Reviews
The New York Review of Books
Cathleen Schine
“What appears on the surface to be an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written story of the loss of a beloved child is actually an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written glimpse into the abyss, a book that forces us to understand, to admit, that there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation.”
24/11/2011
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The London Review of Books
Mary-Kay Wilmers
“Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying; and about the memory of a time between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s when Didion and Dunne lived in California and Quintana was growing up; a charmed time when ‘there had been agapanthus, lilies of the Nile, intensely blue starbursts that floated on long stalks’; when children might develop a liking for caviar; and there were birthdays at which rafts of balloons were released to drift over Hollywood Hills; a time when fear was glossed over or unrecognised and Didion was a mother who wrote books...”
03/11/2011
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The Economist
The Economist
“This is a difficult book, but not a sentimental one. Ms Didion has a remarkable ability to consider her own feelings without letting her prose turn soggy with emotion … [She] has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality.”
05/11/2011
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“Heartbreaking … Whereas “Magical Thinking” was raw and jagged and immediate — the work of someone who prized order and control and found herself suddenly spinning into madness — “Blue Nights” is a more elliptical book: the work of a survivor trying to understand the daughter she has lost, even as she surveys the receding vistas of her own life, as age and illness and bereavement leave her feeling newly vulnerable and alone.”
31/10/2011
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The New York Times
John Banville
““Blue Nights,” though as elegantly written as one would expect, is rawer than its predecessor, the “impenetrable polish” of former, better days now chipped and scratched ... The book will be another huge success, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.”
03/11/2011
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The New Statesman
Sophie Elmhirst
“… this book is like nothing else Didion has written - not always a good thing. It lacks her clean and graceful style, a gaze that is sensitive and yet slightly removed. The writing is brutal, unsettling and frantic. Yet how else could she write such a book, in such a moment? The tone, a stripping away of artfulness, is deliberate. Its lack of polish lays bare an anguish that infects her every waking moment, leaving her haunted by the past.”
07/11/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
“This is not, technically, as finished a piece of writing as The Year of Magical Thinking. Like the gloamings of its title, it is vague, insubstantial, impressionistic, elusive. At times it reads more like an incantation than the crystalline self-examination of its predecessor. Yet for all its tremulousness it has an indomitable quality: a steely willingness to recollect past happiness in present adversity — the deepest of all sorrows, according to Dante — which it is impossible not to admire.”
14/11/2011
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The Times
Janice Turner
“For once in her writing there is little scholarship or literary reference: in this cruellest of afflictions, the loss of a child, knowledge affords no comfort. Only the memories abide.”
05/11/2011
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The Literary Review
Jane Thynne
“It’s terribly sad. Do not look here for brave messages on coping with bereavement. Didion’s pain is far too raw.”
01/11/2011
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The Evening Standard
Katie Law
“Didion comes over as neither likeable nor cosy, but rather self-centred and preoccupied with her own writing. She was perhaps a more loving wife than mother, since Quintana Roo remains a shadowy presence. Yet Didion's prose and her imagery of her own blue nights beckoning, however fearful they may be, make for compelling reading.”
10/11/2011
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The Financial Times
Rahul Jacob
“Blue Nights is searingly honest about the extended nightmare of losing a child, but also uneven. There is a staccato quality to some of the writing, and a chapter mostly about how children today are mollycoddled seemed out of place. Didion somehow summoned the detachment she is renowned for in The Year of Magical Thinking. To expect her to pull off a masterpiece twice is to ask too much.”
04/11/2011
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The Mail on Sunday
Craig Brown
“What greater grief can there be for mortals to see their children dead? asked Euripides. Didion quotes this, and intends Blue Nights to be a prolonged exploration of its meaning and its undeniable truth. But although her grief is all-consuming, her book lacks the transcendent clarity and beauty of its predecessor. Or perhaps its relative failure is because her grief is all-consuming: it may be that her grief is so great that it has consumed even her most resilient qualities as a writer: her judgment, her clarity, her lack of self-pity.”
30/10/2011
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The Observer
Julie Myerson
“... a very odd book, full of fury and fragility and yet somehow anaemic. In fact, Didion's heartfelt declaration that "there is no day in her life on which I do not see her" serves only to remind you of Quintana's essential absence. Because we, the readers, do not ever really "see" this girl. Even the passages where she might have come to life are rendered needlessly brittle by Didion's stabbing, birdlike prose ... Where the book is most successful — and most poignant — is in the viciously honest picture Didion draws of a lonely, encroaching old age.”
23/10/2011
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The Sunday Times
Daisy Goodwin
“[An] elusive memoir, which manages to be both intimate and aloof (you wouldn’t know how Quintana became ill unless you had read the earlier book). We are given sudden vivid glimpses of Quintana, but no facts, no humdrum biography. Didion reaches no conclusions, has no epiphany, and leaves out as much as she reveals. Her prose is a thing of beauty, but the book itself is as evanescent as the eponymous blue nights.”
23/10/2011
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The Guardian
Rachel Cusk
“She struggles to revive the form and style of her earlier book, to make it live again; she repeats anecdotes, and often sentences, word for word; she creates repeating prose patterns whose effect, in the end, is to confer the author's own numbness on the reader. What she cannot do is master her own material: instead of grieving with her, we are watching her grieve. This is a piteous and exposing process, and one which places a moral burden on the reader. And it is here that Didion's lack of humility comes back to haunt her, for by burdening the reader she is also making herself vulnerable to judgment.”
12/11/2011
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The Spectator
Susan Hill
“... I wanted Quintana to be brought alive in her mother’s words. That would have been her memorial. This disjointed, painful, author-centred book is not. Did Didion ever mean it to be? Was she always writing about herself, not about Quintana? Well, what she wrote is what we have, and we must accept that. But it is legitimate to criticise the section which deals with the tragic death of Natasha Richardson ... the account of Natasha’s death in this book, which is meant to be about Quintana, jars, and seems to have no place, though it had a place for Didion. That’s the problem, somehow.”
12/11/2011
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