Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

by Sofia Samatar

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.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Essays, Crafts, Literature, Memoir, Books About Books

192 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 2024

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

[ocelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

sofia samatar I love your big beautiful obsessive hoarder mosaicist brain!! the weight she gives to naïveté 🫶🏻 this is what art is about to meeee. maybe I will even read her fiction soon (thank you to brendan for knowing me once again))

[Brenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do yourself a favor. Get out of your house. Catch a train going at least two and a half hours in any direction. Start your playlist collected from music Jeff Spurgeon has woken you up with ever since you decided it’s bad for you to have your phone in the same room as you while you sleep. Read this book in the dim light of the quiet car. Ignore the pangs of your feet in those new shoes you’re breaking in. Rock with the locomotive motion. Read. Figure out the meaning of Art.

[sbu_andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't know why I pick up books like these knowing I won't like them. I picked this one up because someone I went to high school with and haven't talked to since posted about this on her story. She's an author coach or whatever now. There's a bit of jealousy there; somehow, "author coach" seems cooler to me than "booktuber". Anyways, I was really drawn in by the conceit here--an epistolary craft book, with some literary criticism peppered in.

But the problem with these "on writing"-type books is that you need to already be bought in before you start reading, if you want the magic to work. Maybe that's a foregone conclusion, but I keep hoping that if I read enough of these, one of them will zap my brain and I'll be a teenager again, utterly convinced that I am a writer, all else be damned.

Whether it's fair to expect it or not, that didn't happen in Opacities. Strangely, my biggest problems with this book are common pitfalls in poetry--it's too associative, too esoteric. [Person whose name you only vaguely recognize] once wrote [vague aphorism that might gesture towards the craft of writing]. The gestures to writing are too weak, they don't resolve to anything the reader can take home. You're supposed to just--I don't know--bask in the vibe. Who knows? Maybe it's a sign I'm not really a writer.

[Hannah Bonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've ever read about writing.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

rtc

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

little did i realize how much this book has shaped my conceptions of writing re: note-taking, writing with/about authors, obsession, collaboration, correspondence, etc. etc. i read this fast the first time because it was so immediately resonant and exciting and i did not super think of it again but sofia samatar has clearly been living in my subconscious like a little gargoyle collaborator.....i love her. brain is not working fast enough today to put into words all of why i love this book but i want to include some notes to show her genius

- commonplace book, companion text
- "impossible projects"
-"i felt myself becoming antisocial, but what does social mean? social can mean 'being-forced-to-appear.'"
- "a dread not of being seen but of being caught"
- "i would write the INAUTHENTICITY MANIFESTO"
- "to go on writing to friends, to write intensively to friends, pouring out everything there, the thoughts, the quotations, the cries. it was a way to stay alive as a writer. we exchanged confidences and confidence. yo usaid it was when you were most a writer: in letters to other writers" (16)
- "i wished to take my incompleteness to extremes. i wanted never to write alone" (27)
- "how can the nothing and doesn't matter spread until writing is freed and becomes like a holiday?" (29)
- "the history of literature is a sinuous garland of plagiarism. allusion, citation, parody, translation, tribute, i wrote to you, and you wrote back to me, it's all i think about. this happened several times, that we passed certain phrases back and forth, the talismanic ones, exchanging them like mantras" (31)
- "that dissolution, the blurring of the edges of the self. it's all i want from writing: an incandescent reading" (32)
- "notes as stories" (39)
- "the pleasure of a process that threatened to become an end in itself" (42)
- "you wrote to me of a book that would be a catalogue of obsessions....you simply add to it, a little bit every day. a dream of the artist as magpie or wandering child or comfortable man with many hours: a dream of creation without suffering" (43)
-"'how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life'" (74)
- "i wrote that art was a communion of stranges, a seance, a private letter" (74)
- DURATION
- studium vs punctum
- "there were writers, you said, who wrote through reading. to become steeped in the other, filled up" (87)
- "porousness, i wrote. vulnerability to literature" (95)
- "'i simple want to say how much i love'" (96)
- "what i was writing, i thought, was simply what i wanted to keep. so as not to forget. so that, when i opened my book, i could return" (111)
- repetition & decanting
- contrapuntal reading, contrapuntal writing !!!!


initial review: i ate this like candy

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want Sofia Samatar to tuck me into her pocket and carry me around with her and whisper sweet nothings in my ear forever

[Emily Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike any book on writing I’ve ever read. Gave me a bit of the feeling of Drifts (Zambreno). This was also poetry. And it brought me thoughts I hadn’t articulated or touched all the way through before.

[miriam]

man whenever i read these kinds of books i can never actually comprehend what the point is nor understand the constant references and that makes me feel intensely stupid. maybe this would resonate more with someone more familiar with literary criticism and/or someone who has a compulsive need to write something profound to Be A Writer. that is not me however !

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is what happens when you're a writer who hoards quotes and passing thoughts; you're a dragon collecting all sorts of treasure. Opacities is not so much a how to be a writer guide, so much as it is a reflection on why one writes and engages with words (both your own and others'). I didn't really know what I was hoping to get when I picked this book up, to be honest. It wasn't what I expected, but it gave me some food for thought.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful morning read, it goes quickly, but inspires writing some morning pages afterwards :)

[Gray Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

reminds me of an old friend who’s writing i love who i don’t talk to anymore i wish i could give her this book! the resentment of traditional form in the writing and in the composition of the book really works for me. i want to write more but i am not an academic and this book reminded me that those two things are not mutually exclusive

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes every other book about writing not seem like it’s about writing

[archive ☄ · Rating 5 out of 5]

a book on writing and the writing life that combines sofia samatar's luminous prose with personal letters to our other greatest living writer, kate zambreno??? of course i'm making the library buy a copy and then buying myself one... this book needs to be in every hand at every hour :o)

[Milla Surjadi]

Audibly gasped when I saw this on Dylan and Becca's bookshelf and of course they had two copies, so I lugged this book from New York with me and then savored it in drips over two weeks. So glad this lived up to the hype and now I yearn to take a class that teaches this book in conjunction with Diego Garcia. Both books are about writing and rooted in epistolary relationships, which is to say they're really books about one's identity — and friendships — in relation to writing, and I sometimes think this is the best way to write about writing without sounding cringe.

This book does a lot, with so many layers that I appreciate. Obviously I am drawn to the message here that opacity (anonymity as a writer/self, incompleteness in writing, Samatar's desire for a never-ending book) enacts self-irreducibility, which enacts a pathway to intimacy, or what Samatar calls community. But most interesting to me is the desire for a model of writing that purifies, that polishes the self until it is annihilated into the object itself (As Goethe says: "There is a tender empiricism that makes itself so inwardly identical with the object that it thereby becomes true theory.") // A practice of writing that renders it both object and site of some rebirth ("a withdrawal that made one open to every passing current of air, touched by the gleam of every instant," "So writing will be a body and a dwelling.")

Also one of the most epic lines I've ever read: "Was it the way our work was read, pinioned in the tight bands of identity politics that made us so eager and so afraid to disappear? ... I've always been drawn to this matrix: dissolution / ecstasy / unbeing / object / self-as-object / abjection / multiplicity / THING."

***

"I wished to take my incompleteness to extremes. I wanted never to write alone."

"How close can you get? Are you doomed to objectify the other? The risk of throwing off the proper name -- yes, it can fail, I wrote, but for me it recreates the feeling of my most intense moments of reading. That dissolution, the blurring of the edges of the self. It's all I want from writing: an incandescent reading."

"'Art is not purity,' Lispector wrote. 'It is purification.' I wrote to you that this reminded me of religious language ... So for me this becomes a question of writing, I wrote. How do you purify, how do you polish? (The repetitive motion of polishing.)"

"This went far beyond self-expression. There is a tender empiricism that makes itself inwardly identical with the object. He felt this with a certainty that did not cease to hurt. 'This much no one can doubt: what he seeks has only one name. Painting.'"

"Annihilate the self, we wrote to one another. I don't know how many times. Annihilate the self. It wasn't about death, mysticism, or equilibrium, it was about reinventing oneself as a writer. Withdrawal was chrysalis. How to grow a completely different lung, for another breath."

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Then my humanism and anti-humanism became hopelessly confused, and I found myself ascribing motives to what I had written in a kind of trance. How does one present a coherent self? In a way, it was the problem of finding a place on a shelf in a bookstore, that is to say the problem of being sold. It was the problem of needing to be read, that is to say legible, visible, seen, discovered, purchased, and consumed. And yet, I wrote to you, it's not just that one hates being advertised, it's something deeper, I think, something that really has to do with writing. I quoted Blanchot, who wrote of "that neutral power, formless, without a destiny, which lies behind everything that is written."

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical, philosophical, and at times even mystical, this epistolary meditation on art, writing, and literature will appeal to writers and artists of all sorts, though I’m unsure if it was meant for a larger audience. Unlike other famous books on writing (i.e Lamott’s Bird by Bird or King’s On Writing), Opacities is not a memoir. Instead, it employs an exchange of brief letters between two writers. The style is quite meditative, the prose is full of imagery, and the book includes a hefty dose of quotations from great figures in art and literature. This is worthwhile for creatives seeking inspiration and consolation amidst the life of an artist.

[Charlie McCormick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have some aversion to the concept of reading about writing, on the basis such perspectives are necessarily indulgent and worn out. There were several pages in this book that only deepened the aversion, deafly rambling on about the torture of creation; but they were several more that got to me. My criticisms, my edits, the outside world - all melted on the turn of a few phrases. And of course I saw then the beauty of Samatar's prose, the sincerity of her references, the intrigue of her medium. This book doesn't ask too much of you, really, and I should not pretend otherwise - let alone pretend it doesn't give.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three short passages from Opacities:


*


…and when she wakes he asks her, how can loving happen, the emotion of loving, and she tells him, only through a mistake. Love comes through a lapse in the logic of the universe, never an act of will.


*


Deleuze and Guattari jumped up and down in my room like twin celluloid balls. White balls with blue stripes. When one of them touched the floor the other was in the air, a game they continued to play without stopping.


*


I can never understand, I wrote to you, what form a work should take. It’s like everything has to be written not only from the beginning of the work but actually from the beginning of all writing, as if nothing’s ever been written before, as if I’ve never read anything.


*

[Coco Peezy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Who are you when you write?” (157)

[Jenina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Timely reminder on the articulation of punctums

Great cast of encounters in Said, Glissant, Barthes, and ofc LISPECTOR

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ended up buying this and starting it over a long weekend, and then came back to it. I'm a sucker for writing craft books, and I've wondered how Samatar approaches it. This is really well done, and also really well constructed, in that the fragments move you forward in the book, and you want more of them. Definitely worth reading.

[Cay-lamity · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The writing consists largely of quotations,” Benjamin wrote of his work, “the craziest mosaic technique imaginable.” It was the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour of his life.”

“the nineteenth-century tradition of the deathbed memoir, a book dictated from one’s final pillow”

“We wrote often, sometimes several times a day. Flurries. You called it a buoyant fugue state. My friend K’eguro called it “doing an Emily Dickinson””

“Kafka: “Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.””

“El Wardany, who dreamed of a secret society of artists who lived and wrote according to this principle: the League of Incomplete Literature. Once, I had sent you his description of this curious group. “In their eyes,” El Wardany explained, “completed works conceal the incompleteness at their heart by way of an artificial unity: a unity whose purpose is to rescue their author. Incomplete works, however, are quite unashamed of this incompleteness. Indeed, they take it to its extreme as if to say, ‘You can never write alone.’””

“I WISHED TO take my incompleteness to extremes.”

“I began to imagine what I called the project of nothing. A project of deep aimlessness and anonymity.”

“Roberto Calasso saw that the history of literature is a sinuous garland of plagiarism. Allusion, citation, parody, translation, tribute, I wrote to you, and you wrote back to me, it’s all I think about.”

“LET US NOT desert one another,” Jane Austen urged that anonymous group, her fellow novelists. “We are an injured body.””

“THESE ARE JUST notes for another book, the one I wanted to write”

“YOU WROTE TO me of a book that would be a catalogue of obsessions. It reminded me of what Coleridge wrote about Sir Thomas Browne: that Browne was a Hunter of Oddities and Strangenesses, whose oeuvre was a collection, a Museum and Cabinet of Rarities.”

“It was both a journey and an image museum. I wrote to you that Angelopoulos said a film, despite its failures and omissions, remains a record of an intellectual journey: an inventory.”

“WHAT WAS A photograph? Kanai wondered. A question that touches the heart of writing, at least for a certain type of writer, the writer-collector. “Wasn’t it simply that a part of the world had been peeled away, and made a stain there? A stain of light.””

“Benjamin’s three stages of prose writing: the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. So first you have a song and at the end you have a piece of cloth”

“I WANTED TO send you something very small and perfect that would say everything. A single sentence. A word. A letter.”

“I am not interested in disclosure,” Petra Kuppers told her. “I am interested in discharge.” Words you and I would exchange several times in letters, moving a cursor to a place on the screen to induce the discharge of send. I don’t want to reject confessional writing outright, I wrote to you, but it’s a tricky mode for works received as black or feminist texts, autoethnography is expected of us, you get that voyeuristic thing where people are really looking for confession, trying to root it out, and it’s fetishistic, brutal, I wrote, one is deprived of philosophy, I’m less interested in “what happened to you” than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, yet untethered emotion, that’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.”

“I’ve always been drawn to this matrix: dissolution / ecstasy / unbeing / object / self-as-object / abjection / multiplicity / THING.”

“Think of the central nervous system and how it is discontinuous,” Ashon wrote. “Our sense perception of the world is grounded in the fact of our flesh’s discontinuous nature: nerve endings are detached and information must leap, must jump, must produce choreographies of encounter with other nerve endings.”

“Vibration,” Ashon told me, “is what allows us to sense that we are, in fact, touching, though such a fact is really only ever a metaphor.”

“You wrote that you often thought of writing as a sickness, after Wittgenstein, who wrote, in a friend’s copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Each one of these sentences is the expression of a disease.””

“When someone is vomiting,” wrote Marguerite Duras, “you hold him tenderly.”

“Wittgenstein: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!””

“Alejandra Pizarnik, who said she wanted to die standing up like an axolotl drinking time in its glass cage. “The voices burn in every limb. To sink in the pinholes of light of a rainy dawn. Impossible situations. Wind, time.” In the middle of a line she changed languages, writing in French now, her foreign tongue, her mirror, the language she could remember learning to write—a process that must have taken significant time. “Pas compris,” she wrote. “J’ai rien compris. Pas compris un seul mot.””

“TO BE A copyist of beloved things must be the best occupation,” wrote Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, clicking duplicate on a pdf of the artist Lee Lozano’s notebooks. “The hands stay busy so the mind’s leash can slacken. To become transparent . . .””

“Pierre Menard’s great work remained unfinished. It still lies open, like an extended hand.”

“HOW, INDEED,” ASKS Abdelfattah Kilito in The Author and His Doubles, “can one speak of bilingualism without citing, evoking, and invoking animals? Behind every articulation of language lies an inarticulate cry.”

“CAN ONE—or at least could one ever—begin to write without taking oneself for another?” asked Roland Barthes. He dreamed of copying André Gide—not only his works but his practices, his way of strolling through the world, a notebook in his pocket and a phrase in his head.”

“Imitation makes community. It is an affectionate art.”

“WHY RECORD these notes, which, by the time they are written, will have been written by someone who no longer exists?”

“SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN wrote that Hélène Cixous worked on the same subjects over and over until they became “decanted.” I loved this idea of writing as distillation, a chemical process. Cixous wrote that she wanted to be a painter. She wanted, like Monet, to paint the cathedral twenty-six times”

“Clarice Lispector, who said, “I’d like to write a story full of all the instants, but that would suffocate even the protagonist.””

“I want to write a book that is stripped down to almost nothing”

“ALL NIGHT LONG I make the night,” Alejandra Pizarnik wrote. “All night long I write. Word by word I am writing the night.”

“it wasn’t an escape from the world but rather an entering in, it was talk of life, it was one of those mornings Rilke wrote of, made of a million tiny insuppressible movements, when objects vibrate into one another and out into the air, there is no main object in the garden, everything is everywhere diffused, and one would have to be in everything in order to miss nothing.”

“It was still early morning, and the smell of the dust that had sunk into the earth and gravel during the night mingled with the exhalations of the trees and vegetation, leaving a sweetness in the cool dawn atmosphere. Expanding her slightly painful rib cage—using the muscles that were stretched around the ribs—she breathed the sweetness in, and the pain, turning into particles, was drawn with it into the depths of her lungs.”

[Eli]

not even Franz Kafka could save this one

[Apgepps · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt a bit like reading the contents of a very pretentious person‘s notes app. Sorry.

[KBiagioli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another reviewer, Apgepps, wrote the best review of this book that I can find: "Felt a bit like reading the contents of a very pretentious person‘s notes app. Sorry."

[Mihiret · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a fan of Sofia Samatar's challenging and intricate fiction, including A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, and her travel memoir The White Mosque, so I was intrigued by the chance to read her thoughts on writing. Opacities is not a book on craft, though it definitely engages questions of how and why to be a writer, and I don't think we have a good word yet to describe the genre of its contents--mostly shorter parts (grouped into longer sections), they are less definite and more exploratory than many essays, almost like statements or interrogations in a longer conversation about writing and the challenges of being a minoritized writer. Many of them engage with quotations from other writers (building on them, challenging them) or are continuations from letters exchanged with another writer. They ask questions; when they answer them, they don't expect those answers to be definite. It's an active book that asks a lot of its reader, and I found it fascinating. It leaves the reader interrogating their own relationship to writing (as a producer, as a consumer).

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

[Dani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really hard to rate this one.

Samatar is a beautiful writer, with her interconnected musings often reading like prose poetry. Even though I enjoyed the imagery, themes, and questions/quotations/conversations presented, it all felt a little too abstract and thought experiment-y for me to grab onto in a meaningful way. Maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace while reading. Given the title, maybe the opaqueness is more intentional than I assumed?

Many of Samatar's references also made me feel like a philistine — I consider myself reasonably well-read, but I was completely unfamiliar with many of the writers (Lispector, Kapil, Kanai) Samatar turned to again and again and I wonder if that affected my ability to connect with or understand some of the points she was trying to explore. I am grateful for the extensive bibliography at the end so that I can discover more of the writers namedropped here.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a series of notes on writing, Samatar musing to herself and her correspondents about the act of writing and how to think about it in order to incorporate it into your life. Consequently, it's a book which will most resonate with other writers. The subtitle is appropriate.

Many of the pages contain a single thought, often based on the quote of another writer. (She's particularly enamored of Rilke). As such, these are thoughts to muse upon, not race through. It's almost like a book of koans. For those who want to pursue the quotes, there are full citations in the back of the book.

I can see writers having a copy of this book to hand so that occasionally they can dip into it to spark their thinking – not about the actual thing they're writing, but how to become the writer they strive to be.

[William John Wither]

Writing, that feral act. The simultaneous need to be seen and decimated. And, here, a balm in the form of another (whether Zambreno or an author's words). I always find myself jealous of those writers who find that one 'other' with which to enact playhouse mirror – this seeing the self distorted and new. It is both heartening and wrenching, in that it can only take one (Kaveh Akbar and Tommy Orange, for example), and yet one is so hard.

I admire Samatar's mind in how it recognizes and dissects patterns. The class is all present – Lispector, Rilke, Kafka, Barthes, to name a few – and yet what do we do with all those words when living, at times, quavers like a limping moan?

Much to enjoy here, this box of feelings, read once for the poetics and twice for the tapestry. Lapped up like a pond-wet dog.