Essayist and critic Brian Dillon is in thrall to sentences. For a quarter of a century, he tells us in his marvelous new book, he has been collecting them, in 'the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using,' the way, we might add, Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies, with analytic passion and sustained wonderment ... Mr. Dillon scorns the advocates of “plain style” who drone on about 'the perils of ‘jargon,’ all the while deaf to their own obnoxious and excluding conventions.' He likes his language knotty and challenging, and being something of a metaphysical himself ... The product of decades of close reading, Suppose a Sentence is eclectic yet tightly shaped ... Mr. Dillon’s own book is a record of successive enrapturings.
Each selection is treated with a laser-like focus — and at times an overeagerness to point out rhetorics — as Dillon allows his thoughts to spiral into wider speculation. A single sentence, he argues, can evoke an entire text ... Elsewhere, though, Dillon loosens his belt to include excerpts that are a good deal more sprawling ... If for Orwell good prose is like a windowpane, then much in Suppose a Sentence would presumably have him reaching for a duster. Dillon is thankfully more tolerant of these smudges of ambiguity ... Reducing great writers and works to a single sentence is a provocative act, but one that in an age of 280-character opinions does not feel inappropriate ... an absorbing defence of literary originality and interpretation.
The writer, essayist, and professor Brian Dillon is a superb reader of sentences ... Dillon demonstrates that reading out of love, lingering over cherished sentences, can draw out an astonishing wealth of material ... Dillon also has an eye for the strange little choices others may overlook ... So often writing is presented as if it emerged from the writer fully formed, without the intervention or guidance of anyone else, but throughout the collection Dillon is attentive to the editing process ... Dillon is a great appreciator of that vexing descriptor, style, even when it is awkward or clunky, as seen in his essay on Robert Smithson ... Dillon generally seems to be drawn to ambiguities, odd word choices, confusing pairings ... This form of scrutiny exposes the strange chemical process that underscores all writing.
This book is about sentences, but it is also about writers; those crafts-folk that string words together, like lanterns, across this inky, squally sea of existence. Each chapter begins with a single sentence Brian Dillon was drawn to and copied down, in notebooks over the years – 'out of a teeming sky of inscriptions, these are the few that shine more brightly' – and now offers up to us, with his singular, remarkable exploration of it ... Dillon approaches language like a child outdoors before indifference has kicked in. The writing is honest, hungry and full of wonder. We are met with variety everywhere in Dillon’s choices: writer and subject, style and length, and, most affectingly – his own views on it all ... This exceptional book is the sky after an eclipse, full of silvery words; dancing, like bright fledglings.
In this delightful literary ramble, Dillon (Essayism), a creative writing professor at Queen Mary University of London, expounds upon remarkable sentences from a variety of voices in literature, past and present. Explaining he has 45 notebooks filled with favorite sentences, Dillon focuses each of the book’s 27 essays on a different one ... The well-chosen sentences themselves are worth the price of admission, but Dillon’s encyclopedic erudition and infectious joy in a skillful piece of writing are what stamp this as a treat for literary buffs.
