Not softly into that Blue Night [a review]

At a glance, Joan Didion's latest book, "Blue Nights," looks much like her last, the National Book Award-winning "The Year of Magical Thinking." Once again, the front cover bears amply spaced blue letters with thick trunks and delicate serifs spelling out her name and the book's title. And once again a black-and-white photograph--this time of her daughter Quintana Roo--dominates the back cover. What lies within is also, at least superficially, similar. Magical Thinking was written in the wake of the sudden death of her husband, while Blue Nights comes after her daughter--who in the previous book had rallied from pneumonia-induced septic shock to full recovery--has ended another long hospital stay, this time in death.

No two losses are equivalent, of course, and therefore neither could--nor should--two books be. Didion previously comforted herself with precision--quoting the time, "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," that she wrote her first words after her husband's death; the size, "three-by-six-inch," of the index cards in his pocket; and the chance medical facts that littered her life, "Tissue anoxia for > 4 to 6 min. can result in irreversible brain damage or death." She quoted widely, borrowing from the 9/11 Commission Report and The Merck Manual, 16th edition. She pile on the certainties and firm facts, as if research alone could overcome her disbelief, could convince her that her husband was really, truly gone.

Uncertainty has given way to a blameful regret in Blue Nights. Didion crafts her memories -- each heavily freighted with portent -- into mantras that echo through the book. She guiltily repeats the list of "Mom's saying" posted in the garage by a young Quintana: "Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I'm working." She finds answers in the quartet of questions that the adopted Quintana asked as a child, apparently often:

What if you hadn't been home when Dr. Watson called--
What if you couldn't meet him at the hospital--
What if there'd been an accident on the freeway--
What would happen to me then?

She recalls her daughter's calls to a mental hospital ("to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy," she explained) and Twentieth Century Fox ("to find out what she needed to do to be a star"). She remembers how, like her parents, who financed their life with Hollywood scriptwriting, Quintana reacted to movies not with pleasure, but evaluations of commercial potential. She sees in these memories all the signs of a childhood stifled, of a child forced into adulthood, of, inevitably, a mother who did not quite measure up. "How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?" she asks again and again, in one form or another.

Magical Thinking draws to a close with Didion still listing, still drifting, still unwilling to let go of her memories. Yet she acknowledges that they too grasp her. She sees that they are a fiction borne of an impossible hope--for return her life past--and with that realization we glimpse her journey onward. In Blue Nights, she wants none of that fiction. She rejects memento but clings to memory. She quite literally collapses on the floor of her apartment -- she watches, still in shock, as her own blood pools on the floor -- and yet she clings to life. She doesn't seem quite sure what to make of it, but still she clings.

"The fear is not for what is lost… The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her."

Ten days at sea with Gabriel Garcia Marquez [a review]

In February 1955, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was 27 years old. He had finished his first work of fiction, a novella, nearly seven years earlier, but he had not yet found a publisher. He was working as a film critic at the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. He also wrote the occasional news story. Perhaps for that reason, he was assigned the story of Luis Alejandro Velasco.

Late that month, the Colombian destroyer Caldas was swamped as it returned home from a repair mission to Mobile, Alabama. The ship survived, but eight sailors were washed overboard. The 20-year-old Velasco was among them. Rescue teams from Colombia and the U.S. combed the waters for the lost seamen, but found no one. After four days, the search was abandoned. Nearly a week later, an all-but-dead Velasco washed onto a beach in Northern Colombia.

What followed, naturally, was a Jessica Lynch-esque media frenzy. By the time Velasco arrived at the newspaper's office, "he had been decorated, he had made patriotic speeches on radio, he had been displayed on television as an example to future generations, and he had toured the country amid bouquets and fanfares, signing autographs and being kissed by beauty queens." He had even done advertisements: for watches ("his watch hadn't even slowed down" during his time at sea) and for shoes ("his were so sturdy that he hadn't been able to tear them apart to eat them").

This much we learn from the introduction to the "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," Marquez's 106-page account of the young seaman's ordeal. As it turned out, Velasco showed up at El Espectador not merely in search of another check. In the course of 20 six-hour interviews with Marquez, the sailor would reveal that there was no storm the night he and his shipmates were swept overboard. The problem was one of weight; the ship was overloaded with contraband television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines. The revelation, which following the solemn denials of the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was accompanied by photos in which one could make out the labels on the illegal cargo, made the story a sensation.

The politics of a now-dead dictatorship may now be of little interest--except perhaps as a reminder of the Lynchian tendencies of all governments--but the story remains a sensational read. All the aching monotony of ten days adrift at sea is magically (although you'll find no magical realism here) packed into an often breathless narrative. Some critics have called it a nonfiction competitor to Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. Marquez, however, seemingly would rather not have us read this story. The concluding paragraph of his introduction:

I have not reread this story in fifteen years. It seems worthy of publication, but I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it. I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much.

It should be noted that at the time of its publication in Spanish, Marquez had never before been credited with the story. It had originally ran under Velasco's name as a first-person account. Perhaps in a reflection of his unease about the publication, Marquez reportedly signed over the royalties to Velasco. 

There are, true enough, very few signs of the baroque poetry of Marquez's later works. Marquez describes, earlier in the introduction, a photo he recently saw of a middle-aged Velasco: "He had grown older and heavier, and looked as if life had passed through him, leaving behind the serene aura of a hero who had had the courage to dynamite his own statue." Those are the words of an older, more adept writer. Yet much of that keen and easy observation is here, in its infancy. And measured against today, the tale stands tall. Marquez's deceptively spare sentences pack a punch that knocks flat most of today's journalism.