Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

by Sofia Samatar

Overview

Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing

In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.  

In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?

Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593767679
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192

About the Author

SOFIA SAMATAR is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award Finalist. Her works range from the World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno. Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Editorial Reviews

"Sofia Samatar’s Opacities is simply one of the most beautiful books about writing, about being a writer, that I’ve ever read." —Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy

"Sofia Samatar's Opacities lowers us into the deepest part of the sentence, past ruin, past the drowned, past the moon, past the future, past the writer and her ink where the ragged dark begins to sing. Opacities is a posthumous book written by the living. I read this entire book in the pitch-black to keep all its brilliant secrets safe." —Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily

“Opacities is a writer’s notebook that we get to read pre-posthumously, a conversation with the self and the dead, a gesture toward the fantasy of publication without publicity. A book for Rilke’s 'narrow ledge,' full of intimacy and intensity, comforts and agitations, the haunting desires of artists.” —Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance and Any Person Is the Only Self

"In the profound company of others and in conversations with ghosts, Opacities is a work of great intimacy and intelligence. It is both mesmerizing and consoling to dwell in the meditative space Sofia Samatar has created. Her submerged narratives haunt (now coming to the surface, now subsiding) allowing room for the reader to enter the text in any number of ways. A most irresistible experience." —Carole Maso, author of AVA and Mother & Child

“Was ever a darkness so refulgent as Sofia Samatar’s Opacities? With her distinctively supple line, Samatar summons a troupe of literary night-guides from Kafka to Djebar and leads us to the so-called vanishing point where scarcity inverts to fullness and nothing vanishes except our certainties. Obsidian, inky, rippling, Vantablack, Samatar’s vision of literature restores the dream of the night library, where we can and should read in the dark, and where the Future rises up with the face of the New Moon—her next and original face.” —Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral

"Opacities fantasizes many models of writing, including the 'companion text,' the project that 'lasts your whole life,' the one that includes failure and 'deep aimlessness,' and the book that writes itself, by virtue of an accumulation of index cards in a shoebox. Opacities dreams of connectivity and communion. It strives to bring into correspondence the talismanic writers of the literary imaginary, and, in a voice reminiscent of the address in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Samatar conjures an anonymous, epistolary intimate. It is a book about process and ambivalence, one that ultimately evinces a deep-seated passion for the creative acts that are reading and writing." —Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards

"What is a writing method that 'is less like writing and more like living?' Sofia Samatar develops this question as a form of metallurgy in Opacities, a book that sets autobiography in motion until what remains is what we love the most: a notebook. Blurry, snorting and stamping it's hoof in the rain, the notebook's hybridity is both void and animal: 'Zero. Zero.' To write this bifurcated or doubled zero, Samatar thinks 'through the hole.' This is an 'incompleteness' taken to 'extremes,' and I'm here for it. Anything I could possibly write in support of this beautiful book falls short of the elation I felt when reading, something that happened in one sitting because I could not set it down." —Bhanu Kapil

From the Publisher

2024-03-25
The author of The White Mosque reflects on her literary self.

“I wrote to you of a writing method: Take notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is done,” writes Samatar near the beginning of her second work of nonfiction, which she hopes will “be a tonic; not a course of study, but a course of treatment.” In a series of short notes addressed to an unspecified recipient, the author reflects on her attempts to find “a writing method” that feels “less like writing and more like living,” while also grappling with the practicalities of a creative life, which include a lack of sufficient time, a struggle against the complexity of being relegated to the “diversity sideshow,” and a desire to be considered marketable enough to be “sold.” To make sense of the contradictions of her chosen path, Samatar quotes a variety of literary thinkers, ranging from historical stalwarts like Kafka and Barthes to modern writers of color such as Bhanu Kapil and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Throughout, Samatar linguistically circles back to the idea of her truest literary self, constantly returning to the question, “Who are you when you write?” On a line level, this formally inventive book is a pleasure to read. The author’s confessional tone, tightly efficient sentences, and use of white space produce a stunning aesthetic. Structurally, though, the notes spiral between a set of unanswerable questions and their associated emotions without landing satisfyingly. While the ending’s ambiguity is aligned with the book’s tone (and its title), the story feels more like a moment in time than a narrative arc, leaving readers wondering exactly how the process of writing this book affected Samatar’s perception of herself within and outside of her craft.

A sometimes cloudy but beautifully written meditation on the writing life.

Kirkus Reviews