Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

Novelist Samatar (The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain) presents a meandering collection of vague musings about writing, publishing, and life. The strongest entries critique the “tyranny of identity” in the publishing industry and lament how authors from marginalized backgrounds are unfairly “asked to speak or write as a representation of a category.” Unfortunately, the rest of the book lacks this clarity of purpose. Samatar drifts between meditations on the slow pace at which she writes, her struggle to collapse the distance between real life and how it’s recreated on the page, and how the act of publication alienates the author from their own work. However, the brief entries end before she has a chance to fully develop any of these ideas. Seeking to call attention to how her literary influences have shaped her work and outlook, Samatar includes extensive quotes from Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, Mieko Kanai, Clarice Lispector, and other writers, but many are presented with minimal commentary, which can make this feel more like a compendium of quotations than an original work. Samatar succeeds perhaps too well in her “project of deep aimlessness,” stringing together gnomic pronouncements about writing that fail to cohere (“So writing will be a body and a dwelling. Box with aperture. Edged and moving”). This falls flat. Agent: Sally Harding, CookeMcDermid. (Aug.)