Ambivalence Author: Brian DillonISBN-13: 9781804272480 Publisher: Fitzcarraldo EditionsGuideline Price: £14.99To choose to write a memoir in the third person – in the manner of Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story – is to necessarily install some distance between author and reader. Subverting expectations for unreserved disclosure, the memoirist’s decision to present the self as an assiduously crafted “he” or “she” – or in the case of Brian Dillon’s new memoir Ambivalence, as a whittled-down, singular initial, “B” – is to approach the genre from a different angle. From the outset, it is to “tell it slant”, in poet Emily Dickinson’s memorable words. Renowned for his elegant excavations of the units which compose contemporary literary culture such as the essay, the image and the sentence, in his newest work Dillon forays into less discrete and indeed potentially “ambivalent” terrain: the story of an education. Tracing his own nonlinear path through school, and later his undergraduate and postgraduate work in Dublin and Canterbury, Ambivalence presents a conflicted portrait of traditional academia, instead assembling a more lateral tribute to maverick mentors, continental lodestars (Derrida, Cixous, Barthes) and the trajectory of a boy who “never stopped reading” despite considerable early loss. [ ‘My brother kicked me in the balls, but I threw a knife at his head. We were in a strange world after our parents died’Opens in new window ]The book, beginning from B’s schooldays and ending with his move to England for a postgraduate position in the mid-1990s, is structured into loosely chronological sections broken up by two more essayistic intervals on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Derek Jarman and Walter Benjamin. The writing is heady with literary theory, yet the decision to narrate B’s pedagogical adventures in the present tense aerates these scholarly references, animates them with the “flash and dare” of something more elusive than degree certificates: a sensibility, or a style. Dillon has the latter in abundance. Ambivalence’s more intricate challenge is how to recount an intellectual apprenticeship without lapsing into nostalgia, or an unfettered “influx of feeling”. This is the ambivalence at the book’s core: B’s initial struggle to reconcile the pursuit of knowledge with a parallel desire to practise “care”. As B cultivates his own idiosyncratic training as a critic, the binary between theory and sentiment softens. To be ambivalent is to resist making up one’s mind, and to waver between fixed positions, yet Dillon here makes it an intimate art form. Alice Blackhurst is a writer, academic and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image