Joan Didion: Play It As It Lays

[Mirabell]

s*: Don't pass: Joan Didion's "Play it as it lays"

Play it as it lays is a remarkable novel, dark, brutal and fundamentally sad. It is highly recommended. It is the story of a woman who shoots a roll of dice and doesn't pass and a whole society who bets against her and is happy to take her money. Alea jacta est, indeed. What's done is done.

It is an excellent novel, although I can think of several readers who would not like it. It's, trivially, a matter of taste.

[fausto]

I have found that Didion's prose is not for everyone, indeed. I love it to bits. I haven't read that book, but I've read a couple of her novels and three of her non-fiction works (Slouching towards Bethlehem, The White Album, After Henry). Her intelligence and her writing never cease to amaze me. But what I like the most is that reading her journalist work make me feel like I have encountered the closest thing to objectivity I will ever encounter. Honestly. Opinionated but very balanced.

[fausto]

I forgot the essential: good piece you wrote, mirabell.

[Mirabell]

Here's a quote from the book

Although the heat had not yet broken she began that week to sleep inside, between white sheets, hoping dimly that the white sheets would effect some charm, that she would wake in the morning and find them stained with blood. She did this in the same spirit that she had, a month before, thrown a full box of Tampax into the garbage: to be without Tampax was to insure bleeding, to sleep naked between white sheets was to guarantee staining. To give the charm every opportunity she changed the immaculate sheets every morning. She wore white crêpe pajamas and no underwear to a party.