My memories of reading Geoff Dyer’s first essay collection, Anglo-English Attitudes, are inseparable from the location in which I first encountered it. We had driven for several hours through the Massif Central, arriving to discover that we were a day late for our hotel booking. An apologetic host explained that our room was now occupied by the mistress of a French politician, who preferred to sleep alone. After offering refreshments, he found us lodging nearby, at what turned out to be the former home of the Marquis de Sade. It was a discovery made by chance, always by chance; deliberation robs such encounters of their vitality, and it remains the most memorable hotel I have visited.
Most of the essays I recall from Anglo-English Attitudes reappear in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which also includes nearly all of the essays collected in Working the Room. Dyer is at his best in the longer essays, when he has room to digress, and when his exuberance can carry the reader beyond the ostensible subject.
The essay on William Gedney is particularly striking. Dyer draws lightly on Joyce, Coleridge, Walter Benjamin, Marguerite Yourcenar, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Fielding to explore the life of the autodidactic photographer. Before finishing the volume, I found myself ordering several photography monographs, adding novels to my wish list, and seeking out unfamiliar jazz recordings. This is not criticism written to fine-tune analytic functions; Dyer’s writing inspires a renewal of attention, a widening of passions.
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