Su último deseo / The Last Thing He Wanted

About Su último deseo / The Last Thing He Wanted

Un oscuro y enigmático thriller sobre los complots y conspiraciones de la Guerra Fría de la mano de Joan Didion, una de las narradoras más lúcidas de las letras norteamericanas.

El libro en que se basó la película de Netflix

Elena McMahon abandona su trabajo como reportera en The Washington Post y su lujosa vida en California para adentrarse en otra: la de su padre, una existencia repleta de tratos oscuros. Sin apenas darse cuenta, acabará sustituyéndole como traficante de armas para Estados Unidos en algún punto de América Central. ¿Cómo ha podido llegar hasta ese punto? ¿Qué la ha llevado a cambiar una vida acomodada por el mundo criminal?

En este thriller moral, hipnótico y provocativo, Elena se enfrentará a las consecuencias de los errores de su padre hasta verse implicada en una conspiración gubernamental que pondrá en jaque su vida y sus principios.

Ambientada en los ochenta y escrita como si se tratara de una investigación sobre lo que ocurrió durante esos años de sombras políticas, complots e intentos de asesinato, Joan Didion nos presenta una novela trepidante y enigmática donde vamos descifrando poco a poco la figura de Elena hasta conseguir entender su papel en ese gran tablero que constituían los últimos años de la Guerra Fría.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The book that inspired the Netflix Film

This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didion’s incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up.

The narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. Suddenly walking off the 1984 campaign, she finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon. She becomes embroiled in her Dick’s business though “she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing.” It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined, something that includes Ambassador-at-Large Treat Austin Morrison and Alexander Brokaw, the ambassador to an unnamed Caribbean island. 

Into this startling vision of conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations, Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points up how “spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock.” As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. This is our system, the one “trying to create a context for democracy and getting [its] hands a little dirty in the process.”