Affinities
By Brian Dillon
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
London, 2023

The third installment in a trilogy by the Irish writer Brian Dillon (following 2017’s Essayism and his 2020 masterpiece of comparative literary criticism Suppose a Sentence), Affinities (2023) assembles 30 or so monochromatic images that he deconstructs not so much for their artistic value but for their biographical details and imbedded narratives. Less a collection of art criticism then, or even “historicity,” the book tries, and often fails (by Dillon’s own self-deprecatory admission), to make connections between affinities, and to attempt, in the author’s approximation, to “render the obtuseness of the image with some but not too much acuity.” He even argues in his introduction that to have an affinity for something is not so much “a question of beauty or quality or taste, or other external aesthetic values,” and that the book is something discursive, exploratory, expansive. It is also a leap in the dark, an “idiotic project: naïve, impossible, disingenuous,” the undertaking of a “monkish task . . . while the world went to hell.”