Blue Nights
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4,3 • 4 valutazioni
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Blue Nights sono le ore lunghe e luminose della sera che a New York preannunciano il solstizio d’estate, «l’opposto della morte del fulgore, ma anche il suo annuncio».Sono passati sette anni da quando Joan Didion e John Gregory Dunne festeggiavano il matrimoniodella figlia Quintana Roo nella cattedrale di St. John the Divine in Amsterdam Avenue. Joan Didion ripensa a quel giorno, ai gelsomini del Madagascar nei capelli di Quintana, al fiore di frangipani tatuato sulla spalla. I ricordi rievocano istantanee dell’infanzia di Quintana: Malibù, la scuola di Holmby Hills, la California Meridionale e le sue stagioni «che arrivano in modo così teatrale da sembrare colpi di un destino inatteso». I ricordi spingono Joan Didion a interrogarsi sul suo essere madre, ora che la figlia non c’è più. A rileggereogni singolo evento della vita di Quintana alla ricerca di segni che forse non aveva voluto vedere.A fare i conti con la propria, inaspettata vecchiaia.Come L’anno del pensiero magico, Blue Nights colpisce per la precisione chirurgica con cui parla del dolore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Loss has pursued author Didion relentlessly, and in this subtly crushing memoir about the untimely death of her daughter, Quintana Roo (1966 2005), coming on the heels of The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion again turns face forward to the harsh truth. "When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children," she writes, groping her way backward through painful memories of Quintana Roo's life, from her recent marriage in 2003 to adorable moments of childhood moving about California in the 1970s with her worldly parents and learning early on cues about how to grow up fast. While her parents were writing books, working on location for movies, and staying in fancy hotels, Quintana Roo developed "depths and shallows," as her mother depicts in her elliptically dark fashion, later diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder"; while Didion does not specify what exactly caused Quintana's repeated hospitalizations and coma at the end of her life, the author seems to suggest it was a kind of death wish, about which Didion feels guilt, not having heeded the signs early enough. Her own health she writes at age 75 is increasingly frail, and she is obsessed with falling down and being an invalid. Yet Didion continually demonstrates her keen survival instincts, and her writing is, as ever, truculent and mesmerizing, scrutinizing herself as mercilessly as she stares down death.
