In the Dark Room

Reviews / Votes

'In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past, those that are lost and those, fewer, that remain: on what, in a late work, Beckett beautifully reduced to "time and grief and self, so-called". Retracing his steps through his own life and the lives of the family in the midst of which he grew up, Brian Dillon takes for guides some of the great connoisseurs of melancholy, from St Augustine to W. G. Sebald, by way of Sir Thomas Browne and Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. The result is a deeply moving testament, free of sentimentality and evasion, to life's intricacies and the pleasures and the inevitable pains they entail. In defiance of so much that is ephemeral, this is a book that will live.'

- John Banville, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005 'In the Dark Room moves beyond the specificity of recollected grief to explore the history of attempts to understand memory, from De Quincey to Proust and Bachelard. Like Van Veen in Nabokov's Ada or Ardor, Dillon delights in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds". The personal blends effortlessly with the universal to form a deeply evocative meditation on loss and the passage of time.'

- P. D. Smith, Guardian 'It is the deeply emotive nature of his "journey into memory" that presents Dillon with such a formidable task. Yet he not only succeeds in translating his personal experience into a book of immense, disturbingly lucid insight, but in doing so has written a meditation on the nature of memory that, in many places, could compare to the most open-hearted writings of Roland Barthes. It is an amazing achievement in terms of prose style alone.'

- Michael Bracewell, Daily Telegraph