A coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal writers in his life—Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, and others—and in the process arguing for the transformative power of art, literature, and learning.
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.
