I listened to the audio book version of The Year of Magical Thinking, and I am not sure that I would have made it through a reading of the National Book Award winning, actual book. It is stunning in it’s depth and it’s detail and it’s feelings. I liked the cool even recitation of Barbara Caruso, although some reviewers thought she was a little too cold and detached for the subject matter.
Joan Didion is a great writer. She is also a great technician of English. As a writer of far lessor skill and ambition-implying that I could be a great writer if I really, really wanted to be-I am awed by Joan Didion’s prose. The Year of Magical Thinking is about death and dismay and despair and sorrow and mourning for the loss of a husband and the grave illness of a daughter. There is enough data here for Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking to be a sort of symposium on Death and Dealing with Death. The facts are laid on hard and heavy, even when blended with the story of her life with her husband, John. The facts are cold and hard and real-she needs reality as she seems to have lost all contact with it when John suddenly dies at the dinner table one cold December night. The Year of Magical Thinking is a year in which she keeps thinking her beloved husband will magically return from the great beyond.
At the same time she is rattling off facts and lists and statistics, she is remembering what her life was like before-she can only view the world as before. She recalls the trips they took to Paris, or Honolulu, or Southern California. There is the odd juxtaposition of Joan Didion the rich and spoiled socialite living the life that most of us can only dream of, and Joan Didion the widow trapped in the sorrow of lose that no amount of fame or money can help.
“weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.“
The fact that the audio book cover quote is filled with ellipsis is funny, this is a book best listened to as it is filled with long and convoluted language. There is also a Broadway Play starring Vanessa Redgrave and I can easily enough image her velvety voice delivering the sorrow filled story of unbearable loss, that is somehow survived.
This is a great book for all it’s love of quotes and lists and jargon gone bad. The fact that we are not supposed to suffer the loss of a loved anymore, but merely get up the next day and get on with it. The fact that many widows and widowers don’t last two years after the loss. The idea that Emily Post knew better how to deal with death than doctors do today. The Year of Magical Thinking is a profound book.
June like it and Edmund wrote two haiku about it.
