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Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life
Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing
In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.
In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?
Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.
In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.
In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?
Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.
192 pages, Paperback
Published August 13, 2024
About the author
Sofia Samatar
80 books583 followersSofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 28, 2024
sofia samatar I love your big beautiful obsessive hoarder mosaicist brain!! the weight she gives to naïveté 🫶🏻 this is what art is about to meeee. maybe I will even read her fiction soon (thank you to brendan for knowing me once again))
July 28, 2024
A wonderful morning read, it goes quickly, but inspires writing some morning pages afterwards :)
July 23, 2024
I am a fan of Sofia Samatar's challenging and intricate fiction, including A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, and her travel memoir The White Mosque, so I was intrigued by the chance to read her thoughts on writing. Opacities is not a book on craft, though it definitely engages questions of how and why to be a writer, and I don't think we have a good word yet to describe the genre of its contents--mostly shorter parts (grouped into longer sections), they are less definite and more exploratory than many essays, almost like statements or interrogations in a longer conversation about writing and the challenges of being a minoritized writer. Many of them engage with quotations from other writers (building on them, challenging them) or are continuations from letters exchanged with another writer. They ask questions; when they answer them, they don't expect those answers to be definite. It's an active book that asks a lot of its reader, and I found it fascinating. It leaves the reader interrogating their own relationship to writing (as a producer, as a consumer).
Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.
Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews