies as feckless at best, stupid, cynical and harmful at worst. Basically, she was right, but after so many wars and atrocities and insurgencies and counterinsurgencies all over the world in the ensuing decades, El Salvador has long since disappeared in the rearview mirror.
At this point I would think you could get plenty out of this book if you knew something about El Salvador in the 1980s but if not, all you would get is Didion's sharp writing--perhaps that's enough.
Back then El Salvador and all of Central America were red hot topics. People like myself involved in foreign affairs studied Central America carefully. There were acronyms and personalities and storylines that had Washington riveted in the Executive Branch, on the Hill, and in the media and think tank world. Basically, the plot had to do with "fighting communism" in the western hemisphere, particularly in terms of Cuban support for Nicaragua and the Sandinistas.
El Salvador boiled with violence that was only ancillary to that Cold War scenario. Didion correctly portrays the U.S. as attempting to buttress El Salvador's government and make it strong enough and stable enough to keep the commies out, but the fact is that the military and the paramilitary and the guerrillas weren't necessarily at war over communism in the western hemisphere
The conflict in El Salvador had different roots. There were fourteen family groups who controlled huge tracts of land; that gave them the wherewithal to control the banks and to an extent the government. Poverty in El Salvador was extreme if you weren't born into one of those fourteen families. So there was a socio-political uprising that went on for years and years, and in a very self-interested way the military established itself as arbiter and spoils-keeper, generally supporting the rich, generally not supporting the poor, and always battling with the rebels (let's skip the acronyms, there were different groups of rebels). The U.S. problem was that the military and paramilitary (arms of the government, after all) committed all manner of atrocities. So how could the U.S. funnel money to human rights' violators? Didion catches this question in a basic way and adorns it with the atmosphere of menace and fear that permeated the country. Somehow the U.S. did keeping funneling money to El Salvador's government.
I visited El Salvador even more briefly in 1987. The situation was as bad or worse than ever. San Salvador, the capital, had suffered a terrible earthquake the year before. There was rubble along the roadside everywhere, large piles of dirt and bricks. Napoleon Duarte was president. He was a centrist, a former mayor of San Salvador, and a Notre Dame-educated engineer. I was a member of a small group that met with him. He was attuned to resolving all of El Salvador's problems but lacked the resources to do much, a pretty battered guy who could be shot anywhere and at any time because he knew exactly what was going on. My group then moved to a luncheon/discussion with representatives of business (the 14 families.) We were harangued about the United States privileging human rights over fighting communism. (Again, I don't think that communism really was the incendiary dynamic in El Salvador.) I had the distinct impression that these guys had what they had and intended to keep it; they weren't giving anything away; in fact, they were the source of funding of paramilitary activities intended to guard their riches. Then we met with the Minister of Defense, Vides Casanova. His schtick was that he needed more money, equipment and training so he could deal with both the rebels and the paramilitaries...and squeeze money out of everyone, including the U.S. (which was supplying $100 million a year in military aid at the time.) Of course, Vides Casanova and others presided over thousands of atrocities during their time in power.
Didion basically makes the case for viewing El Salvador as a bad place to spend two weeks and for considering U.S. policies as feckless at best, stupid, cynical and harmful at worst. Basically, she was right, but after so many wars and atrocities and insurgencies and counterinsurgencies all over the world in the ensuing decades, El Salvador has long since disappeared in the rearview mirror.
August 4, 2019
2.5 Stars!
The US is one of those countries which has interfered with or invaded so many countries within the last century that you sometimes lose track of some of the names. There must be millions of American children out there who will be totally oblivious to their nation’s role in the Salvadoran Civil War.
Of course the US may well have been the strongest supporters of the Salvadoran military government, by 1984 Reagan had spent close to $1 billion in aid, but they were not alone, they were helped by the Latin American dictators like Pinochet’s Chile and Videla’s Argentina.
Didion gives a grim yet compelling oversight into the death squads, Sheraton murders, the raped and murdered missionaries and some of the main players involved in the war, and there are some fairly graphic descriptions of the casualties.
Overall I thought there was a distinct lack of clarity, depth and focus with her reporting and as a result, this doesn’t make for particularly great reading and it made me long for someone like Kapuscinski who would have handled it a lot better and made the writing a lot clearer.
December 12, 2012
If I had read this book in the context of my Latin American history class, I would have appreciated its perspective. The book is a valuable work of current events, or at least it was in the 80's when it was published, but as a work of literature, I was unimpressed. The 107-page book is filled with poorly integrated block quotes that could have been cut down. There's hardly a story in the book. As a reader, I was unsure what the narrator was doing in El Salvador in the first place. I feel like she should have made herself more of a character to develop tension etc. If she was going for more of a journalistic approach, then she should have left herself out of it altogether. It also would have helped to get a lot more of the history of the country to provide a context for the events described. I don't think the average person has much background knowledge about El Salvador.
October 30, 2025
As a Central American/U.S./California writer, the product of three distinct sensibilities merged in ways I’m only beginning to unravel, I can plainly say that Joan Didion (who similarly is filtered across all those 3 sensibilities) is one of the most grossly overrated writers of all time. This is a narcissistic, strainingly Elegant, and useless traipse through backwater (to JD) country that only reminds herself she’s better off cruising the freeways of LA on the way to rich Malibu to watch John Wayne movies at home. Her affectless Hemingway aping reaches its nadir here. A slog to get through, like her similar slog in Miami. Why did 80s editors think that Didion was the best writer they had on their roster to talk about Latin America, parachuting her into Central America like U.S. Aid packages only to bungle her way through their tripwire politics and sneer at their/our culture?
March 23, 2025
Very good and taught me a lot of new words !
Read
August 18, 2025Can't really say I know anything more about the civil war in El Salvador after reading this, but that's totally on me!
April 21, 2025
Didion’s best writing is all about equatorial spycraft, war, and esoteric politics. This falls into the top third of her work, in my opinion. Svelte, beautifully observed, sadly relevant.
February 9, 2011
During the Reagan administration the United States committed itself to a policy of rollback as regards populist movements, particularly in the Americas. We invaded Grenada and created proxy armies in Costa Rica and Honduras while attempting the overthrow of Nicaragua. Unremarkably, we supported the dictatorships of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador against popular insurgencies.
During this segment of the eighties I was very active politically, both with the Socialist Party and with solidarity groups at my school, Loyola University Chicago. It was like VietNam all over again, like high school and college, except this time, with the draft inactive, people were generally less concerned. As during our adventures in Southeast Asia, I read quite a deal about the history and politics of Central and South America during this period.
Didion's book was purchased in the eighties, but sat unread for over a decade. It was not a history or a work of political science, so it didn't seem so vital. Besides, Didion was just a name to me, not someone I was into reading. Getting around to it years later was in part an exercise in reminiscence, in part the result of having befriended a Salvadoran temporarily resident in Chicago.
In fact, although based only upon her own reading and a mere two weeks in the country, Salvador is a good, albeit impressionistic, book. Short, it reads like one of the current events essays one appreciates in the New York Review of Books. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it had appeared in some form either there or in The New Yorker. Most memorable at this juncture is her description of the cliff outside the capital below which were the tossed, bloated bodies of suspected communists.
During this segment of the eighties I was very active politically, both with the Socialist Party and with solidarity groups at my school, Loyola University Chicago. It was like VietNam all over again, like high school and college, except this time, with the draft inactive, people were generally less concerned. As during our adventures in Southeast Asia, I read quite a deal about the history and politics of Central and South America during this period.
Didion's book was purchased in the eighties, but sat unread for over a decade. It was not a history or a work of political science, so it didn't seem so vital. Besides, Didion was just a name to me, not someone I was into reading. Getting around to it years later was in part an exercise in reminiscence, in part the result of having befriended a Salvadoran temporarily resident in Chicago.
In fact, although based only upon her own reading and a mere two weeks in the country, Salvador is a good, albeit impressionistic, book. Short, it reads like one of the current events essays one appreciates in the New York Review of Books. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it had appeared in some form either there or in The New Yorker. Most memorable at this juncture is her description of the cliff outside the capital below which were the tossed, bloated bodies of suspected communists.
January 8, 2022
Paused reading 10/28/2021
March 15, 2012
Joan Didion's nonfiction/reportage can be tough to read; "Salvador" is no exception. My difficulty isn't with her subject matter, although it can be grim as it is here or simply excruciating as in her two most recent books covering the deaths of her husband and then her daughter. It is because she produces such beautiful, fully formed and precisely balanced sentences that one (at least this one) can get bogged down in marveling at their perfection. She portrays the sense of anomie, fear and dread that accompanied one everywhere in El Salvador in the 1980s so well it could cause post traumatic stress in anyone who was there.
Extraordinary book from a great American author.
Extraordinary book from a great American author.
Read
December 24, 2013Ah, Madame Didion, how I love the way you take something visceral and awful, and write it as if you were observing it from a bathysphere, smirking and chain-smoking. El Salvador, as we know/knew, is/was a wreck. The point is that, as a privileged American, you can't possibly claim to "feel" what the people are feeling, or to write "objectively" about a situation that your own government, via its local proxy, refuses to let you examine objectively. Instead, the only way to approach the situation honestly in the moment is to contemplate its futility and horror from a distance. Preferably from inside your bathysphere.
November 16, 2020
Struggled with this book more than I thought I would. Maybe I lacked some context on El Salvador at the time of writing. I did enjoy her framing of American action in El Salvador, and how meaningless or superficial it could really be.
February 27, 2017
Di mana El Salvador? Kenapa dengan El Salvador? Enggak salah emang, realitas Amerika Latin lebih edan, seedan yg digambarkan dalam karya fiksi, bahkan lebih.
December 22, 2023
Lack of depth. I found her sweeping, knowing observations about the people and culture of el salvador to be mostly pretty ignorant and they started to annoy me.
didion is probably the best i’ve read at capturing sense of place, but despite her best efforts (and i believe she did try) two weeks somewhere wholly unfamiliar, sheltered from most of it and interacting mostly with members of high society is obviously insufficient.
when she does write about the architecture, or individual experiences with local people, it’s pretty brilliant. she is still incredibly perceptive, and is clear in laying out the horror of the situation, and the consequences of an aggressive, cruel and fundamentally irredeemable US foreign policy.
didion is probably the best i’ve read at capturing sense of place, but despite her best efforts (and i believe she did try) two weeks somewhere wholly unfamiliar, sheltered from most of it and interacting mostly with members of high society is obviously insufficient.
when she does write about the architecture, or individual experiences with local people, it’s pretty brilliant. she is still incredibly perceptive, and is clear in laying out the horror of the situation, and the consequences of an aggressive, cruel and fundamentally irredeemable US foreign policy.
December 31, 2022
pretty cursory introduction to the political turmoil of early 80s El Salvador, and I’m sure, as that of a white American woman visiting for a mere two weeks, Didion’s insight is lacking somewhat. That being said I knew nothing at all about El Salvador so I found even the basic facts really interesting (and grim), and Didion’s prose is perfect as always.
September 14, 2024
syntactically confusing at times, this book still prevails as 1.) a testament to the incomprehensible commitment some journalists have to the truth and 2.) the absolute ridiculousness, almost comedic (but with mortal consequences), of US Foreign policy. It is sickening to think that such negligence extends beyond Latin America to the entire globe.
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