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phloon's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.25
I greatly enjoyed examining the sentences alongside the author. He thinks of sentences, and writing in general, in ways I've never considered. Lots of great stuff in here for me to reflect on when writing or reading.
bill369's review against another edition
I didn't finish this book quite frankly because I found it boring.
Snaps I did like:
I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.
Because the child is like a worm that feeds on the body of its mother but also resembles a corpse in the grave, that breeds then kills worms when the body is spent.
"Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments." – SIR THOMAS BROWNE
It is exactly what I want from a sentence, this combination of oblique self-involvement and utter commitment to the things themselves. For words are also things and things are apt to burst with force and loud report.
Snaps I did like:
I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.
Because the child is like a worm that feeds on the body of its mother but also resembles a corpse in the grave, that breeds then kills worms when the body is spent.
"Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments." – SIR THOMAS BROWNE
It is exactly what I want from a sentence, this combination of oblique self-involvement and utter commitment to the things themselves. For words are also things and things are apt to burst with force and loud report.
casparb's review
4.0
A satisfying survey of sentences from authors across four(ish) centuries.
Particularly love the due deference to Gertrude Stein and Roland Barthes. Stein is, to me, perhaps the most radical re-inventor of the sentence that ever put pen to paper (at least, certainly in the 20thc), and it is an ongoing crime that she is still underrecognised as such.
Dillon has also quite convinced me to find a copy of Claire Louise-Bennett's Pond.
Particularly love the due deference to Gertrude Stein and Roland Barthes. Stein is, to me, perhaps the most radical re-inventor of the sentence that ever put pen to paper (at least, certainly in the 20thc), and it is an ongoing crime that she is still underrecognised as such.
Dillon has also quite convinced me to find a copy of Claire Louise-Bennett's Pond.
erboe501's review against another edition
4.0
I cherry-picked essays from this collection about authors I was already familiar with, or for sentences that particularly caught my eye as I skimmed. I miss the kind of super close reading of word-by-word, comma-by-comma analysis that I thrived on in school, so Dillon's readings were an enjoyable nostalgia trip.
Ones I particularly enjoyed, although I haven't read the cited works from which the sentences are pulled:
Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Joan Didion (Vogue!), Hilary Mantel.
Ones I particularly enjoyed, although I haven't read the cited works from which the sentences are pulled:
Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Joan Didion (Vogue!), Hilary Mantel.
painalangoisse's review
3.0
I read Essayism recently and enjoyed it and expected this to be a similarly cohesive work. But it's not. My fundamental problem is with scope: each chapter (ranging from 2-10+ pages) has to decide whether to treat the formal structure of only the sentence at hand, situate it in some kind of context with regard to its author and time period, or engage in personal connection. I think the collection would cohere much better if a consistent approach was chosen; as is, Dillon writes about different concerns for each essay, while still gesturing towards the range of other issues he could tackle. The result is unbalanced. I found the essays best when they primarily addressed the sentence on the page - their putative subject, that is - as for example in the James Baldwin chapter. On the flip side, they're at their worst when the sentence is an excuse to rhapsodize about the author's biography and tendencies with only gestures towards the sentence at hand. In those cases, I found the work exhausting due to knowing too much about the authors to feel that these necessarily short portraits were anything like adequate. And that gets to my deeper issue with the work - who is its audience? Those who already know the expository information (ie, those with literary backgrounds) will be bored or frustrated; if other reviews are to be trusted, the general reader does not care for the formal analysis he (inconsistently and, in my view, inadequately) provides.
My other issue with this collection, particularly compared to Essayism, is the perspective. In Essayism, there was clear development of Dillon as a reader and as a writer, and this gave a sense of who was narrating the essays and why. His mode has changed in Suppose a Sentence - the work is necessarily personal given his (stated) interest in collecting sentences for himself. But as the work goes on, I find that he empties himself from his writing. The result is disappointing. If the work is indeed meant to be a personal enterprise, I feel it would work much better by explaining what makes each sentence compelling to HIM. There is an irony operating in his essay on Janet Malcolm - he describes her as fixated on atmosphere, a nebulous "sense" of things being critical to her writing. Well, he's the same way - all through the book we are receiving "senses" that become nebulous due to insufficient textual evidence and lack of well-explained reader response. But at least in Malcolm's case one is able to locate her voice and form some idea of who is writing. Brian Dillon, on the other hand, comes away looking like a man with fascinations but no original ideas, nor a real voice of his own.
My other issue with this collection, particularly compared to Essayism, is the perspective. In Essayism, there was clear development of Dillon as a reader and as a writer, and this gave a sense of who was narrating the essays and why. His mode has changed in Suppose a Sentence - the work is necessarily personal given his (stated) interest in collecting sentences for himself. But as the work goes on, I find that he empties himself from his writing. The result is disappointing. If the work is indeed meant to be a personal enterprise, I feel it would work much better by explaining what makes each sentence compelling to HIM. There is an irony operating in his essay on Janet Malcolm - he describes her as fixated on atmosphere, a nebulous "sense" of things being critical to her writing. Well, he's the same way - all through the book we are receiving "senses" that become nebulous due to insufficient textual evidence and lack of well-explained reader response. But at least in Malcolm's case one is able to locate her voice and form some idea of who is writing. Brian Dillon, on the other hand, comes away looking like a man with fascinations but no original ideas, nor a real voice of his own.
e333mily's review against another edition
3.0
A wonderful premise (a collection of essays about the authors favourite sentences!) but I didn’t love this as much as Essayism. I suppose I just didn’t feel the same affinity for most of the sentences, even though Dillon’s analysis was brilliant, as always.
Favourites were Woolf, Didion, Barthes, Dillard, Malcom & Boyer. Oh—and his opening sentence, which lasts two and half pages!
-
“I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.”
“(Is that what I've been trying to do with all of these sentences? To read them in slow motion?…)”
“What have we got but our phrases, piling up?”
“Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same, of the same cries that is, compounded, and spoken at the last, in extremis, or another sort of beast entirely, whose unmeaning cry is just an overture, before the sentence sets in distinguished motion its several parallel clauses, as though it were a creature with at least four legs ("Every sentence was once an animal, says Emerson), so slowly but deliberately intent on its progress, so stately in its procession, so lavish in attention to the world it passes through, so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn, that—what? here already the sentence swerves, and although you are sure you've caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you, as if the animal in question were squirming or shaking itself loose of your grip, or turning to bite you and then take off, against all entreaties, into a mist of metaphor, where you must follow, closing the gate of this punctuation mark behind you; and on the other side everything is both less certain and suddenly, swimmingly, closer at hand: the sentence stops and looks around and starts comparing itself to the action of a drug, to the light-sucking lens of a camera or the slow apparition of an image (let's say a face) on photographic paper, to festive decorations enchained about a church, or a storm speeding across the lake towards the place where its writer is sitting, or, or, or the sentence, which considers itself very modern, has grown tired of such figural adventures, not to speak of the antiquary's accumulation of clauses and subclauses, so that you start to notice, start to notice certain acts of repetition (Repetition. But also. Interruption.) that give the sentence a faceted, crystalline quality it will always ever after possess, whether it wants to talk about sickness and health, about the sunlight outside Rome, a New York afternoon, a white boy who wants to be black, or the disappearing sun in daytime, even if it is short, even if it is long, even (especially) if it still aspires to its old elegance, the lofty periods, the plush vocabulary, on which subject, by the way, the sentence has been taking notes — a sample from the archive: slumgullion, man-drelled, greaved, eidetic, soricine, macula, fimmering, glop, exorb, chthonic, brumous, moil, ort, flygolding, chlamys — and keeping tabs, in case these riches come in useful, because who can say what the sentence will need or want in the future, what expansions or contractions it may endure or enjoy, what knowledge need to muster and deploy, whose speech to steal and celebrate, where to be heard the rhythms it needs to live, to live and let slip your overly attentive attention, interesting itself in things and bodies and abstractions that you no longer recognize and whose names and outlines you will have to entrust to the slippery sentence itself, which it turns out knows more than you do, knows when to seize on and worry the world and when to let go, as it's doing now, and go skittering away from you (its maker not its keeper), beating the bounds of its invisible domain.”
Favourites were Woolf, Didion, Barthes, Dillard, Malcom & Boyer. Oh—and his opening sentence, which lasts two and half pages!
-
“I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.”
“(Is that what I've been trying to do with all of these sentences? To read them in slow motion?…)”
“What have we got but our phrases, piling up?”
“Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same, of the same cries that is, compounded, and spoken at the last, in extremis, or another sort of beast entirely, whose unmeaning cry is just an overture, before the sentence sets in distinguished motion its several parallel clauses, as though it were a creature with at least four legs ("Every sentence was once an animal, says Emerson), so slowly but deliberately intent on its progress, so stately in its procession, so lavish in attention to the world it passes through, so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn, that—what? here already the sentence swerves, and although you are sure you've caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you, as if the animal in question were squirming or shaking itself loose of your grip, or turning to bite you and then take off, against all entreaties, into a mist of metaphor, where you must follow, closing the gate of this punctuation mark behind you; and on the other side everything is both less certain and suddenly, swimmingly, closer at hand: the sentence stops and looks around and starts comparing itself to the action of a drug, to the light-sucking lens of a camera or the slow apparition of an image (let's say a face) on photographic paper, to festive decorations enchained about a church, or a storm speeding across the lake towards the place where its writer is sitting, or, or, or the sentence, which considers itself very modern, has grown tired of such figural adventures, not to speak of the antiquary's accumulation of clauses and subclauses, so that you start to notice, start to notice certain acts of repetition (Repetition. But also. Interruption.) that give the sentence a faceted, crystalline quality it will always ever after possess, whether it wants to talk about sickness and health, about the sunlight outside Rome, a New York afternoon, a white boy who wants to be black, or the disappearing sun in daytime, even if it is short, even if it is long, even (especially) if it still aspires to its old elegance, the lofty periods, the plush vocabulary, on which subject, by the way, the sentence has been taking notes — a sample from the archive: slumgullion, man-drelled, greaved, eidetic, soricine, macula, fimmering, glop, exorb, chthonic, brumous, moil, ort, flygolding, chlamys — and keeping tabs, in case these riches come in useful, because who can say what the sentence will need or want in the future, what expansions or contractions it may endure or enjoy, what knowledge need to muster and deploy, whose speech to steal and celebrate, where to be heard the rhythms it needs to live, to live and let slip your overly attentive attention, interesting itself in things and bodies and abstractions that you no longer recognize and whose names and outlines you will have to entrust to the slippery sentence itself, which it turns out knows more than you do, knows when to seize on and worry the world and when to let go, as it's doing now, and go skittering away from you (its maker not its keeper), beating the bounds of its invisible domain.”
newishpuritan's review
4.0
This is as smart, astute, attentive and knowledgeable as one could wish for, but I discovered in reading it that I am not the target audience: I don't believe that the sentence is where the real work of a novel takes place. There's a reason why the structural edit comes before the copy edit. And many very good novels barely contain a sentence of the kind baroquely anatomised here: Philip K Dick springs to mind.