By Brian Dillon
I read this over a week or so at the start of September 2024.
It’s a Fitzcarraldo white, and so you immediately know it has a certain style to it; not the surface style of the sentences, but a certain literary worldview behind it.
I really loved it. It’s an effort to read, every page dense with complex clauses and branches, left and right and orthogonal, allusions, metaphors for weeks, loopbacks to the clauses, wrinkled rhetorical devices roving and roaring their presence, punctuation - though I am partial to a set of commas, arranged, like a tasting menu - all superposing and layering to a rich, thick book that one feels as though one could sink their teeth into and still be picking gestalts and English departments out of one’s teeth for long afterwards.
(Sorry).
The conceit is that Dillon takes a set of sentences that he has noted down over the years, and explores each one, illuminating the history, context, and architecture of each. It’s really lovely; the characterisations of each of the authors tend to full biographies sometimes, and all are brought to life; but the best part for me was always the analysis - grammatical, syntactical, semantic, plus many others (the guy’s vocabulary astounds, I haven’t had to Google or elide this many words in ages).
He writes astonishingly well. It must have taken years to make this book. I want to someday be able to convey this level of erudition, sophistication, and recursive inspection in my writing as well.
My absolute favourite part was the first page, reproduced below, but there were a ton of wonderful passages that I bookmarked.
“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 its 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 a 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 day time, 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, mandrelled, greaved, eidetic, soricine, macula, flimmering, glop, exorb, chthonic, brumous, moil, ort, flygolding, chlamys—and keeping tabs, in case these riches come in useful, because who can say what th 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 recognise 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 left go, as it’s doing now, and go skittering away from you (its maker not its keeper), beating the bounds of its invisible domain.”