It is always a pleasure to dwell in the words and world of Brian Dillon. "Suppose a Sentence" is a collection of literary essays, where the foundation is the sentence. Twenty-eight essays plus introduction focus at first a specific sentence by an author but then using that as a projection into that writer's style, structure, and sensibility. In many ways, this collection is a very straight forward literary inquiry into the author's work. It's not really about the sentence itself, or structure of writing, but how the beauty and form of writing take place in a reader's or critic's mind.
Most of the authors/writers are well known here: Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, Thomas De Quincey (an author that comes up a lot in this book), Charlotte Brontë, George Elliot, Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and others. Pretty much the Western Literature world, but with some new figures such as the Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jazz critic Whitney Balliett. I don't know the names like those two, but I want to read their works due to Dillon's take on their work.
I love literature, and I too think of sentences that make me go-go almost the same manner as listening to exciting music. Dillon captures these moments in these brief but thoughtful series of essays.
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