Essays, literary criticism

Argumentative, discursive, literate and sensitive analyses of writers’ sentences. This book helps the reader’s attention focus on how a sentence is constructed, whilst employing language that allows the reader to also reflect on the essay writer’s words in themselves. The whole is somewhat refined, reflexive and self aware.
In the right mood, or spirit, this is a bracing reminder for close and careful reading.
Without sympathy, the book might read as pretentious twaddle.
Enjoy!

The selection of sentences, of course, also creates a to be read list. As another reviewer has commented, this may create more a list of essayists, than novelists, but in an essay the writer has less need to ensure narrative drive, perhaps, and so time for reflection. ( )

It’s not unusual for writers to become entranced with, enthused by, enamoured of the sentences of other writers. For years, Brian Dillon wrote out sentences that caught his eye in the backs of notebooks. Then, as a project, he sifted through these sentences, selecting his favourites, and tasking himself with writing an essay provoked by each sentence. Some of these essays focused on the grammatical structure of the sentence. Some focused on the unusual word choices. Some spun off into flights of imagination about the writer, their life, their other sentences, their many other sentences, their oeuvre. Some fixated on the colons, the semi-colons, the commas. 28 essays in total. A feast of sentences. And some of the loveliest writing about prose styling that you could hope for.

Many, indeed most, of these sentences may not be familiar to you. I had encountered very few of them in prior reading. Yet Dillon’s enthusiasm for the sentence itself and its place within its text, or wider place within the writer’s larger output is infectious. However, I wonder whether I’ll bother going on to follow these up. Unlike other enthusiasts of sentences (yes, the phenomenon is not unique), Dillon doesn’t really lead you past his own essays. Much as I admired his writing, it didn’t draw me to the writers he discussed. I wonder why that was. Perhaps his choices were so singular, so niche, that they never rose above his own prose, his own idiosyncratic engagement with his targets. For example, when he discusses Roland Barthes colons, his own essay (and indeed his essays thereafter) take on a preponderance of colons. His enthusiasm for the sentence fragment tends him towards fragmentary sentences of his own. The close reading of linguistic tics, leads the reader to spot Dillon’s own tics, (eg. “For sure,…”).

I enjoyed all of these essays but rather wish that Dillon were more enamoured with more of the sentences of fiction than of non-fiction. The stylings of essayists can be a delight, and perhaps it is a special delight for a renowned essayist, but it doesn’t always draw me in. And so I’d have to say that I’m probably not the ideal reader of this collection (though I suspect my wife might be).

And thus, only gently recommended (at least by me). ( )