Didion, Joan. Miami. New York: Vintage International, 1998.
Reason read: Here’s the whole train: Miami has an extremely strong Cuban culture. Fidel Castro was Cuban. Fidel Castro also had a birthday in August. Reading Miami to acknowledge the connection.
It took me some time to navigate Didion’s true focus for Miami. I was expecting an overarching, historical portrait of a city in Florida which is rich in culture and diversity today and yesterday. Instead, Miami started out as a tirade about how Cubans in Miami are often ignored (when they aren’t being misunderstood). Cuban ethnicity is left out of the equation when Anglos describe Miami. The naive gringos err on the side of stereotypes or misconception when trying to describe or name something that is uniquely Cuban. I wasn’t expecting this us against them narrative. It is more accurate to say Didion’s Miami is about the Cuban Exile Community, past and present. Didion moves the reader directly into the eye of a political hurricane which is in a nutshell government conspiracies and corruptions, the underbelly of wheeling and dealing like failed and successful assassinations. Organized crime and car bombs that go boom in the night. Bay of Pigs. Watergate. Ronald Reagan. Nightmares in the light of day. Sunny Miami.
I am distracted easily. Put in front of me a sentence that is too long winded and my mind starts to wander and my eyes jump all over the page, forgetting what I just tried to read. Miami is full of crazy long (in my mind run-on) sentences that drove me to distraction. Case in point: “On the morning of the anniversary ground was being broken for the renovation of the bungalow, an occasion for Claud Pepper, fresh from the continuing debate in the House of Representatives over aid to the Nicaraguan contras, to characterize the landing at Giron as “one of the most heroic events in the history of the world” and for many of those present to voice what had become by that spring the most urgent concern of the exile community, the very concern which now lends the occasion its retrospective charge, the “the freedom fighters of the eighties” not be treated by the Reagan administration as the men of the 2506 has been treated, or believed that they had been treated, by the Kennedy administration” (p 16).
Here is a short quote I liked, “To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance” (p 99).
Author fact: At the time of Miami’s publication Didion had published a combined ten books, both fiction and nonfiction.
Book trivia: I was hoping for some good photographs of historic Miami but none were included.
Nancy said: Pearl said Miami had gorgeous writing (p 146).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the incredibly obvious chapter called “Miami and Environs” (p 145).
~*LunaSea*~ 