I spent most of the year writing about photography, which is my intention with this newsletter. But I thought I would take the opportunity at the end/beginning of the year to reflect on some of the books—or more specifically sentences—that I read in 2023. Many of the books weren’t published this year, but they happen to be where my mind was at.
I recently read Brian Dillon’s Suppose A Sentence, which is comprised of a series of essays about sentences he loves. It’s a great read, and a great example of why Dillon writes so beautifully about art—and specifically photography (see below for more). Dillon is an amazing looker. He has a capacity to give a very careful, very generous kind of attention to the subjects he writes about. I decided to adapt his model slightly, to reflect on some of the things I read this past year.
I love great sentences, both structurally and for what they contain. Reading them, analyzing them, has so much in common with reading a photograph. I struggled to isolate single sentences from books I read this year, so instead these might be best thought of as passages.
In many cases, I wanted to select the last lines from a story or novel. I forbade myself from doing that, in part because I think last lines are not mine to spoil. But also because they felt too tidy, too much like the summation of something.
Instead: A snippet. A selection. A way of looking.
Wishing you a happy and fruitful new year!
xz
“I found myself frequently using the word affinity, and wondered what I meant by it. An attraction, for sure—to certain works of art or literature, to fragments or details, moods or atmospheres inside of them. To a sentence, for instance, or an essay, but just as easily to an impression diffusing in the mind that could not be traced back to its source.”
-Brian Dillon, Affinities: On Art and Fascination
Brian Dillon is a master looker. His trilogy of books, Suppose a Sentence, Essayisms, and Affinities, are about the careful acts of attention. Dillon scrutinizes the works that he is drawn to, and in the process he reveals himself, his affinities.
Most of the essays in Affinities are about photography. Dillon has said he is trying to exhaust a subject when he writes about it, and there is a feeling of proximity that comes from this depth of looking, as if through his words, we approach a subject. Anyone interested in writing about photographs—or about language, for that matter—will find value in this book.
“She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not know that life itself transformed itself into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.”
-Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
I read Pure Colour when it first came out in 2022, and have since read back through Heti’s work, which, when I picked up Pure Colour, I’d read none of. Then, this year, after reading most of her other writing, I read Pure Colour again. In some ways, it is a simple book. The plot is sparse, the language is straight forward. Yet the book left me with almost unnameable feelings.
In an interview some years back, Heti referenced Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a sculpture placed in a courtyard in Manhattan’s financial district that (intentionally) interrupted the path people who worked in the neighbouring buildings walked each day. Heti said she aims to do something similar with her work: “I wanted to make it hard to walk—hard for someone to walk down the same path they use every lunch hour.”
Last year, after finishing Motherhood, Heti’s novel from 2018, I remembered a moment from years ago: I was swimming in the ocean, treading water with a friend, when we both realized the current had moved us from our original position without us noticing. It was seamless, almost magical. This is the feeling that Heti’s work has on me—the feeling that I’ve been moved without realizing it.
I was texting with a friend earlier this year a few weeks after her father passed away. I typed out the above sentences and sent them to her. They made her cry. In a good way, I think.
“Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean a more natural violence.”
-Amy Hempel. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
This story. This fucking story.
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” was first published in 1983, but I only stumbled upon it earlier this year. Apparently Hempel wrote it in a writing class in response to the prompt, Write about your worst secret. Her worst secret: “I failed my best friend when she was dying.”
The resulting story is about a woman visiting her dying friend in the hospital. It’s short (like most Hempel stories), largely composed of dialogue, and structurally perfect.
I read the last line (not above) and the whole thing got inside me. Like a stain, a knew I wouldn’t be able to get it out.
“The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb to overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It’s a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.”
-Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
I can’t always remember when I read something, and it’s possible that I read Labatut’s book in 2022, not 2023. Regardless, the final section, which is where the above sentence comes from, is something I’ve re-read multiple times since.
When We Cease to Understand the World is about scientific and mathematical discoveries, and about the discoverers themselves. It draws largely on factual history, but as the book progresses, Labatut begins to include fictional details about the scientists and mathematicians he writes about. Perhaps because of subject matter, and because of perspective (it’s told in third person), I had the feeling, reading the novel, that I was hovering quite high above the story. Though I liked it, I often had the urge to move down, closer to the ground and to the subjects. It would have been a critique I had of the book were it not for the last section, The Night Gardener.
The Night Gardener runs all of thirteen pages, and is in some ways an epilogue to the book. The perspective switches suddenly from third person to first, and the characters that populated the rest of the book fade into the background. Instead, an unnamed narrator talks about his town, his garden, and about a gardener he meets on a walk. It’s a seemingly simple section, but it is haunted by the details from the rest of the book.
For me, The Night Gardener makes the whole book work. Reading it, I felt as if the rest of the book had been preface (excellent, interesting, well-written preface), and that the final section was, in fact, the novel. I’m not sure if this was Labatut’s intention, but I found it a bold move.
“Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld.”
-David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
I spent parts of the summer doing research for a project I am currently working on with three other artists. This often meant reading books about climate change under a smoke-filled sky. Many of the books I read were more recent than Wallace-Wells’, which was published in 2019, but for some reason the above sentence stayed with me, perhaps because of the way it contextualizes time.
A question bound up in so much of contemporary life seems to be, What do we owe each other? Perhaps, at this point, the answer is just, more.
”She has an appointment in fifteen days for another set of tests. She doesn’t eat for several hours before leaving the house. Then they draw her blood again. Blood, the snitch everyone hates. It keeps you alive on one condition: transparency. It creeps around the body like a shrewd domestic who has access to every room and knows everything there is to know about you. And who talks under pressure. The body is too basic, too weak; it can’t be trusted. Only the mind can console us for its disloyalty; the only flag it flies is that of freedom, made of the bones of truth and the bones of lies—a cross; white against black. Blood respects nothing.”
-Eva Baltasar, Boulder, Translated by Julia Sanches
I picked up Boulder after listening to a conversation between Parul Sehgal and Adam Dalva. I love a short book and I love a first person narrator, and this book has both. The novel is told from the perspective of Boulder, a woman who works as a cook on a ship. She quickly falls for a woman named Samsa. Together, the two women move to Reykjavik to live. When Samsa decides she wants to have a child, a fresh tension enters their relationship.
The language in this book is sharp and forceful. It reads like a text written thousands of years ago and just now unearthed. I could have pulled so many sentences from this book. This passage is just one of the many reasons to read it.
”I loved all of it,” she said. “But Hel. My absolute best bit was at the very start, when he looked right at me and said, ‘There are many ways to make a thing disappear.’”
-Helen Garner, The Spare Room
I started with The Children’s Bach and am now working my way through Helen Garner’s catalogue. This is my favourite so far. Maybe the best book I read all year.
The Spare Room is a novel about a woman named Helen who agrees to host her friend Nicola, who, having been diagnosed with stage four cancer, has come to Melbourne to undergo alternative treatments. When Nicola arrives, it’s clear that she is less well than she’s let on. Helen is overwhelmed by the work of caring for her sick friend. But Nicola refuses palliative care. The two are stuck together with all the things they cannot say. Nicola will not accept that she is dying, and Helen cannot bring herself to tell Nicola that the treatments she is undergoing are quackery. As the book progresses, tensions rise, and the two friends are forced to confront their circumstances. This book was funny, beautiful, sad, and honest. I couldn’t put it down.
”Dionysos does not
explain or regret
anything. He is
pleased
if he can cause you to perform,
despite your plan,
despite your politics,
despite your neuroses,
despite even your Dionysian theories of self,
something quite previous,
the desire
before the desire,
the lick of beginning to know you don’t know.”
-Anne Carson, Bakkhai
I am working on a little spare-time project that has some vague connections to Dionysos. I picked up Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ play and was excited to discover Carson’s poetic introduction. Dionysos is such an interesting and obscure figure—a twice born god who pre-dates the gods who birthed him. Carson, unsurprisingly, puts it best: “Dionysus is god / of the beginning / before the beginning.”
“On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared.”
-Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
I got sick on a Sunday and spent the day in bed, sleeping mostly. Pasquale was in my dreams. And Nadia too. They’d slipped from the pages into my mind. They were shouting in the hallway, running the shower. Then they left. When I woke I realized it: my margins were dissolving.
Ferrante’s quartet, about two young friends in post-war Naples, spans the life of a friendship between Lila and Lenu. But it also tells the story of a neighbourhood, of a period of social and political upheaval, of class conflict, of love and of loss.
For me, the Neapolitan novels are about the arbitrary nature of division, and of the boundaries that contain “the self.” Over the course of the books, this idea—the dissolving of margins—recurs, especially between the two friends. How they speak, how they think, who they love: these details flow back and forth between them. On more than one occasion, it horrifies Lila, the way person and place bleed into one another. But is this not also a part of friendship—the dissolution of barriers?
“But there is one thing that should not be scarce, that should in fact increase, and that is good and pleasurable and decent work: the work of caring, healing, building, teaching, planning, learning. The pride of the professions that define the middle class is that they still contain and represent such work. The tragedy is that they represent such work made scarce. In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite, which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other—and few, if any, poets, astronomers, and givers of care. But the middle class is also culpable, for its strategy has long been to hoard the best work, to heighten the barriers, to exclude tine masses of willing hands.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling
Fear of Falling was a notable gap on my bookshelf for a long time, and this year I finally read it. The book is as prescient now as it was when it was first published in 1989. My copy is full of post its and marginalia. Perhaps the thing I wrote most often was, HA!, because in addition to being sharp, clear-eyed, and incisive, Ehrenreich was really funny.
“Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise that what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.”
-Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing
What a weird and wonderful book—full of Weinberger’s breadth of knowledge, all bound together by threads of silk, almost invisible.
“Weather Report
The temperature of this novel is always over 88°F.
Relative humidity: never below 59%.
Wind speed: never exceeds 4 mph in any direction.
The sea is a long way from this book.”
-Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men, Translated by James Young
I have a special love for books that contain a certain quality of light—or more specifically, allow me to picture a certain kind of light. Play It As It Lays had this quality. So did The Virgin Suicides. Something about the ability to conjure the feeling of light—and at times, heat—makes a book very seductive to me.
Heringer’s book, his last before he took his own life, had this affect on me. The book is in some ways a love story—a tragic one that also reflects violence and masculinity, and on parts of Brazilian history.
The passage above opens the book.
Hi Zachary, I just subscribed to your newsletter. Thank you for recommending Brian Dillon’s book. I’ve been looking for inspiration when it comes to writing and looking at photographs (or art). This looks to be a good one!
Some gems in here! When We Cease is an amazing book, and a bunch of these are on my to-read list. Keep writing!