In the Dark Room: a Journey in Memory
A critical essay collection on culture, vision, and memory. It probes how images and photographs shape perception and personal recollection, and it asks hard questions about contemporary culture.
Work Information
Using the relation between image and memory as a starting point, these essays trace the link between private experience and culture. The prose is quiet, but the observations are sharp.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Ireland
- Published
- 2006-08-31
- Pages
- 256 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 1.6 x 19.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781844880478
- ISBN-10
- 1844880478
- Category
- 洋書/Professional & Technical/Professional Science/Behavioral Sciences
Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, "In the Dark Room" explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing.
Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room , a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives , which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.
Reviews
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deep book
arrived as described. the book is a bit difficult to read......fascinating but very deep.
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Intimate read on loss
This is a heavy book that requires one to take time with it - not because it's boring; I found the style very accessible even with the many intertextual references. No, the prose works very well, but it is the content, the ideas, those memories and experiences that the author is reminded of through tangible objects and places in his life that make the reader both drawn into the prose and simultaneously re-thinking their own experiences and memories. I felt wholly immersed in this book and thinking about it constantly while reading it. I wanted to turn the pages as fast as possible while also wanting to stay in it and make time stop somehow. It is a book with an atmosphere which may be difficult to be in at times - loss and bereavement are the central themes of this book, so beware, yet it is not a depressing read or one that just leaves you emotionally exhausted. Rather, it offers an intimate look into another's grief, allows you to sit in it with the author and think on your own experiences and life which, inevitably, goes on.
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Great service
Good
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this is not a fitzcarraldo editions book.
you receive the Penguin-published edition, which is £3 cheaper. Do not buy this.
Related Literary Awards
- Irish Book Awards Edition 4 (2006) ・Winner