[33M]⋙ Libro Free Play it as it lays a novel A Touchstone book Joan Didion 9780671248468 Books

Play it as it lays a novel A Touchstone book Joan Didion 9780671248468 Books

Download As PDF : Play it as it lays a novel A Touchstone book Joan Didion 9780671248468 Books

Play it as it lays a novel A Touchstone book Joan Didion 9780671248468 Books

Spare, elegant, and terrifying, Play It as It Lays is the unforgettable story of a woman and a society come undone.

Raised in the ghost town of Silver Wells, Nevada, Maria Wyeth is an ex-model and the star of two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang. But in the spiritual desert of 1960s Los Angeles, Maria has lost the plot of her own life. Her daughter, Kate, was born with an “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Her long-troubled marriage has slipped beyond repair, and her disastrous love affairs and strained friendships provide little comfort. Her only escape is to get in her car and drive the freeway—in the fast lane with the radio turned up high—until it runs out “somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped.” But every ride to nowhere, every sleepless night numbed by pills and booze and sex, makes it harder for Maria to find the meaning in another day.

My Thoughts: Joining the journey of Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays: A Novel felt like a descent. A slow unraveling of a woman who has found no meaning in her life, and who will end up with nothing left.

Mariah has finally come full circle and is under the care of psychiatrists, in a place where she can turn her life over to others.

In a non-linear narrative, we watch Mariah’s life in flashbacks. Anything she sees in the world around her can send her back to moments in another time or place. Some happy moments, and as she grasps for feelings of connection, she can hang on a little longer. Images of her daughter Kate feel the most poignant, and sometimes she seems to be grasping for time with her again, but she also realizes that these hopes are impossible.

Watching a young woman destroy herself slowly, and seeing those around her enable her, felt like an insidious train wreck. Self-destruction takes time, but when it finally happens, you almost feel relieved. A beautifully written story that literally depressed me. 4.5 stars.


Tags : Play it as it lays, a novel (A Touchstone book) [Joan Didion] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood,Joan Didion,Play it as it lays, a novel (A Touchstone book),Simon and Schuster,0671248464

Play it as it lays a novel A Touchstone book Joan Didion 9780671248468 Books Reviews

Joan Didion, as always, does not disappoint with her compelling writing style and strong sense of characters. Her way of introducing the characters may read as odd or offputting to some people, as she introduces them from individual first point of view at the beginning but then uses third person afterwards for the rest of the book, but I think it’s unique and really lets you get inside their head without losing the power of perspective that third person gives the reader. Definitely recommend!
This is one of those books that you read knowing that you won't understand it for a long time after the last page is finished. I don't know how I feel about it other than confused and oddly drawn to read it again immediately.
Magnificently written. Short terse chapters about the decadent and destructive effects of Hollywood on the lives of a model and aspiring actress and a former actress and their film industry husbands. Compelling and intriguing novel. Masterful writing by Didion as always.
In Joan Didion's classic, Play It as It Lays, Maria Wyeth resides in a psychiatric hospital. As the story unfolds we get a glimpse of what her life was like before she got there. Set in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the Mojave Desert, there isn't any glitz. It's bleak, harrowing, and fascinating.
I was right the first time. I read ths book at east ten or more years ago. I found it extraordinary, capable of provoking emotions like despair and resignation. On a second reading now, so many years later. I find it even more convincing than the first time. Didion was (is?) s most extraodinary writer, succeding in arouse strong emoion on the reader. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Harrowing but fascinating and beautifully written. Really gruesome abortion scene midway through the novel, while exquisitely written, was VERY hard to read, FYI. Nonetheless Joan Didion is an important writer and this dark tale is engrossing.
Joan Didion removes the rose-colored glasses through which we view the mystique of Hollywood in her 1970 retrospective on the underbelly of the California Dream in the 1960’s. It is a novel of decay; of sex, drugs, and booze passed around as carelessly as sticks of gum; of dispassionate divorce; of forced abortion; of casual suicide; of being eaten alive by a band of coyotes. It follows the delirious journey from silver screen to psych ward of Maria Wyeth (a name whose pronunciation, when spoken with slurred speech, can almost be heard to ask, “Then why am I?”), a girl from the small town of Silver Wells, Nevada who slept her way into the big city disillusionment of Los Angeles – a place whose insidious influence travels like tainted blood through veins across the vast California highway system over which she absentmindedly speeds. Through Maria’s jaded, tear-stained eyes we are presented with a culture built upon open secrets and self-destruction – a circlejerk of exploitation. In a Shakespearean world of players, the burnt-out actress struggles to find her part.

Didion’s searing take on Hollywood is as unforgiving as the biz itself. Its vapidity is juxtaposed with the opulent rituals of its self-important players, and with the desperation of those who will only ever hope to play such a role. It dismantles the assumption that ‘the life’ is all luxurious leisure, gratifying glamour, and a promise of endless possibilities for a more finely lit tomorrow. When recalling the words of her gambling-addicted father in the opening monologue, a glimpse of reason is given as to what now compels her to open up like never before “I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.” This is a warning à la “The Emperor’s New Clothes;” the city is like a model whom photographers only shoot from a certain angle, but Maria has grown weary of false pretenses.

After this brief first-person narrative chapter of Maria’s (followed by even briefer ones by her (ex)husband and who we can only assume is the closest she can get to a female friend), a cold and eerily detached third-person takes over, casting an unnerving fog over the story as if to mirror the drug-induced haze in which she keeps herself to quell the nightmares. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” And there is indeed a distinction between Maria and these other players nothing, or more precisely an understanding of nothingness – an understanding of the cosmic cruelty that dictates our interlaced fates.

The interplay between the choices we make, the choices of others, and how those two fatalistic forces combine to make up that which we cannot control is the heart of the novel’s nihilism. She cannot control her husband and the hospital staff who discourage her from visiting the only person she unselfishly and desperately seems to love, but who or what can Maria blame for her daughter’s mysterious cognitive malady? Is it her own misfiring mind? But if so, who or what is to blame for that? The book posits this quasi-religious quandary throughout, invoking an existential anxiety in the reader. “Carter and Helene still believe in cause-and-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane.” Maria’s sanity is called into question by nearly every player she exchanges words with, and the recurring disparity between her thoughts, feelings, and actions cause the reader to do the same. But perhaps her overwhelming sense that nothing and no one around her is meaningful is the more accurate perception of our shared reality.

In the ominous words of an ill-fated player, “If you can’t deal with the morning, get out of the game […] it’s play-or-pay.” Plays such as Shakespeare’s are predetermined – they have a set plot, prewritten dialogue, and a clearly-defined denouement which every iteration adheres to. But as Maria comes to find, life is much more like a game – the odds are ever-shifting, the misunderstandings constant and compounding, and any of its ends up until one’s final breath do not necessarily make sense or produce any semblance of significance. While the general reader may not care about or like Maria, they are kept in perpetual suspense as to where her story will end. And for the select few who identify with her, who have perhaps travelled the same roads, slept in the same hotels, shopped in the same stores, or suffered an analogous angst, her story is a terrifying reminder that you are not alone in your abject loneliness – but such knowledge might mean something to someone.

In this cinematically structured novel, with its dizzying scene shifts and fluctuating focus like that of uncertain cinematographer, Didion poignantly presents the plight of a woman swept away by the perpetual and indifferent waves of interest present in the patriarchal world of Hollywood. Though set nearly sixty years in the past, its players and themes are as immediate and real as the landscape she cleverly uses as a symbolic backdrop to her uniquely L.A. drama. Fans of postmodern literature will appreciate the craft and care with which she carves out Maria’s convoluted mind from the filthy pavement of Hollywood Boulevard, and those new to the movement will be thrown headfirst into the fragmented chaos of demolished identity and malleable meaning.

Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
Spare, elegant, and terrifying, Play It as It Lays is the unforgettable story of a woman and a society come undone.

Raised in the ghost town of Silver Wells, Nevada, Maria Wyeth is an ex-model and the star of two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang. But in the spiritual desert of 1960s Los Angeles, Maria has lost the plot of her own life. Her daughter, Kate, was born with an “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Her long-troubled marriage has slipped beyond repair, and her disastrous love affairs and strained friendships provide little comfort. Her only escape is to get in her car and drive the freeway—in the fast lane with the radio turned up high—until it runs out “somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped.” But every ride to nowhere, every sleepless night numbed by pills and booze and sex, makes it harder for Maria to find the meaning in another day.

My Thoughts Joining the journey of Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays A Novel felt like a descent. A slow unraveling of a woman who has found no meaning in her life, and who will end up with nothing left.

Mariah has finally come full circle and is under the care of psychiatrists, in a place where she can turn her life over to others.

In a non-linear narrative, we watch Mariah’s life in flashbacks. Anything she sees in the world around her can send her back to moments in another time or place. Some happy moments, and as she grasps for feelings of connection, she can hang on a little longer. Images of her daughter Kate feel the most poignant, and sometimes she seems to be grasping for time with her again, but she also realizes that these hopes are impossible.

Watching a young woman destroy herself slowly, and seeing those around her enable her, felt like an insidious train wreck. Self-destruction takes time, but when it finally happens, you almost feel relieved. A beautifully written story that literally depressed me. 4.5 stars.