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geoffdgeorge 's review for:
Tone
by Sofia Samatar, Kate Zambreno
Hated it.
This book could have been an email, for all it actually illuminates/observes/argues about tone. Mostly poses questions rather than trying to arrive at any answers. Takeaways boil down to 1) tone is inherently a subjective concern (duh), 2) tone is a communal practice, in that it's an attempt to share an atmosphere/mood/vibe with others, and both writer and reader are active participants in this community (which, OK, sure, but again: duh), and 3) tone is an amorphous concept that's difficult to pin down (a dilemma you'd think the book would be trying to reconcile, but instead the authors mostly arrive at: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
And its own tone is just so much self-indulgent, academic-poetic bullshit. A sample sentence:
This book could have been an email, for all it actually illuminates/observes/argues about tone. Mostly poses questions rather than trying to arrive at any answers. Takeaways boil down to 1) tone is inherently a subjective concern (duh), 2) tone is a communal practice, in that it's an attempt to share an atmosphere/mood/vibe with others, and both writer and reader are active participants in this community (which, OK, sure, but again: duh), and 3) tone is an amorphous concept that's difficult to pin down (a dilemma you'd think the book would be trying to reconcile, but instead the authors mostly arrive at: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
And its own tone is just so much self-indulgent, academic-poetic bullshit. A sample sentence:
For reading Sebald is not reading a singular voice but a library of the past, in the case of The Rings of Saturn ventriloquizing the baroque style of Thomas Browne, so perhaps reading Sebald in Michael Hulse's translation is in some ways closer to the "circles of his spiralling prose" originally intended, if we assume that Sebald read Browne and other seventeenth-century writers in English, so that a dubbing or doubling was already occurring (with that we think of Borges, another kindred spirit in the text, on the artifice of dubbing movies, which is also thinking through voice in translation, the uncomfortable chimrera in our own consciousness).
Mind-numbing—and unrewarding. Compares tone to colors and to "the hoard" and to other abstract concepts. It's like being cornered at a party with a synesthete on hallucinogens, forced to listen politely to their nonsense.
The book reveals nothing new about craft, about how thinking on tone has evolved, about what might separate tone from a piece of writing's other concerns. Off to the nearest Little Free Library it goes, to hopefully be picked up by someone who gets more out of it than me.