There’s a kind of Sebaldian quality to this book: maybe it’s the interspersing of photographs, and the sense of history as unbearable, along with this aching desire one feels to protect the beautiful faces in the images. Maybe also the feeling that everything seems Very Serious and Important, but you’re not always clear on the point, and sometimes, for me at least, it dragged a little. I tend to assume that this is a problem with me, and not the book. But I think that there is something else going on here.
I’ve been wrestling with this one, because I love experimental approaches to criticism and philosophical fragments, but I felt like the form here wasn’t entirely adequate to the ideas, and I find it very hard to explain why. There are so many really powerful moments, and important ideas in this book — I really loved a lot of it, and I do think the images are essential, and I get why it’s in the form of notes, and I actually don’t know what else it could be. I guess I think that it felt like a work in progress, which is exciting in some ways, frustrating in others. In presenting itself as a collection of notes, it is patently presenting itself as a work in progress, so it seems misguided to critique it as such, but still, it didn’t seem quite ready for publication. It’s worth noting that her previous book, In the Wake, which I think is incredible, also has this feeling of immediacy, thought in motion, but it doesn’t feel at all underdeveloped — it’s more like it has a sense of urgency and ongoingness, like, the things that it is describing are still happening, and so the work of theorizing them will never be done, and new things happen every day that feel very important to include, so you just have to write to the moment and send it to press and keep on going. These notes feel more labored over — because they are so concise and direct, they feel polished; it’s not that it was written in a hurry. But the ideas also don’t seem as clearly worked out, and while I appreciate being invited into the process of working through it, it feels like lost potential to not stay with it a little longer to see what happens.
Kasia Reads 