No one but Tom Wolfe summed up the ethos of the 1960s as Didion did, with her litany of little ironies and dedicated absurdities. As she says, “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”
Ultimately, Didion’s essays are about language, about how a writer understands what her subject is by carving sentences out of the world of experience. The subject matter is eclectic, the themes diffuse - profiles of Nancy Reagan, Martha Stewart and Ernest Hemingway and pieces on the Hearst Castle in California, Vietnam veterans, and Gamblers Anonymous - but the prose style hits the same consistent effortless tempo and polished tone 12 times in a row.
0 kommentar(er)
