Book Review: Salvador, by Joan Didion (1983)

The stark cover of Joan Didion's 1983 book Salvador.

Joan Didion, early 1980's.

In 1982, Joan Didion and her husband, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, went to El Salvador to observe the chaos and disorder during the Salvadoran Civil War. Didion and Dunne traveled around El Salvador for two weeks. The end product of their visit was a series of articles that Didion published in The New York Review of Books, and then expanded for her book Salvador, published in 1983. 

Didion’s fine writing is on display throughout the book. The end of the first paragraph of Salvador gives the reader a preview of what is to follow, as Didion writes that to visit El Salvador is “…to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.” (p.13) 

 The Salvadoran Civil War was a brutal and bloody conflict, and Didion relates the grim details: “The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie.” (p.19) 

Didion interviews several government officials, and at one point she and Dunne and some other journalists attempt to speak to a colonel but return without meeting him. “…nothing came of the day but overheard rumors, indefinite observations, fragments of information that might or might not fit into a pattern we did not perceive.” (p.45) I like that sentence very much, and it seems to be a good summary of the book itself. 

Didion comes to no grand conclusions at the end of Salvador, and it seems the only thing we have learned is that it’s a complicated place and there’s no easy answer for stopping the killing. Indeed, the civil war would continue until 1992. 

Salvador is a short book, just over 100 pages. Does it really need to exist as a stand-alone book rather than a long piece within a larger collection? Probably not. It’s a little unfair to expect anyone to turn out an entire book based on just two weeks of reporting, even if they are an author as talented as Joan Didion. Because of it’s length and the short amount of time Didion spent in the country, Salvador is inevitably going to feel like it’s just skimming the surface. Salvador is still an interesting book, but it’s not an essential one.