I’ve had this book with me for a while, and so I thought it was time to read it.
When he was reading a book and he discovered a beautiful sentence, or a beautiful passage, Brian Dillon copied it out in his diary. Across the years, these diaries filled with his favourite sentences accumulated on his bookshelves. One day he decided to pick twenty-five of those sentences, write an essay about each of them, and put those essays together into a book. And that is how ‘Suppose a Sentence‘ came into being.
The central idea behind the book is very attractive. What can be better than seeing a fellow reader take out his favourite sentences and share his thoughts on them? That is the reason that pulled me towards this book. And I think that is the reason that pulled many readers towards this book.
Of course, in these parts, we have this famous sentence. And it is time for me to say that. It is this. There is good news and bad news.
The good news is this. There are twenty-seven essays, two more than what we thought. Brian Dillon covers old authors from previous centuries like Shakespeare and Thomas De Quincey, and authors from the twentieth century like Elizabeth Hardwick, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Hilary Mantel, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and many others. Dillon has put in a lot of effort into unpacking each sentence, looking at it grammatically and stylistically, and trying to excavate its meaning, both the said and the unsaid, and trying to investigate why the sentence is beautiful. All good things.
Now the bad news. Most of the sentences didn’t do much for me. Standing on their own, without Dillon’s analysis, they didn’t look beautiful. I liked some of them, for example Annie Dillard’s and Janet Malcolm’s sentences, but in general, the included sentences didn’t create a big impression on me. I felt that Brian Dillon was paying homage to his favourite writers, many of them influential ones who wrote for The New Yorker or similar magazines, rather than picking beautiful sentences and sharing his thoughts on why he liked them. I also felt that that the analysis was overdone. It was like trying to explain a joke, or analyzing a beautiful song. If you do it a bit too much, you can’t see the beauty anymore. It is a tricky thing. How do you share your thoughts on your beautiful sentences? Especially on why you liked them? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I feel that Brian Dillon’s way of doing it didn’t work for me.
Others have raved about the book. They’ve said that it is amazing. Maybe it is. It is probably written for the intelligent reader, for the literary critic, for the literary scholar. I am a reader who reads for pleasure, and this book was probably not written for me.
So, after such high expectations, I found that this book was underwhelming. But don’t let that discourage you. If you like literary criticism type of analysis, you might like this book. Brian Dillon has written other books, one on essays (similar to this one, but on essays), a book which is like a memoir, and another on nine people. I’m thinking that I’ll try the memoir book sometime, because it is maybe more up my alley.
Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.
“This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt : the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.”
– Annie Dillard
“A slight sense of quotation marks hovers in the air but it is very slight – it may not even be there – and it doesn’t dispel the atmosphere of dead-serious connoisseurship by which the room is dominated.”
– Janet Malcolm
“When you travel, Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, the first lesson you learn is that you do not exist. It’s a fearful lesson to have to learn at home, or rather in the city you are still hoping is home…”
“As I write, I’m two-thirds of the way through ‘A Time in Rome’, which she published in 1960, and I think I have found, again, a writer after my heart. How many times does it happen, dare it happen, in a life of reading? A dozen, maybe? There is a difference between the writers you can read and admire all your life, and the others, the voices for whom you feel some more intimate affinity.”
Have you read ‘Suppose a Sentence’? What do you think about it?
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