Tone

by Sofia Samatar, Kate Zambreno

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.”

In Tone , a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks.

This study treats a variety of How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading―and living―together.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Writing, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Literature, Adult

144 pages, Hardcover

Published November 21, 2023

About the author

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar.

Reviews

[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meanderingly brilliant and made me want to read every cited book. I learned a lot about tone but never directly. I had to find my own insights in the atmosphere here.

I also loved this interview with the authors: https://tinhouse.com/podcast/kate-zam...

[X]

DNF. Even if you find this book’s tone (lol) appealing - it’s written as sort of a self-aware, semi-ironic academia hivemind - I think you need to have read the (mostly obscure) books they reference in order to get something out of this.

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ratings have no meanings. This is here merely to describe what a deliciously juicy sticky treat this was–one which I plan to dip in to stretch and play with often.

[Kyle]

I would like to petition to join the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere.

[Isa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the best way, this book felt like the walks I take after hitting a j or having a biiiiit of a microdose. This book was airy, meandering, and felt like conversations in the daytime under a big tree.

[ocelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a special book!! hard to rate! I, like the authors, think that I read books for atmosphere above all else. the slipperiness of the subject makes it a challenging read but samatar and zambreno approach the concept of tone with a playfulness and genuine desire to connect and share with each other, to study in a way that feels intuitive and good, that makes it difficult to be put off or bored. their conceptualization of tone based in the collection and arrangement of elements in space reeeeallly made sense to me. loved the chapter on the hoard best — atmosphere as something that can only be created and experienced as a collective, a hoard as both process and product, a self-generating liveliness. couldn’t stop thinking about Raving reading this, in particular Wark’s comments on the way the rave is a product of queer ravers, “for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life,” how their bodies and energy create atmosphere for the consumption of coworkers. rambling now but overall the kind of book that hammered in the desire to read broadly and voraciously, always grateful for that

[Emily Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the collaborative nature of this.

Someone mentioned previously that having read the cited texts would probably engender a better personal reading experience. I agree. I hadn’t come across many of the texts, especially essays, but when something I had read was mentioned, my brain tickled delightfully.

[archive ☄ · Rating 5 out of 5]

so glad i live in the timeline where this magnificent book has been written...!

[Sonja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure of what to make of this book. Tone is a consideration that opens up the conversation I think. A kind of new space to think and talk about literature more broadly. I think I will have to read it again sometime. It’s intriguing.

[Aimee Knupsky (bookchantment) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of collaboration I have with my dear friend. How lucky I have been.

[Geoff]

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:

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.

[Mishari · Rating 5 out of 5]

دراسة نبرة الأشياء تبدو لنا كمشروع لا يمكن القيام به على انفراد. ما الذي يخلق جو الغرفة؟ الآخرون الذين بداخلها: اجتماع صدى أصواتهم، الصخب أم المداعبة، تمديد وتقصير تحولات مشاعرهم المتراكمة والموحدة، الدفء الذي ينبعث من ملابسهم، شعرهم، رائحة القلق، للسعادة أم للاستياء، للإعجاب المستقبلي. وإذا كانت الغرفة فارغة، فيوجد هناك أثر في الهواء لأولئك الذين غادروا للتو. إلى أي مدى يمكن ملاحظة عطر يتلاشى؟ أم أثاث مجعد ومموه بضغط الجلوس والعرق. الدافع وراء اختيار مصباح الضوء. الأيادي التي صاغت، ونقلت، وصقلت هذه الأشياء. في الأرضيات، بقع دماء ودموع موجودة من قبل وصولنا تراكمت منذ كان هناك موقد في هذا المكان، وشعر كثير من القطط والكلاب. نحلة محاصرة تضرب زجاج النافذة. الذي جذبنا إلى موضوع نبرة الأشياء هو أنه عبارة عن ذبذبات قامت بتشكيلنا بحيث أصبحنا ننتمي لها؛ لكن لا تنتمي لنا.
— كيت زمبرينو و صوفيا سمتر

[Will Fassler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book for my songwriting. All of the images throughout really stuck with me, and I've felt very called to the snow and cold recently.

Here are my fav thoughts so I can keep track when I look back:

The colorless patch of sky, the double meaning of hoard, "muffled man-made air," there's lots of food but its all inedible, "eating is their time," the nestless blackbirds feeding on local waste, are-bure-boke quality Japanese photographs, Fukases impressionist photographs, atonal parrots, rabbits, an inescapable odor under your nose, the nonexistent bird seen by mistake, Barry Lopez photographing a polar bear, the absence of tone in snow, the windows.

I really liked the aviary or animal chapter. The jump cuts throughout are a helpful tool. Sometimes my eyes glazed over and I was not interested, but when I did enjoy, I enjoyed!

[Lene Kretschz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5ish. The first chapters are lovely, revelatory even, and I was really looking forward to a five star book and then the whole thing just sort of...fell apart. Trenchant literary criticism was replaced by aimless quote-mining, and biting insights into the academy as institution devolved into self-pitying whining.

I've had issues with Zambreno's recent work but had hoped that the presence of Samatar, a writer and thinker I greatly admire, would rein in her worst impulses. Sadly, no such luck. A disappointment overall, but the first few chapters are worth a read.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

More than a little pretentious but not totally unpleasant. Interesting and somewhat stimulating even if it goes too far afield of what it says on the box. Was frustrated by an entire chapter being dedicated to Sebald who, to me, is only interesting in how atonal his writing is, how devoid of atmosphere it is. It's almost an anti-style. But they don't have much to say different about different authors. So not really what I was looking for but not a waste of time by any stretch (it's super short).

[Anna Frohling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this would be about how to write tone for fiction but apparrantly not
a third of this book is the authors taling about themselves talking about their work a zoom call then going to a college and for a talk about themselves and they order food but their order gets their last and isnt that crazy and wheres my cheeseburger

[Sean Mead · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is the union of incompetence and pretentiousness.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very satisfying read, contained and certainly with purpose. Certainly need more writings that posit philsophizing around a few central literatures.

[Roanna Flowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting. Thoughtful. Completely different. Engaging. Dense. Sometimes foggy. Deep. A book to underline. A book that will make you buy other books.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tone analyzes & connects many interesting works of literature, but is so wide-ranging with such a short length that it doesn't really feel like there's much of a central idea threading the book together as a whole. Many fascinating vignettes and a compelling writing style, but it lacks the coherence I'd expect of a work of literary criticism. It's promising enough I'd still read more work by the authors, though.