What do you think?
Rate this book
Suppose a Sentence
Suppose a Sentence is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature, widely conceived. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects - from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.
192 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 2020
164 people are currently reading
3554 people want to read
About the author
Brian Dillon
81 books207 followersBRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin 2005).
His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.
His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
Read
May 14, 2021While reading this book, I 'supposed' (in the sense of 'imagined') an exhibition, each brief chapter an individual display case in which a single sentence by a particular writer lay in splendor on a raised support. Around it were displayed other sentences by the featured writer, along with the paragraph from which the spot-lit sentence had been taken (for which I was very grateful). On the information card accompanying the exhibit were further sentences, this time by Brian Dillon. If I simply read the spot-lit sentence and passed on to the next display case, I'd have an interesting day out—but taking my time in front of each exhibit, and reading the attached information, resulted in, o, o, o, o, what to call it...yes! Reader heaven.
Many writers I'm familiar with were featured, and the few names that were new to me were journalists, though equally skilled at supposing a fine sentence. And in case you might think that this book is about 'beautiful' sentences, or about showing you how to write such a thing, Brian Dillon insists that the sentences he focusses his spotlight on have been chosen for their ability to open under my gaze, not preserve or project their perfection. Brian Dillon's gaze is surely a powerful one, for the sentences did indeed open up, and not only for him but for me too as I followed happily the many directions towards which his incisive gaze led him.
When Dillon 'supposes' a sentence, he seems to be using the word 'suppose' in Gertrude Stein's sense of the word—she features in one of the chapters—i.e., 'diagramming' or discovering the sentence in all its aspects; both a measuring of its atmosphere, as it were, and a mapping of the trajectory of its course: how it moves, how it uses commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons; and finally, the world of meaning to which the strung-together fragments lead the reader. Without Dillon's guidance I might not have found the meaning in some of the chosen sentences, and certainly not in the case of Gertrude Stein. I'd have admired those ambiguous sentences but would not have figured out what made them work. This one, for instance, from Elizabeth Hardwick: In her presence on these tranquil nights it was possible to experience the depths of her disbelief, to feel sometimes the mean, horrible freedom of a thorough suspicion of destiny. What Dillon 'discovered' in that sentence caused me to pick out Hardwick's Sleepless Nights from the bottom of a pile where it had been relegated due to a 'thorough suspicion' that it was difficult. I've already started reading it and it is proving to be an entire series of ponderful sentences—which reminds me to mention Dillon's chapter on Claire Louise Bennett's Pond, where he talks of the 'headlong' and 'imaginative' trajectories of her unusual sentences in a way that made me want to dive back into that book.
I would like to talk about the other familiar and much loved writers featured in Dillon's collection, writers such as Thomas de Quincey, George Eliot, Maeve Brennan, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Joan Didion, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilary Mantel, but I'll limit myself to mentioning Dillon's take on Elizabeth Bowen, and in particular the tendency of her sentences to 'jar' and 'jangle', something which her editors were unhappy about but which Dillon admires. I'm in Dillon's camp—that tendency was a feature of her writing I had noticed with pleasure when I read her; it paralleled the psychological states of her characters and added layers to my understanding.
Dillon's selection of sentences begins and ends, not with a sentence but with a phrase: 'O, o, o, o.' The little phrase carries so much meaning whether uttered by Shakespearean characters in the first chapter or by an anonymous little girl in the last, who, it is said, wishing to write before she could read, scratched the letter O many times on her paper. Rousseau dismissed her efforts, but Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Boyer and Brian Dillon all agree that the letter O, when one's imagination is at play, can encompass the whole world. As can the word 'suppOse', now that I come to think of it...
Many writers I'm familiar with were featured, and the few names that were new to me were journalists, though equally skilled at supposing a fine sentence. And in case you might think that this book is about 'beautiful' sentences, or about showing you how to write such a thing, Brian Dillon insists that the sentences he focusses his spotlight on have been chosen for their ability to open under my gaze, not preserve or project their perfection. Brian Dillon's gaze is surely a powerful one, for the sentences did indeed open up, and not only for him but for me too as I followed happily the many directions towards which his incisive gaze led him.
When Dillon 'supposes' a sentence, he seems to be using the word 'suppose' in Gertrude Stein's sense of the word—she features in one of the chapters—i.e., 'diagramming' or discovering the sentence in all its aspects; both a measuring of its atmosphere, as it were, and a mapping of the trajectory of its course: how it moves, how it uses commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons; and finally, the world of meaning to which the strung-together fragments lead the reader. Without Dillon's guidance I might not have found the meaning in some of the chosen sentences, and certainly not in the case of Gertrude Stein. I'd have admired those ambiguous sentences but would not have figured out what made them work. This one, for instance, from Elizabeth Hardwick: In her presence on these tranquil nights it was possible to experience the depths of her disbelief, to feel sometimes the mean, horrible freedom of a thorough suspicion of destiny. What Dillon 'discovered' in that sentence caused me to pick out Hardwick's Sleepless Nights from the bottom of a pile where it had been relegated due to a 'thorough suspicion' that it was difficult. I've already started reading it and it is proving to be an entire series of ponderful sentences—which reminds me to mention Dillon's chapter on Claire Louise Bennett's Pond, where he talks of the 'headlong' and 'imaginative' trajectories of her unusual sentences in a way that made me want to dive back into that book.
I would like to talk about the other familiar and much loved writers featured in Dillon's collection, writers such as Thomas de Quincey, George Eliot, Maeve Brennan, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Joan Didion, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilary Mantel, but I'll limit myself to mentioning Dillon's take on Elizabeth Bowen, and in particular the tendency of her sentences to 'jar' and 'jangle', something which her editors were unhappy about but which Dillon admires. I'm in Dillon's camp—that tendency was a feature of her writing I had noticed with pleasure when I read her; it paralleled the psychological states of her characters and added layers to my understanding.
Dillon's selection of sentences begins and ends, not with a sentence but with a phrase: 'O, o, o, o.' The little phrase carries so much meaning whether uttered by Shakespearean characters in the first chapter or by an anonymous little girl in the last, who, it is said, wishing to write before she could read, scratched the letter O many times on her paper. Rousseau dismissed her efforts, but Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Boyer and Brian Dillon all agree that the letter O, when one's imagination is at play, can encompass the whole world. As can the word 'suppOse', now that I come to think of it...
August 22, 2020
I really, really like this joyful, varied look at 27 sentences by 27 writers, ranging from De Quincey to Baldwin to Jaeggy and beyond. Dillon takes a different approach with each essay, and often provides a bit of biography as well, so it's educational beyond the craft level. Recommended
July 1, 2021
Literature analysis wonks only.
A lovely review tempted me, but alas, this only lives up to its premise if one is well-versed in All The Writers. I thought perhaps it would contain sentence construction deconstruction (parse that, if you will), which I could still relate to, or meditate on life (as good literature does). I confess, I also hoped to find certain sentences inspiring, a sort of literary chapbook by someone widely read. However, I found most of it largely uninteresting and unrelatable, relying on references to classical writers and engaging largely in literary criticism and contemplation over the personal.
It begins with Shakespeare, an amusing but slight paragraph-long piece. The sentence: "O, o, o, o." What are they telling us, these four diminishing 'O's? (Or is it five? The full stop, you might say, is the last and smallest circle.)
I read the James Baldwin one--he of absolutely sublime deep thinking on identity and love--and this is what Dillon chose: "They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic." He then proceeds to talk largely about Norman Mailer's piece, "The White Negro," compare when the two authors have met, and then go into 'ofay,' a word that might be used to "describes a particular kind of white desire to condescend and become otherwise, to inhabit Afro-American culture, if only as hipster spectator."
The Susan Sontag one also disappoints. "I took a trip to see the beautiful things." Following that intriguing quote is essentially an essay comparing whether or not Sontag superseded Donald Barthelme, another writer. It then segues into the tone of the piece and how it's similar to her non-fiction writing, and then the final two pages are devoted to analysis of the film it appears in.
Virginia Wolf was more of what I expected. The sentence he uses is 181 words, from the opening of "On Being Ill," written in 1926, so I won't quote it here. Here, finally, was the sort of deconstruction I imagined: "Seven times--four hows and three whats--the sentence invites us to anticipate a logically and artistically satisfying terminus. With the final 'how' we may reasonably expect that the grammatical, argumentative, and symbolic denouement is just around the comma-swivelling corner. Instead, we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hink, for what seems an age, that our destination is the dentist's chair... The sentence has allured us a long way, but I'm not certain I follow, not even sure that 'this' consists of, never mind the 'infinitely more.'"
Fluer Jaeggy, who I don't know at all: "Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust." begins promisingly enough, with Dillon briefly reflecting on a distaste for verb-less sentence fragments. Unfortunately, the quote comes from Jaeggy's description of Thomas DeQuincey's writing (note including of DeQuincey in an earlier essay), and Dillon spends the rest of the piece analyzing Jaeggy's discussion of DeQuincey (talk about navel-gazing) except for a final two paragraphs wondering about the meaning of the sentence and so he returns to the original Italian to translate. A fascinating idea! "Paper storage' is a curious choice on the translator's part, because the phrase depositi cartacei (literally paper deposits) suggests a kind of bureaucratic or legal deposition, an official amassing--and it refers to the things themselves, not to the action of their archiving or the space in which they're placed."
Ultimately, this was like sifting panning for gold-leaf, sifting through convoluted and chewy sentences in order to find little bits of sparkle. If your reading background contains a wealth of pre-20th century works, you might be better served than I.
Essays containing sentences from: Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Roland Barthes, Whitney Balliett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Janet Malcolm, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilary Mantel, Claire-Louise Bennett, Anne Carson, Anne Boyer.
A lovely review tempted me, but alas, this only lives up to its premise if one is well-versed in All The Writers. I thought perhaps it would contain sentence construction deconstruction (parse that, if you will), which I could still relate to, or meditate on life (as good literature does). I confess, I also hoped to find certain sentences inspiring, a sort of literary chapbook by someone widely read. However, I found most of it largely uninteresting and unrelatable, relying on references to classical writers and engaging largely in literary criticism and contemplation over the personal.
It begins with Shakespeare, an amusing but slight paragraph-long piece. The sentence: "O, o, o, o." What are they telling us, these four diminishing 'O's? (Or is it five? The full stop, you might say, is the last and smallest circle.)
I read the James Baldwin one--he of absolutely sublime deep thinking on identity and love--and this is what Dillon chose: "They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic." He then proceeds to talk largely about Norman Mailer's piece, "The White Negro," compare when the two authors have met, and then go into 'ofay,' a word that might be used to "describes a particular kind of white desire to condescend and become otherwise, to inhabit Afro-American culture, if only as hipster spectator."
The Susan Sontag one also disappoints. "I took a trip to see the beautiful things." Following that intriguing quote is essentially an essay comparing whether or not Sontag superseded Donald Barthelme, another writer. It then segues into the tone of the piece and how it's similar to her non-fiction writing, and then the final two pages are devoted to analysis of the film it appears in.
Virginia Wolf was more of what I expected. The sentence he uses is 181 words, from the opening of "On Being Ill," written in 1926, so I won't quote it here. Here, finally, was the sort of deconstruction I imagined: "Seven times--four hows and three whats--the sentence invites us to anticipate a logically and artistically satisfying terminus. With the final 'how' we may reasonably expect that the grammatical, argumentative, and symbolic denouement is just around the comma-swivelling corner. Instead, we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hink, for what seems an age, that our destination is the dentist's chair... The sentence has allured us a long way, but I'm not certain I follow, not even sure that 'this' consists of, never mind the 'infinitely more.'"
Fluer Jaeggy, who I don't know at all: "Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust." begins promisingly enough, with Dillon briefly reflecting on a distaste for verb-less sentence fragments. Unfortunately, the quote comes from Jaeggy's description of Thomas DeQuincey's writing (note including of DeQuincey in an earlier essay), and Dillon spends the rest of the piece analyzing Jaeggy's discussion of DeQuincey (talk about navel-gazing) except for a final two paragraphs wondering about the meaning of the sentence and so he returns to the original Italian to translate. A fascinating idea! "Paper storage' is a curious choice on the translator's part, because the phrase depositi cartacei (literally paper deposits) suggests a kind of bureaucratic or legal deposition, an official amassing--and it refers to the things themselves, not to the action of their archiving or the space in which they're placed."
Ultimately, this was like sifting panning for gold-leaf, sifting through convoluted and chewy sentences in order to find little bits of sparkle. If your reading background contains a wealth of pre-20th century works, you might be better served than I.
Essays containing sentences from: Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Roland Barthes, Whitney Balliett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Janet Malcolm, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilary Mantel, Claire-Louise Bennett, Anne Carson, Anne Boyer.
August 20, 2021
How To Become Holy
Brian Dillon has done for the secular what scholars of the sacred call ‘exegesis,’ that is, the meticulous investigation of single sentences (biblical people call them verses; theology students refer to gobbets). Who wrote? Why was it written? How has what was written been interpreted by others? Are there other versions of what was written? How does what was written compare with other writing before and after? Etc.
Exegetes, in other words, squeeze their literary objects by making as many interpretations and connections that they can imagine until the objects yield a meaning, a moral, a truth that was lying hidden in plain sight. They are never satisfied with the obvious, the surface meaning. They search for allusions and subtle uses of style, vocabulary and grammatical nuance.
This is what Dillon does in his analysis of twenty-seven more or less random sentences that appealed to him aesthetically at some time in his reading history. He contemplates them as intently as a biblical scholar. He makes them say things that haven’t been said before.
Dillon’s use of exegesis has an interesting effect which I don’t think even he anticipated. It turns the secular texts he has chosen into sacred objects. Their importance lies not in what they say literally but in what they connect or point to beyond the words used. They become a kind of poetry simply by being treated as independent linguistic objects, hieroglyphs perhaps, whose significance must be discovered not casually presumed.
It strikes me that this very well could be how all sentences considered sacred got that way - for one reason or another (perhaps their inherent beauty) they attracted, no demanded, attention and consideration. If so, all sentences are potentially sacred. The ones already so designated are merely conventional. Perhaps this is a general conclusion of my cursory exegesis of Suppose A Sentence, and a reason for the book itself.
Brian Dillon has done for the secular what scholars of the sacred call ‘exegesis,’ that is, the meticulous investigation of single sentences (biblical people call them verses; theology students refer to gobbets). Who wrote? Why was it written? How has what was written been interpreted by others? Are there other versions of what was written? How does what was written compare with other writing before and after? Etc.
Exegetes, in other words, squeeze their literary objects by making as many interpretations and connections that they can imagine until the objects yield a meaning, a moral, a truth that was lying hidden in plain sight. They are never satisfied with the obvious, the surface meaning. They search for allusions and subtle uses of style, vocabulary and grammatical nuance.
This is what Dillon does in his analysis of twenty-seven more or less random sentences that appealed to him aesthetically at some time in his reading history. He contemplates them as intently as a biblical scholar. He makes them say things that haven’t been said before.
Dillon’s use of exegesis has an interesting effect which I don’t think even he anticipated. It turns the secular texts he has chosen into sacred objects. Their importance lies not in what they say literally but in what they connect or point to beyond the words used. They become a kind of poetry simply by being treated as independent linguistic objects, hieroglyphs perhaps, whose significance must be discovered not casually presumed.
It strikes me that this very well could be how all sentences considered sacred got that way - for one reason or another (perhaps their inherent beauty) they attracted, no demanded, attention and consideration. If so, all sentences are potentially sacred. The ones already so designated are merely conventional. Perhaps this is a general conclusion of my cursory exegesis of Suppose A Sentence, and a reason for the book itself.
February 19, 2021
I love reading about this kind of stuff and I would’ve been happy to have the book continue with a new entry every single day. Of course, I didn’t always agree with Dillon’s interpretations, but even he didn’t agree with all of his interpretations. I wasn’t familiar with all of the writers and/or their works he’s chosen, but that’s more than okay.
Thanks to Tony for my awareness of this singular book and I point you to his review for a proper understanding. Instead of asking for your favorite sentences like Tony did (though that was a fun exercise), I leave you with my favorite Dillon sentences.
From the chapter “O Altitudo (Sir Thomas Browne)”:
Sentences that live on—deathless—for every sentence written is a sort of ghost—in the face of universal forgetting:
Technically what I’ve quoted above isn’t a sentence as I’ve left out what follows Dillon’s colon, a sentence of Browne’s, which also uses a colon. Dillon seems to like colons (as do I) and points out when and how they balance a sentence, though the focus of his essays isn’t necessarily on punctuation.
From the chapter “Suppose a Sentence (Gertrude Stein)”:
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.
From the chapter “Splinters of Actuality (Elizabeth Bowen)”:
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.
Thanks to Tony for my awareness of this singular book and I point you to his review for a proper understanding. Instead of asking for your favorite sentences like Tony did (though that was a fun exercise), I leave you with my favorite Dillon sentences.
From the chapter “O Altitudo (Sir Thomas Browne)”:
Sentences that live on—deathless—for every sentence written is a sort of ghost—in the face of universal forgetting:
Technically what I’ve quoted above isn’t a sentence as I’ve left out what follows Dillon’s colon, a sentence of Browne’s, which also uses a colon. Dillon seems to like colons (as do I) and points out when and how they balance a sentence, though the focus of his essays isn’t necessarily on punctuation.
From the chapter “Suppose a Sentence (Gertrude Stein)”:
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.
From the chapter “Splinters of Actuality (Elizabeth Bowen)”:
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.
June 2, 2021
55th book of 2021.
Since returning from university my mother has taken it upon herself to install a good amount of mocking towards me. It is always good-natured and met with laughter. I said to her on Wednesday, “I am going to the library now to pick up my reservation. A book about sentences! Sentence structures! I’m sadly excited.” She said to me, “Why don’t you go out and tell the builders?” (The “builders” are not abstract—we have 2 builders currently working on my parents’ garden, for the first time in about 27 years.) Since the builders have been floating about in the garden with giant power-tools, my mother has been mocking me on my creative…sensibility. I work most days at the school from 4 o’clock so the builders (who wrap-up around 3) see me floating around, in turn, in the kitchen with a book making toast and tea most mornings. This is already funny as the joke of the family is that I am perceived by all as the famous “lay-about”. It’s a joke of course but all jokes contain half-truths. This isn’t a pity-paragraph though. So, yes, Wednesday morning I expressed my excitement about reading a book on how to construct a sentence, my mother thought it a funny image to imagine me wandering out and telling the builders as they wielded jackhammers about the book I was actually excited to read. A book all about sentences.
Distilled down to two words, this collection of essays hops between the critical and the personal in a fine, witty, generous balance. It isn't so much a How To Write Better Sentences but more a Appreciation of Beautiful Sentences; Dillon begins the collection with a "preface" that outlines his addiction (addiction?) to sentences. He writes,
I considered such a selection of essays without Joyce, Proust, Nabokov and Sebald as a crime, but Dillon changed my mind. No crime, only, originality. I was expecting to read sentences from the aforementioned and so when I was confronted with otherwise, I was pleasantly surprised. Ordered chronologically by the time the writer was writing, these are the writers addressed by Dillon. There are 27 sentences total.
Within the essays are tiny snippets of auto-fiction (where they apply, though, I believe auto-fiction naturally applies at every turn when discussing any form of literature. How can it not?), deconstructions of the sentences used, of course, also snippets of biography, musings on the writers themselves/their work in general, etc. Some essays are fairly long, some are only several pages. The first, for example, on Shakespeare, is only a single page and the chosen sentence is simply:
Enter Dillon's mind and wit.
The essay on Eliot is a stand-out for me, one of the most realised essays in the collection, on a particular sentence from Middlemarch. No essay is particularly weak. They all have various flavours, but maintain Dillon's voice, which is gentle and intelligent, the best sort of person to be caught beside a fireplace with at a party. Funnily enough, I've often wondered if these warm, interesting people truly exist in real-life. Is it that they only appear on the page, and that we only find what they are saying when it is measured, edited? Beside-fireplace-conversations are rarely as astute. (The fireplace is a strange example I've adopted, but I will maintain it. Actually, thinking about being caught in conversation, the one that springs most readily to mind is at my friend's mother's wake, being caught with an old neighbour, who, for some strange reason, insisted on talking to me at great length about Pablo Escobar. This was not beside a fireplace, but instead, beside the sad table littered with triangular sandwiches of bland filling—ham, cucumber, cheese.)
A collection for real nerds of literature/writing/grammar. I imagine most people would find the contents "dry", but if this is your field of interest then you will find it enlightening. Well worth the read. Dillon had me returning to my own favourite sentences—one being from Proust—yes Proust!—and tempting me to do the same as he has done for years, writing all favourite sentences in notebooks. The problem is, I'm lazy. Though, on the upside, Goodreads is a less-romantic, less-traditional, way of inscribing favourite sentences. That'll probably have to do for me. And besides, we have intelligent and helpful writers like Dillon showing us their favourites sentences, which, in turn, helps us consider our favourites, and perhaps might inspire us to be slightly less lazy, though, really, that's quite unlikely.
Since returning from university my mother has taken it upon herself to install a good amount of mocking towards me. It is always good-natured and met with laughter. I said to her on Wednesday, “I am going to the library now to pick up my reservation. A book about sentences! Sentence structures! I’m sadly excited.” She said to me, “Why don’t you go out and tell the builders?” (The “builders” are not abstract—we have 2 builders currently working on my parents’ garden, for the first time in about 27 years.) Since the builders have been floating about in the garden with giant power-tools, my mother has been mocking me on my creative…sensibility. I work most days at the school from 4 o’clock so the builders (who wrap-up around 3) see me floating around, in turn, in the kitchen with a book making toast and tea most mornings. This is already funny as the joke of the family is that I am perceived by all as the famous “lay-about”. It’s a joke of course but all jokes contain half-truths. This isn’t a pity-paragraph though. So, yes, Wednesday morning I expressed my excitement about reading a book on how to construct a sentence, my mother thought it a funny image to imagine me wandering out and telling the builders as they wielded jackhammers about the book I was actually excited to read. A book all about sentences.
Distilled down to two words, this collection of essays hops between the critical and the personal in a fine, witty, generous balance. It isn't so much a How To Write Better Sentences but more a Appreciation of Beautiful Sentences; Dillon begins the collection with a "preface" that outlines his addiction (addiction?) to sentences. He writes,
To my surprise, there are no sentences here from Robert Burton, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, James Joyce, W.G. Sebald, no John Ashbery (I have neglected, but not completely, the sentence in poetry). No Proust—no Proust!
I considered such a selection of essays without Joyce, Proust, Nabokov and Sebald as a crime, but Dillon changed my mind. No crime, only, originality. I was expecting to read sentences from the aforementioned and so when I was confronted with otherwise, I was pleasantly surprised. Ordered chronologically by the time the writer was writing, these are the writers addressed by Dillon. There are 27 sentences total.
William Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Roland Barthes, Whitney Balliett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Janet Malcolm, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilary Mantel, Claire-Louse Bennett, Anne Carson, Anne Boyer.
Within the essays are tiny snippets of auto-fiction (where they apply, though, I believe auto-fiction naturally applies at every turn when discussing any form of literature. How can it not?), deconstructions of the sentences used, of course, also snippets of biography, musings on the writers themselves/their work in general, etc. Some essays are fairly long, some are only several pages. The first, for example, on Shakespeare, is only a single page and the chosen sentence is simply:
'O, o, o, o.'
Enter Dillon's mind and wit.
The essay on Eliot is a stand-out for me, one of the most realised essays in the collection, on a particular sentence from Middlemarch. No essay is particularly weak. They all have various flavours, but maintain Dillon's voice, which is gentle and intelligent, the best sort of person to be caught beside a fireplace with at a party. Funnily enough, I've often wondered if these warm, interesting people truly exist in real-life. Is it that they only appear on the page, and that we only find what they are saying when it is measured, edited? Beside-fireplace-conversations are rarely as astute. (The fireplace is a strange example I've adopted, but I will maintain it. Actually, thinking about being caught in conversation, the one that springs most readily to mind is at my friend's mother's wake, being caught with an old neighbour, who, for some strange reason, insisted on talking to me at great length about Pablo Escobar. This was not beside a fireplace, but instead, beside the sad table littered with triangular sandwiches of bland filling—ham, cucumber, cheese.)
A collection for real nerds of literature/writing/grammar. I imagine most people would find the contents "dry", but if this is your field of interest then you will find it enlightening. Well worth the read. Dillon had me returning to my own favourite sentences—one being from Proust—yes Proust!—and tempting me to do the same as he has done for years, writing all favourite sentences in notebooks. The problem is, I'm lazy. Though, on the upside, Goodreads is a less-romantic, less-traditional, way of inscribing favourite sentences. That'll probably have to do for me. And besides, we have intelligent and helpful writers like Dillon showing us their favourites sentences, which, in turn, helps us consider our favourites, and perhaps might inspire us to be slightly less lazy, though, really, that's quite unlikely.
January 15, 2021
For some of us, reading is like breathing, a constant and almost unconscious part of our existence, until we are startled alert, as if by some literary apnea, the cause a just-right word, a well-turned phrase, a perfect sentence . . . yes; suppose a sentence.
Suppose a sentence . . .
Those three words start a poem by Gertrude Stein, a poem included here, but not one I fancied. Still, the words form the perfect title for this perfect little book. The author, an Irish writer, has taken twenty-seven sentences – from books and plays and essays – and then tells us why he loves them. Oh, he gets around to placing them in context, to explaining them, sometimes correcting them, but mostly he means to say why they are special, at least to him. You really couldn’t undertake a more subjective exercise. Pick twenty-five sentences that stand out in a lifetime of reading, and now let’s discuss them. Okay, you answer, but I’ll need two extra ones.
So twenty-seven sentences. Suppose them. The authors of those sentences will sound familiar: Annie Dillard, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Baldwin. Shakespeare gets one. Just one???
I had favorites, of course. This from Maeve Brennan: Singular perspective the lady had as she looked about the room in which nothing was real except her blue eyes. George Eliot wrote this: Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. And my favorite, by Charlotte Brontë: The drug wrought.
Some do need explaining, and the author brings a singular touch to our understanding. Along the way, and not surprisingly, he crafts some fine sentences of his own.* Such as: I would add Poe, Melville and Gass to the list: writers drunk on the almost erotic possibilities of their sentences. Or: The metaphors in Hardwick’s essays are always unusual, which is what one wants from a metaphor. Yet, he startled me awake with a mere phrase, calling a semi-colon a creaky little hinge.
So, I enjoyed this brief scholarly pursuit. But perhaps an unintended consequence was that I concentrated more than usual on my own sentences: how could they be crafted better; and how might they thrill or harm.
Perhaps in lieu of comments, readers of this review could instead offer a sentence that they’ve underlined, memorized or otherwise filed in their reading life. It could be a wonderful stream.
__________
*In his Introduction, the author, no doubt conscious of his task, begins with a 541-word sentence, complete with 5 parentheses, 1 quotation. 2 colons, 1 semi-colon, I question mark, I italicized phrase and 15 italicized words, 68 commas, 3 hyphens, and four periods. Yes, 4 periods in one sentence.
Suppose a sentence . . .
Those three words start a poem by Gertrude Stein, a poem included here, but not one I fancied. Still, the words form the perfect title for this perfect little book. The author, an Irish writer, has taken twenty-seven sentences – from books and plays and essays – and then tells us why he loves them. Oh, he gets around to placing them in context, to explaining them, sometimes correcting them, but mostly he means to say why they are special, at least to him. You really couldn’t undertake a more subjective exercise. Pick twenty-five sentences that stand out in a lifetime of reading, and now let’s discuss them. Okay, you answer, but I’ll need two extra ones.
So twenty-seven sentences. Suppose them. The authors of those sentences will sound familiar: Annie Dillard, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Baldwin. Shakespeare gets one. Just one???
I had favorites, of course. This from Maeve Brennan: Singular perspective the lady had as she looked about the room in which nothing was real except her blue eyes. George Eliot wrote this: Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. And my favorite, by Charlotte Brontë: The drug wrought.
Some do need explaining, and the author brings a singular touch to our understanding. Along the way, and not surprisingly, he crafts some fine sentences of his own.* Such as: I would add Poe, Melville and Gass to the list: writers drunk on the almost erotic possibilities of their sentences. Or: The metaphors in Hardwick’s essays are always unusual, which is what one wants from a metaphor. Yet, he startled me awake with a mere phrase, calling a semi-colon a creaky little hinge.
So, I enjoyed this brief scholarly pursuit. But perhaps an unintended consequence was that I concentrated more than usual on my own sentences: how could they be crafted better; and how might they thrill or harm.
Perhaps in lieu of comments, readers of this review could instead offer a sentence that they’ve underlined, memorized or otherwise filed in their reading life. It could be a wonderful stream.
__________
*In his Introduction, the author, no doubt conscious of his task, begins with a 541-word sentence, complete with 5 parentheses, 1 quotation. 2 colons, 1 semi-colon, I question mark, I italicized phrase and 15 italicized words, 68 commas, 3 hyphens, and four periods. Yes, 4 periods in one sentence.
Read
December 15, 2020This one's strictly for word nerds who can't just read a good (or weird) sentence without stopping for a quick reread or a not-so-quick deep dive. That's just what Brian Dillon does, with varying success, in this collection of 28 essays on 28 sentences.
The book is in chronological order by the writers of the sentences, and many will be familiar: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Thomas DeQuincey, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Hilary Mantel, and Anne Carson.
Then there are the less familiar: Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Whitney Balliett, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Claire-Louise Bennett. At least unfamiliar to me.
Sometimes Dillon marvels because the sentences are so good. Other times he marvels at how "odd" they are, especially grammatically. If you're a prescriptive type, proceed with caution. Dillon seems to thrill at the sight of sentences that dispense with commas where you'd expect to find them. It adds to the interpretative qualities, you see. Grammar mavens will disagree (but that's what grammar mavens do).
Overall, uneven. Some fun essays, some not so much. Picking favorite sentences is personal sport, after all. Check your own collection if it's proof you need.
The book is in chronological order by the writers of the sentences, and many will be familiar: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Thomas DeQuincey, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Hilary Mantel, and Anne Carson.
Then there are the less familiar: Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Whitney Balliett, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Claire-Louise Bennett. At least unfamiliar to me.
Sometimes Dillon marvels because the sentences are so good. Other times he marvels at how "odd" they are, especially grammatically. If you're a prescriptive type, proceed with caution. Dillon seems to thrill at the sight of sentences that dispense with commas where you'd expect to find them. It adds to the interpretative qualities, you see. Grammar mavens will disagree (but that's what grammar mavens do).
Overall, uneven. Some fun essays, some not so much. Picking favorite sentences is personal sport, after all. Check your own collection if it's proof you need.
October 10, 2023
‘—Ruskin’s earlier sentences you can see, or hear, his prose machinery—as he got older his sentences became looser, less fretful to impress by their elaborate self-command. Virginia Woolf once wrote about him: “We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure.” —fountains have been set to send out a more violent spray, or someone has introduced a foaming agent into the pools below. (Anne Carson: “Foam is the sign of an artist who has sunk his hands into his own story, and also of a critic storming and raging in his own deep theory.”)’
Overall, brilliantly written, but I’d argue that one’s reaction to Dillon’s collection of essays , or rather – level of (bibliophilic?) ‘enjoyment’ would depend on how much each of those mentioned work/writers interest one. I like some more than the others, as is to be expected. And admittedly, my expectations for this collection were quite high (for several reasons). Perhaps I should’ve started with Affinities: On Art and Fascination, which I’m still keen to read. But in any case, thanks for reminding me to (re)read those other books, I suppose?
‘Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, building her prose like a shiny carapace, easy to admire and hard to crack if you’re hoping to emulate it. At the same time, she has a reputation for being, on the page and in person, brittle and neurasthenic, spectral and barely there. None of this adequately describes her prose. It is usually direct and declarative, it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions, there is a wealth of concrete detail. Irony in her work consists largely of the plain statement of such detail, inflected by the innocent, mad or bad-faith language of the people or institutions she is writing about. Sometimes she leaves this plane for another, more abstracted or metaphorical, gothic even.’
‘“Happy but anomalous coexistence”—“happy” here means apt, fortunate and pleasing, rather than pleased, or (nearly vanished sense) happenstance. I like the way this third term in the sentence’s brief inventory—the most concrete term, but not so very concrete—has been elongated, allowed to spread itself around. The absence of stricturing commas around “but anomalous” is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion: in its rhythm, care and thrift, then also in the swerve towards something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work in the house. Was I right to think about the sentence in this way?’
Dillon’s wonderfully obsessive views and thoughts on ‘sentences’ make one (or at least me) appreciate ‘great/well-considered writing’. Not that precisely, but more like it makes ‘bad writing’ more obvious and unbearable. I was reading Dillon’s book while also reading a book I will not mention the title of (but a book written about a chef that I was interested in knowing more about (but the writing was simply ‘unbelievable’; disappointing to say the least—tone, structure, diction, just everything about it really)). I know they tend to say that ‘bad art’ is better than ‘mediocre art’, but I’ll take ‘mediocre writing’ over ‘bad writing’ on any given day, because at least if I’m made ‘bored’ quickly by ‘mediocrity’, I would stop and save myself time. My reaction towards ‘bad writing’ is (much to my disadvantage) usually ‘disbelief’. As in — I can’t believe how someone is able to so confidently, so inconsiderately and so selfishly publish something half-arsedly. And then I waste time trying to ‘prove’ things that don’t need to be proven. And then I scratch at my heart thinking about felled trees.
‘She learned to hold on to her words, running them through until they sounded right and therefore were right—
‘The arrangement of the words matters; and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.’ — Didion, ‘Why I Write’.’
I would have rated Dillon’s book higher if he had chosen the ‘right’ Brönte to write about. It’s as simple and as mad as that. These are just my personal thoughts as a reader anyway. As a pretty compulsive reader, rarely films impress me more than the books they were adapted from (and I think many who ‘read’ similarly would share this sentiment as well); but I have to admit that Cary Joji Fukunaga performed wild ‘magic’ when he did that thing he did to ‘Jane Eyre’ (2011?). The story/plot is still awful, but the cinematography is quite absurd (a compliment that).
‘“The drug wrought.”—not exactly the digressive equal of De Quincey’s elaborate style—(Charlotte) Brontë’s modest sentence might mean: the drug worked, or went to work, performed its usual or intended function. The sentence could as easily mean that the drug went to work on, influenced or manipulated, the raw material of Lucy Snowe’s imagination—it worked her as though she were metal to be moulded or beaten, stone or wood to be carved—The glorious and sinister diorama of Lucy Snowe’s night in the Royal Park: it has all been wrought by opium. Or is it rather, again: the reality worked by opium, heightened or intensified? All of these meanings are present, all of them complementing and contending with each other, inside this tiny, concentrated sentence—As if the sentence contains a pun: the drug wrote.’
(Fully ‘unhinged’ paragraph ahead about the only Brontë (not Charlotte, obviously) that interests me (possibly an understatement); so skip/skim this part to save your own sanity; it is a consciously self-indulgent ‘rant’) To me, Dillon chose the ‘wrong’ Brontë to write/rave about. ‘You Want It Darker’ (Leonard Cohen), or rather, I want it darker. Personally, I think all the Brontës are pretty ‘subpar’ (understatement) when it comes to ‘plot’ (understandably; and considering ‘everything’, they probably did their ‘best’). But one of them seems to be conscious of it/hers, and it is as if it’s her way of using it as a tool to ‘play a joke’ on her readers. Having read that novel (loosely counting) over three times, I am convinced of it. The ‘plot’ and most of the ‘sub-plots’ are just a butchered up and patched together ‘collage’ of ‘village gossip’. It’s all a sublime blur, but it is also her/a masterpiece. And she also gave the/her best lines to the (false (I would argue)) ‘villain’ of the novel. Georges Bataille thought of her as one of the greatest writers ever; and he knew exactly what she was up to, calling Wuthering Heights ‘deceptively romantic’/pseudo-romantic (or something along those lines; perhaps 'darker' even). She used Northern dialects in her writing and ‘fought’ to keep them in even though her ‘sister’ (which of course, like the majority, Dillon seemed to like best) edited them out after her death (but the publishers were like wait what, what the fuck that actually that takes away the fucking ‘soul’ of the novel (and characters) if you do that, so we are putting the original texts back in like the author would have wanted) because ‘if you want to love me, you got to learn my language(s) of love’ kind of way? The beauty of her writing lies in between the lines. She’s the (excuse my language, but) when it comes to ‘vibes’ and style (of writing). Atmospheric? As fuck. I’ll even go further and say that most of her characters are all (deliberately?) quite terrible (especially the women (but she uses them so well as ‘tools’ (in every sense of the word) in the narrative that they become rather ‘irreplaceable’), but Heathcliff Heathcliff (first name, last name) is the deliciously battered heart of the novel (so much so that readers/critics have wondered if the author wrote him with a bit of her(self) in mind (or perhaps ‘in him’); and I am very interested in that ‘interpretation’ or rather ‘speculation’). The only way to properly talk/write about her work is to get unreservedly unhinged about it all (this paragraph is clear evidence of it). Maybe that is why Dillon would rather not. But I like to think that he didn’t because it might feel like (extra unhinged analogy) But I still talk/write about her because I rather go at it again and again loving her (work) embarrassingly and desperately than not love her at all. And — I’m done. Belated thoughts after having raved about WH a bit more with GR friends :
But still, I admire and appreciate how much Dillon cares about (literary) ‘style’, fully knowing that too many writers don’t. Sometimes I wonder (whenever I encounter ‘bad’ writing/books) if it’s just a lack of a trustworthy/competent editor, or is it just a matter of overconfidence and stubbornness. Or worse — is it just a don’t-really-give-a-fuck approach to ‘writing’ with a side of ‘unpicky’/tragic ‘taste’ at that?
‘We do an injustice to Billie Holiday, writes (Elizabeth) Hardwick, if we imagine the value of her art to lie in the lyrics of the songs she sang. “Her message was otherwise. It was style.” Which is to say—what? That she was ultimately in control of her art, or quite the opposite? For what is style if not precisely the oscillation, a refusal to choose, between mastery and accident, between determined artifice and ineludible character? Hardwick liked to say that all her first drafts read as if they’d been written by a chicken. There was a deal of labour involved in becoming otherwise, in seeming or sounding not-chicken enough, and the sentence dramatises that effort, for it was also a work of affinity and solicitude.’
In any case, I think anyone who doesn’t ‘read’ much would surely benefit a fair amount from reading Dillon’s book (even if only to ‘know’ better about how ‘sentences’ function in writing; and to be aware of the fact that ‘good’/well-composed sentences actually take a significant deal of effort/thought/work). But even for readers who ‘read’ more (and/or have read the texts/books mentioned in the book), this is still a pleasantly refreshing read. A lot of what Dillon ‘preached’ in these essays resonate with me a fair bit. I believe in the musicality in/of writing. That is in a way a more pretentious way of saying ‘style’ I suppose? Do it wrongly/badly, and it’s like being stuck with an awfully annoying narrator pummeling unbearable trash into your ears/head. But when done ‘right’? Sublime as fuck. Transcendental. Haunting. Everlasting. (I am fully aware that I fall into the former category, but this is just a random/casual review/thoughts on a book and not some published thing, so leave me be.)
‘Observe the economies of the sentence: the solid paired adjectives, for a start. How strange, you might say, after the convoluting movements—How to describe such intricate experiences, even vexingly opaque or discombobulating experiences, in language that will take your reader there but allow her to remain sufficiently calm and distant that it all makes sense? In his minor art of jazz criticism, or jazz description, Whitney Balliett invents the most compact and recursive structure, which holds up phrases of extreme daring. The sentence remains mysterious, which is perhaps why, when I first copied it out to serve as the heading for this fragment, I must have tried unconsciously to multiply, somehow thus to explain, its effects: “Parker’s medium-tempo blues had a glittering, monolithic quality, and his fast blues were multiplications of his slow blues were multiplications of his slow blues.’
‘(Elizabeth) Hardwick’s syntax is seamless—seductive, but the sentence is rattled by the ghost of an ambiguity that is general in her writing—the grotesquerie was not even his own, which in itself is grotesque. Subclauses are frequently strange and estranging in Hardwick; as Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in a short essay on his love for her sentences, an interjection or aside may arrive “like a great raw piece of beef soliciting our appetite.’
May 20, 2022
This is another book that has been sitting on my to read pile for a long time - I ordered it in one of Fitzcarraldo's sales about a year ago. It is not the kind of book I would normally read, but Marcus Hobson's enthusiasm for it won me over.
Dillon's starting point is to analyse some of the sentences he has been collecting in his notebooks, which span literary history from Shakespeare to the present day and cover a wide variety of styles. Each of these 27 sentences gets a chapter to itself, and Dillon's commentary is incisive and wide ranging.
I have to admit to being somewhat tone deaf when it comes to the rhythmic and stylistic elements of language, so this kind of book is not easy reading for me, and sentences very rarely jump out at me or stick in the memory, but I still found this a fascinating insight into the art of writing.
Dillon's starting point is to analyse some of the sentences he has been collecting in his notebooks, which span literary history from Shakespeare to the present day and cover a wide variety of styles. Each of these 27 sentences gets a chapter to itself, and Dillon's commentary is incisive and wide ranging.
I have to admit to being somewhat tone deaf when it comes to the rhythmic and stylistic elements of language, so this kind of book is not easy reading for me, and sentences very rarely jump out at me or stick in the memory, but I still found this a fascinating insight into the art of writing.
November 4, 2021
I wanted to like this more than I did, as when it did manage to strike home (when the supposed analysandum, the sentence in question, enlarged and enlivened by sagely selected, a propos supportive context, was also robustiously enough built to withstand the 1,000 watt glare of the analyst's laser-guided probings—with just over half of these essays, say), it enlivened and enlarged my world.
Other times, he did lose me as I struggled to keep up as he tumbled down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, book upon book upon book—which, unlike him, I haven't read, and of course he's too breathless to pause and expl...wait, there's another...and yet one more! —and which, one feels (no Joyce! no PROUST!!), at times somewhat idiosyncratically chosen for all that....
The best of critics seldom forget that they, too, are crafting a narrative, creating the impression of a Gestalt. Mr. Dillon shows here that he can do this with the best of them—oh, 3/5ths of the time?
Other times, he did lose me as I struggled to keep up as he tumbled down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, book upon book upon book—which, unlike him, I haven't read, and of course he's too breathless to pause and expl...wait, there's another...and yet one more! —and which, one feels (no Joyce! no PROUST!!), at times somewhat idiosyncratically chosen for all that....
The best of critics seldom forget that they, too, are crafting a narrative, creating the impression of a Gestalt. Mr. Dillon shows here that he can do this with the best of them—oh, 3/5ths of the time?
November 24, 2020
Fascinating is the best word to describe this book. I’m not sure most of us take the time to read closely. By that I mean really looking at the detail both on the page, the structure, the precise words used or the way these work with the punctuation. Do we ever stop to ask if what we just read really makes sense or why there was a change in tense? Do we look for deeper meanings or the minutiae around what we are reading?
In ‘Suppose a Sentence’, Brian Dillon calls our close attention to twenty-eight very different writers, from Shakespeare to Anne Carson, Joan Didion to George Eliot. A single sentence from each is presented at the start of each section, followed by commentary, both directly about the sentence and also about the background, the writer, the situation, and the context. All the information we might require to fully understand, and appreciate, the sentence.
Dillon has been “collecting” sentence for 25 years, copying them into the back pages of his notebooks to save for later. Perhaps savour might be a better word. He has forty-five of these notebooks, all more or less A4 size, lined up on his shelf. A4 in the UK is similar to Letter size in the USA.
The sentences that Dillon selects come in a variety of shapes and sizes. While Virginia Woolf, Samuel Becket and Thomas De Quincey present us with a sentence almost as long as a page, many are just a handful of words. Susan Sontag’s sentence is “I took a trip to see the beautiful things.”, Charlotte Bronte is even shorter, “The drug wrought.” Choice of writer gives us such unfamiliar territory as Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic for the New Yorker.
Sometimes the chapters, which can range from just two pages through to ten or more, include other sentences. Sometimes those are better than the chosen sentence; they say more and sound better. Here is an example from Janet Malcolm. Having chosen something from a profile she wrote for ‘The New Yorker’, Dillon adds this gem to the wider discussion:
“There are place in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets – these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.”
Two sentences, but wow, just wow. I am blown away by how that sounds and reads and am left floored by the knowledge I will probably never write anything as good as that, even though every single one of the words used is quite familiar to me!
Let me take a couple of examples of Dillon’s comments of the sentences he discusses. The line he selects from Thomas De Quincey is a vast rambling sentence, almost a page long. What he says about it is: “It is not really a matter of beauty or elegance, though a strangely lucid control of the sentence might be the first thing one admires in these writers. Something else, a grand engaging awkwardness, is soon felt: the sentence does not lose its way exactly, but somewhere forgets itself, and the reader slips with it, smiling. It might be a case of a metaphor too far, a turn of phrase that will not easily give up its sense, or a series of embedded clauses, like steps axed in glacier ice, from which the writer struggles confidently to descend again.”
As you can see, Dillon is pretty adept with a sentence, and all its clauses, himself.
I am not very familiar with Joan Didion, but was fascinated to read where she learnt her craft, writing pieces for Vogue magazine, including lengthy photo captions.
Dillon takes is one of these captions as her sentence: ”Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” He then says this about it: “The absence of structuring commas around ‘but anomalous’ is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion: in its rhythm, care and thrift, then also in the swerve towards something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work in the house.”
I have recently taken out a subscription with Fitzcarraldo Editions and decided on the option to have both essays and novels. On the strength of this book, I’m so glad that I selected the essays. This book is certainly worth reading again, and then once more to make sure no gem is missed.
In ‘Suppose a Sentence’, Brian Dillon calls our close attention to twenty-eight very different writers, from Shakespeare to Anne Carson, Joan Didion to George Eliot. A single sentence from each is presented at the start of each section, followed by commentary, both directly about the sentence and also about the background, the writer, the situation, and the context. All the information we might require to fully understand, and appreciate, the sentence.
Dillon has been “collecting” sentence for 25 years, copying them into the back pages of his notebooks to save for later. Perhaps savour might be a better word. He has forty-five of these notebooks, all more or less A4 size, lined up on his shelf. A4 in the UK is similar to Letter size in the USA.
The sentences that Dillon selects come in a variety of shapes and sizes. While Virginia Woolf, Samuel Becket and Thomas De Quincey present us with a sentence almost as long as a page, many are just a handful of words. Susan Sontag’s sentence is “I took a trip to see the beautiful things.”, Charlotte Bronte is even shorter, “The drug wrought.” Choice of writer gives us such unfamiliar territory as Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic for the New Yorker.
Sometimes the chapters, which can range from just two pages through to ten or more, include other sentences. Sometimes those are better than the chosen sentence; they say more and sound better. Here is an example from Janet Malcolm. Having chosen something from a profile she wrote for ‘The New Yorker’, Dillon adds this gem to the wider discussion:
“There are place in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets – these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.”
Two sentences, but wow, just wow. I am blown away by how that sounds and reads and am left floored by the knowledge I will probably never write anything as good as that, even though every single one of the words used is quite familiar to me!
Let me take a couple of examples of Dillon’s comments of the sentences he discusses. The line he selects from Thomas De Quincey is a vast rambling sentence, almost a page long. What he says about it is: “It is not really a matter of beauty or elegance, though a strangely lucid control of the sentence might be the first thing one admires in these writers. Something else, a grand engaging awkwardness, is soon felt: the sentence does not lose its way exactly, but somewhere forgets itself, and the reader slips with it, smiling. It might be a case of a metaphor too far, a turn of phrase that will not easily give up its sense, or a series of embedded clauses, like steps axed in glacier ice, from which the writer struggles confidently to descend again.”
As you can see, Dillon is pretty adept with a sentence, and all its clauses, himself.
I am not very familiar with Joan Didion, but was fascinated to read where she learnt her craft, writing pieces for Vogue magazine, including lengthy photo captions.
Dillon takes is one of these captions as her sentence: ”Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” He then says this about it: “The absence of structuring commas around ‘but anomalous’ is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion: in its rhythm, care and thrift, then also in the swerve towards something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work in the house.”
I have recently taken out a subscription with Fitzcarraldo Editions and decided on the option to have both essays and novels. On the strength of this book, I’m so glad that I selected the essays. This book is certainly worth reading again, and then once more to make sure no gem is missed.
November 23, 2021
"Not this, not that the truth is I wanted to write a book that was all positives, all pleasure, only about good things. Beautiful sentences, William H. Gass wrote, are 'rare as eclipses'. 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."
Dillon mentions his attraction to Barthes' image of "reading as cutting, as if the critic's eye were akin to the collagist's scalpel" and he thinks of this book as "having something in common with photomontage, an art of excision and juxtaposition." So he wanted sentences that would "open under my gaze, not preserve or project their perfection." The twenty-eight sentences that make the cut don't have much in common, "[asserting] their material, immaterial presence, and [working] the miracle of their spectral persistence."
In a way, Dillon is diagramming these sentences: cutting into them and prying them apart, or cajoling them to open up like flower-buds in spring, or turning them around and shaking them for loose change, the loose thread that will unravel them at last, as he writes "from one fragment to the next". This is exegesis in practice, shifting from a paragraph to a dozen pages, walking into tiny alleys and lanes, always on the search for ever-elusive meaning. It is a long line of diminishing O's moving beyond the edge, an infinite oroboros.
December 21, 2020
27 essays on 27 sentences: I mean this in the sense gathered from the table of contents, of one essay PER one sentence (a sentence from Shakespeare, from Ruskin, from Bowen, from Jaeggy). But the truth is that each of these essays also speaks to its neighbor (and its neighbor's neighbor) so that it ends up feeling like each essay is also about every other sentence/essay, one-to-one becoming one-to-many. This structure or design or form of cross-talking, or elbow-rubbing, or knee-grazing, works more obviously among some (describing visual and aural purchase of grappling hooks) than others -- as in a many-mouthed conversation (in which what is not heard has still been said). The effect is pleasurable, if you find pleasure in association, the various subject-rhymes, when they register, casting real zingers of mind-boomerangs trailing lassos (is how I envision it) in a mudless rodeo that resolves into a kind of trussed ball of zippy refracting meanings, tying book's mouth to its tail, hand to its hand, foot to its mouth, moth to its light. Sure, some of the sentences selected strike me as bland or uninteresting, just as others strike me as unbland and interesting, but Dillon finds a way to make the bland unbland and the unbland thrilling, and besides each forms a tile that contributes to the lovely whole that is this book. The fact that I was able to look past, perhaps even kind of enjoy (?), reference to and reverence for and genuflecting before one or another French critical nonsense theorist (Barthes, is it?) is a testament to my enjoyment of the whole.
February 8, 2021
Suppose I told you that this book - the first book I read in 2021, purchased on a whim, added to my cart as an afterthought (I'd intended only to purchase Minor Detail by Adania Shibli) - is sure to end up one of my favorites of the year.
Suppose I told you that I, too, have been collecting sentences, "unconnected to duty or deadlines, to projects per se" — in notebooks, in Evernote, on scraps of paper lying about my office, in the notes app on my phone.
Suppose I told you that while reading this book, a list of authors, of books, of articles was formed — and that from this list, I have purchased 12 additional books (so far).
Suppose I attempted to convey my love for this book, this, "meditation on the power of the sentence... from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf to Joan Didion", and couldn't — so left you with a few quotes from its pages instead:
"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."
"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."
"Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, building her prose like a shiny carapace, easy to admire and hard to crack if you're hoping to emulate it... It is usually direct and declarative, it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions, there is a wealth of concrete detail."
"What have we got but our phrases, piling up?"
Suppose I told you that I, too, have been collecting sentences, "unconnected to duty or deadlines, to projects per se" — in notebooks, in Evernote, on scraps of paper lying about my office, in the notes app on my phone.
Suppose I told you that while reading this book, a list of authors, of books, of articles was formed — and that from this list, I have purchased 12 additional books (so far).
Suppose I attempted to convey my love for this book, this, "meditation on the power of the sentence... from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf to Joan Didion", and couldn't — so left you with a few quotes from its pages instead:
"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."
"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."
"Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, building her prose like a shiny carapace, easy to admire and hard to crack if you're hoping to emulate it... It is usually direct and declarative, it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions, there is a wealth of concrete detail."
"What have we got but our phrases, piling up?"
September 10, 2020
It is always a pleasure to dwell in the words and world of Brian Dillon. "Suppose a Sentence" is a collection of literary essays, where the foundation is the sentence. Twenty-eight essays plus introduction focus at first a specific sentence by an author but then using that as a projection into that writer's style, structure, and sensibility. In many ways, this collection is a very straight forward literary inquiry into the author's work. It's not really about the sentence itself, or structure of writing, but how the beauty and form of writing take place in a reader's or critic's mind.
Most of the authors/writers are well known here: Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, Thomas De Quincey (an author that comes up a lot in this book), Charlotte Brontë, George Elliot, Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and others. Pretty much the Western Literature world, but with some new figures such as the Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jazz critic Whitney Balliett. I don't know the names like those two, but I want to read their works due to Dillon's take on their work.
I love literature, and I too think of sentences that make me go-go almost the same manner as listening to exciting music. Dillon captures these moments in these brief but thoughtful series of essays.
Most of the authors/writers are well known here: Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, Thomas De Quincey (an author that comes up a lot in this book), Charlotte Brontë, George Elliot, Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and others. Pretty much the Western Literature world, but with some new figures such as the Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jazz critic Whitney Balliett. I don't know the names like those two, but I want to read their works due to Dillon's take on their work.
I love literature, and I too think of sentences that make me go-go almost the same manner as listening to exciting music. Dillon captures these moments in these brief but thoughtful series of essays.
December 21, 2020
This is a delightful, quirky, and distinctly individual set of essays about 27 sentences that the author finds memorable for a variety of reasons. It opens with a long acrobatic, undulating single-sentence meditation on the sentence itself. I immediately recognized that we readers were in the competent hands of an innovative thinker and writer. It is hard to categorize this book, but I would say that it is something of a commonplace book set to a theme. I adored these essays and think this would be the perfect gift for anyone passionate about language.
August 24, 2022
Me ha encantado la forma de este ensayo (o colección de pequeños ensayos), así como me han fascinado la erudición y el buen hacer del autor. Sin embargo, me ha parecido un gabinete de curiosidades literarias, sin más. Muy interesante, eso sí.
December 6, 2022
I found this book both delightful, fascinating, and satisfying. Each chapter is headed by a quote from a piece of literature that Dillon is obsessed with and in the chapter he examines the sentence word by word--punctuation mark by punctuation mark, the rhythm and the sense of it. It's exhausting but also (for me) kind of exhilarating.
I borrowed the book from the library because of the chapter on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (whose book Dictee I am devoted to) but ended up buying the book because I loved all (or mostly all) of the chapters and wanted to be able to refer back to them (although with my endless TBR, I wonder when that would actually be).
There are lots of writers discussed who I loved to begin with--Beckett, Stein, Elizabeths Bishop, Hardwick, and Bowen, Charlotte Bronte (and the example Dillon uses is from my favorite of her work, Villette), Frank O'Hara. Also: Thomas Browne. Shakespeare (unsurprisingly). I also discovered a few new (to me) writers--so I immediately went to the library (the app) and to the Kindle store (but the prices have increased--rather a shocking amount, to me at any rate). So now I have Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett to be read immediately (but when would that be exactly?) and Robert Smithson's A Tour of the Monuments (which I can't even find) as well as writers I've read that I now feel compelled to reread in the light of Dillon's reading (of just one of their sentences1 (This list includes Hilary Mantel (whose recent death I'm still grieving although I am grateful she finished her Wolf Hall Trilogy- Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, all 3 of which I loved), Fleur Jaeggy, and Anne Boyer.
As always, one good book seems to lead to a dozen others. And people ask me how I find books to read--my question is: how can I stop finding new books--all of which feel urgent to read.
And then read them all as carefully as Brian Dillon does in this book, written with love and devotion and intelligence.
I borrowed the book from the library because of the chapter on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (whose book Dictee I am devoted to) but ended up buying the book because I loved all (or mostly all) of the chapters and wanted to be able to refer back to them (although with my endless TBR, I wonder when that would actually be).
There are lots of writers discussed who I loved to begin with--Beckett, Stein, Elizabeths Bishop, Hardwick, and Bowen, Charlotte Bronte (and the example Dillon uses is from my favorite of her work, Villette), Frank O'Hara. Also: Thomas Browne. Shakespeare (unsurprisingly). I also discovered a few new (to me) writers--so I immediately went to the library (the app) and to the Kindle store (but the prices have increased--rather a shocking amount, to me at any rate). So now I have Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett to be read immediately (but when would that be exactly?) and Robert Smithson's A Tour of the Monuments (which I can't even find) as well as writers I've read that I now feel compelled to reread in the light of Dillon's reading (of just one of their sentences1 (This list includes Hilary Mantel (whose recent death I'm still grieving although I am grateful she finished her Wolf Hall Trilogy- Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, all 3 of which I loved), Fleur Jaeggy, and Anne Boyer.
As always, one good book seems to lead to a dozen others. And people ask me how I find books to read--my question is: how can I stop finding new books--all of which feel urgent to read.
And then read them all as carefully as Brian Dillon does in this book, written with love and devotion and intelligence.
June 29, 2022
not what i expected but okay
January 18, 2021
Reading this made me realize that it had been such a long time since I'd read an academic book, or even read a book closely at all. In college, I read books specifically to dissect them. Thereafter, I would read books and look for quotes that jumped out at me and spoke to me, but somewhere along the way, I started reading leisurely and never stopped. I appreciated this exercise in thought, and admired the way Dillon crafted sentences that behaved the way he described the sentences he admired. This has inspired me to really fall back in love with reading...to rekindle a spark that I wasn't aware had gone out.
December 31, 2021
To a long-time book editor like me, this essay collection showed how much more attention I could pay to sentences, if only there were time. Dillon slows things down, providing his thoughts on sentences, their context, their writers, and other texts that his consideration of each essay’s topic sentence (that is, a sentence is the topic of each essay) leads him to. Not that this book makes one a better editor, but it is especially enjoyable for those who come to it with a deep interest in the ways words can be placed together between periods. Dillon’s author and sentence selections are completely unpredictable, which I found refreshing.
December 26, 2022
this book reminded me of why i love reading (and doing it in english). a real gem. now i’ve got some reading to do though
August 5, 2021
Dillon uses a delightful conceit - pick sentences he has marked out in the books he has read, and then examine each closely, 'reading it in slow motion'. The examination obviously goes beyond the sentence itself, and delves into the lives of the authors themselves, and their approach to language. A lot of the writers are ones I have not read or will never read - de Quincey, Thomas Browne, Ruskin, Beckett; some are jazz critics and book reviewers and essayists published by The New Yorker; and some are all time favourites - Woolf, Mantel, Didion. There are boring, pedantic parts, but overall, the pleasure Dillon takes in the language he is analyzing is infectious, and some vignettes are total treasures (Baldwin's subtle yet unmistakeable put-down of Mailer is one such). Worth keeping by your bedside and dipping into every now and then.
August 6, 2021
A deep.dive into a variety of writers' sentences, perhaps too esoteric for anyone but those deeply invested in the craft of writing and the exercise of reading carefully. This is an uncommon reader.
July 27, 2021
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.
July 23, 2021
Reading this like being inside a building constructed from sentences. Brian Dillon walks us through the entire thing, a phrase oddly hinged, a word that dangles after a pause, through George Eliot's semicolon colon, which is a "sneaky little hinge" and Woolf's "delaying rhythms". It's claustrophobic to dwell on sentences like this, discerning where the symmetry is off or whether the sentences are parallel or not. But it's like nothing I've ever read before. I can't tell if this book is a criticism or story or a meditation. It's one of those that needs a fifth and a sixth and possibly tenth reading.
November 19, 2023
Each essay starts with a sentence Dillon collected and considers special in some way, followed by a discussion of the sentence as situated within a more or less broad context. The sentences often seem like excuses for Dillon to go off on a tangent or three, which would be fine, if the tangents were themselves held together by some greater point.
Dillon's prose is far from dry, yet somehow it failed to convince me—his voice is nearby, clear, familiar in tone, yet without mystery, without draw.
The sentences that I enjoyed the most were by Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcom, Fleur Jaeggy, and Anne Carson. I'll leave you with Jaeggy's: 'Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust.'
Dillon's prose is far from dry, yet somehow it failed to convince me—his voice is nearby, clear, familiar in tone, yet without mystery, without draw.
The sentences that I enjoyed the most were by Robert Smithson, Maeve Brennan, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcom, Fleur Jaeggy, and Anne Carson. I'll leave you with Jaeggy's: 'Paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust.'
October 5, 2020
Delightful. Really fun when it gets wacky and self referential at the end.
Read
December 17, 2020wonderful whimsies!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews