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"It is 1984, a period, in Joan Didion's sweeping formulation of luridness, of counterfeit machismo, of 'striking and maintaining a certain kind of sentimental pose'. More specifically, it was a time when large quantities of lethal weaponry reached the Nicaraguan Contras with the connivance, but without the official sanction, of the American government...It is typical of Didion's approach to her theme that Elena McMahon, the out of work reporter who agrees to escort a shipment of anti personnel mines to a Caribbean island arrives on the remote jungle airstrip wearing a black silk shift. This novel, like its heroine's choice of travel wear, proclaims its classiness at once...Didion's language is as high toned as it is hip, an amalgam of journalistic and political jargons with pared down prose full of finely sprung rhythms, suggestive pauses and patterns of repetition and variation as artful and shapely as song...impractical as it may be, there really is nothing as becoming as black silk."
LUCY HUGHES HALLETT, 'Sunday Times'
"The centrality of 'The Last Thing He Wanted' is not a person, nor even an event, but the tone of the US in 1984. The technique of writing is, as usual, unique, an incantation with repetitions and rhythms to entrance the reader, meant to restore full weight to a language made weightless by misuse...I should perhaps also mention that I read it twice for pure delight before reading it for review."
VERONICA HORWELL,'Guardian'
"Fast paced, witty, inventive...'The Last Thing He Wanted 'is a creation of high seriousness, a thriller composed with all the resources of a unique gift for imaginative literature."
ELIZABETH HARDWICK,'New York Review of Books'
"Joan Didion's first novel for more than a decade, 'The Last Thing He Wanted' is by far her most secular and disenchanted. It is also close to her best."
BRIAN MORTON, 'TES'
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Didion at her finest" USA Today An intricate, fast-paced novel about trying to create a context for democracy and getting hands a little dirty in the process, complete with conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations. From the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I MeanThe narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. She finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father. She becomes embroiled in her his business even though "she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined. Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points out how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. Creating a "menacing world where the reader is held hostage" ("Los Angeles Times"), the legendary author of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" now trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy--Dallas, 1963; Iran Contra in 1984--and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679752851
Book Description Softcover. Condition: New. Reprint. NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Didion at her finest" -USA Today An intricate, fast-paced novel about trying to create a context for democracy and getting hands a little dirty in the process, complete with conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations. From the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I MeanThe narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. She finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father. She becomes embroiled in her his business even though "she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined.Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points out how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. Seller Inventory # DADAX0679752854
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. . Seller Inventory # 52GZZZ00L9FU_ns