Dillon pushes this form to an extreme ... Both sentimental and impersonal. The emotional stakes are high: it is a book framed by the deaths of Dillon’s parents. Yet those experiences are filtered through a cool, analytic lens ... Ultimately makes a compelling case for the intellectual life as a lived practice, one that takes seriously the possibility that thinking and reading might alter not only how one understands the world, but how one lives in it.
Despite the elegance of Dillon’s prose — the book is a page-by-page pleasure — there is a risk of losing the reader. First because the writers he loves are a minority pursuit ... So strong is his passion for his way of finding himself in the world, so dedicated is he to be true to his idols, that we long for him to make it. And this book is proof that he did.
[The] intricate challenge is how to recount an intellectual apprenticeship without lapsing into nostalgia ... To be ambivalent is to resist making up one’s mind, and to waver between fixed positions, yet Dillon here makes it an intimate art form.
Dillon is insightful on the contradictory emotions that deep reading and the deep-ended plunge in beginning to write has on a young mind ... On a broader level, Dillon’s family and friends are too lightly sketched, and the image of a different Dublin is so faintly drawn that the city never takes its rightful place in the story ... Dillon’s memories are written in such a way that a reader cannot help but feel ambivalence.
This is a surprisingly hopeful book. While obscurity may not automatically equate to profundity, the state of being uncertain carries with it a rich source of possibility.
Dazzling if remote ... 'He recognizes and refuses at the same time the insight (or truism) that criticism is inevitably a form of autobiography,' Dillon observes of his younger self, and the line is something of a litmus test. Readers stirred by that observation will likely love this; those who find it unnecessarily obfuscating need not apply.
