Ambivalence
An Education
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 8 sept 2026
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- $199.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
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.
When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films, and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon's education seemed even higher.
Ambivalence is a memoir of the author's native city of Dublin in the 1980s and '90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and memoirist Dillon (Affinities) catalogs his adolescent coming-of-consciousness in this dazzling if remote account. Writing in the third person, Dillon, who grew up in 1980s Dublin, refers to his teenage self as "B." After his mother died when he was 16, B—gay and lower-middle-class—lived in "a tide of reverie, with undertows of avoidance and boredom." He devoured books by the beats, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes, and struggled to connect with his father, who passed away when B was 22. Much of the memoir illustrates how Dillon came to know the world through art and literature: he parenthetically notes that his mother died of scleroderma, a painful and degenerative autoimmune disease, only in the context that painter Paul Klee did as well; when B grieves, he interrogates his own emotions for potential clichés. "He recognizes and refuses at the same time the insight (or truism) that criticism is inevitably a form of autobiography," Dillon observes of his younger self, and the line is something of a litmus test. Readers stirred by that observation will likely love this; those who find it unnecessarily obfuscating need not apply.
