El Mundo (The World)
El Mundo (The World)
“Boca Grande is the name of the country. It is also the name of the city. It’s as if the place itself had defeated the imagination of even its first settler.”
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that (s)he remakes it in (her) image.”
The White Album (1979)
Boca Grande is a tiny fictional nation, nestled between Guatemala and Honduras
Joan Didion was fascinated by Central America. In 1982 — five years after she published A Book of Common Prayer — she visited El Salvador with her husband John Gregory Dunne at the height of the civil war there. She was only there for two weeks, but she witnessed the horrors, chaos and human suffering that war visited upon the people of El Salvador, while also also experiencing a devastating earthquake. The result of that harrowing trip was the searing book-length essay Salvador.
“There are no hills, only the flat bush and the lifeless sea. And the light. The opaque equatorial light. Dead white at noon. The bush and the sea do not reflect the light, but absorb it, suck it in, then glow morbidly. I continue to live here only because I like the light.”
“Boca Grande is not ‘a land of contrasts.’ On the contrary Boca Grande is relentlessly ‘the same’: the cathedral is not Spanish Colonial but corrugated aluminum. There is a local currency but the American dollar is legal tender.”
“Luis was assassinated on the steps of the Presidential palace in 1959. He was the last Strasser-Mendana to place himself in so exposed a position as that of El Presidente. My husband Edgar — and his brother Victor after him — preferred to rule from the relative safety of the Ministry of Defense, leaving the more dangerous (and purely ceremonial) role of El Presidente for a series of expendable cousins by marriage.”
“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”
A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
