I don’t remember who it was who said ‘memory is genius’, but they were on to something. I’m not sure, either, whether they meant genius in the original sense of ‘animating spirit’ — i.e. memory as constitutive of personality — or in the modern one of ‘brilliance’. But both seem to apply equally well to the peculiar talents of Geoff Dyer.
He seems to have a photographic memory; and that’s not a figure of speech. He can remember photographs in an extraordinary way, as witness the opening essays in this collection, in which he spiels on photographers including Alec Soth, Jacob Holdt, Richard Avedon and Martin Parr.
As well as some killer phrases (Avedon’s split-second exposures mean ‘the creases in people’s faces have an air of geological permanence … Isaak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world — about two thousand years ago’), Dyer has an extraordinary ability to cross-reference; to find rhymes or contrasts in other photographs by other photographers elsewhere.
A fascinating piece sees him try to find the other photographs of Times Square on VE Day that might, in the background, have captured Ruth Orkin taking her own photograph of the scene. When he describes what interests him in photographs, he does so with absolute conviction.
And he’s as sure-footed on literature: perceptive, decisive and precise. There are generous reviews here of Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore and Alan Hollinghurst, as well as pieces on the Goncourt journals, Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West and D. H. Lawrence. A deprecating appraisal of Susan Sontag’s fiction opens into a wider discussion of the relationship between critic and practitioner, and a sympathetic account of why her fiction meant so much to Sontag, and yet failed.
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