• Joan Didion. Look, listen, write

The protagonist of His last wish , a novel by Joan Didion published in 1996 and now recovered, is a woman with a great capacity for adaptation that has been reinvented several times throughout her life. The first, when he decides to marry a rich man and leave his incipient reporter career in a newspaper. The second, when he decides to separate and resume his vocation and gets a job at the Washington Post . The third is the one that tries to rebuild the narrator, a journalist, like her. The two belonged to the same community of neighbors for a while. The journalist returns to events that occurred 10 years ago, in 1984, and that she has already investigated. Putting it in writing as you want takes two years. All this is a narrative scheme that allows sequencing the information that you share with the reader, order and quantity, to maintain tension , and let the reader perhaps fit the pieces before the end is explained.

His last wish is a political thriller . The woman whose story is reconstructed is Elena McMahon, who in an unpredictable and inevitable way is immersed in a matter of arms trafficking, which becomes something much bigger and more serious. But the novel is something more: on the one hand, it counts the diligence with which in the 80 United States it interfered in the governments of more or less neighboring countries, it supported the government, the revolutionaries or the counterrevolutionaries according to their own interests with an amazing naturalness, but in secret. Joan Didion has a book of chronicles, Salvador , about the anti-Sandinista revolt precisely. Surely, part of that material, or at least that knowledge of the world, is also part of the novel.

Elena McMahon gets on planes that take her to Miami, San José, in Costa Rica, and to an island in the Caribbean, but she doesn't quite understand what happens . The journalist who tells her story has no doubt. This novel is a portrait of the sewers of the State - metaphor by the way that the narrator ridicules - but tries to look for the humanity of the characters: from the father, from Treat Morrison, the other protagonist of the story, and of course by Elena McMahon . His last wish is also the story of a woman cornered in his daily life: his daughter reproaches him for divorce, his father is beginning to lose his memory and an absurd incident on a plane will make him decide to abandon the campaign of the primary he is covering to visit his father, whom he has not seen for almost two years. The father forgets all the time that his mother, from whom he separated, is dead. Not long ago he died, there was no funeral. The father has always engaged in dark business, smuggling, of which Elena managed to stay away, as well as cleverly hiding it by filling in data on school records about her parents' occupation. There is something deeply tender in Elena's decision to help her father in one last job, the big hit, the million dollar hit, as he calls it. And at the same time, you don't have many more options. It is almost inevitable to remember Nebraska , Alexander Payne's film about the son who accompanies his elderly father to collect an alleged prize that is nothing more than a decoy. And in that assignment to the irrationality that is done to please parents and children.

The novel has something experimental, not so much in the idea of ​​reconstruction with testimonies and various materials, but also, as in the use of repetitions of complete sentences that can almost be interpreted as clues that Elena let pass, but that the reader does not You can ignore if you want to anticipate the outcome. In addition to managing narrative tension, Didion takes advantage here, as in his chronicles, of one of his great abilities: that of capturing and describing a certain mood between depression and the indifference of his characters with just a few sentences, so as in painting unequivocally a certain social landscape. Like other Didion novels, His last wish is very visual and has many elements to become a movie: Netflix is ​​producing the adaptation by Dee Rees and with Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck in the cast.

They happen in Miami, in Sacramento, Manhattan or Hollywood, San José or El Salvador, agents of the FBI, the Government, small-scale traffickers, film producers, actresses, journalists ... appear, in fact, all the books of Didion speak of the same, although in different ways. The stories he tells are part of a large altarpiece that tells the United States and illuminates the dark areas . Didion knows there is nothing better than a well told story, and in that she is a teacher.

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