Plaiting personal address with unconnected scenes across literary history, Opacities invites writers to coexist beside dead giants and to dream of different texts, including one that “lasts your whole life.” Sofia Samatar, whose memoir, The White Mosque (Catapult, 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, imbues each page with a voice that is as lyrical as her evocations are sweeping. Aided by vignettes of Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Bhanu Kapil, and many others, Samatar presents a writing practice that is necessarily intertextual. As she considers “the ghostliness of collage,” Rainer Maria Rilke appears directly before the reader, “writing the words of phantoms” as Samatar does, before “a wave roll[s] toward him out of the distant past.” Navigating the role of the author— compelled, anonymous, or indistinguishable from the text itself—Opacities is a meditative map of the spectrum of literary desires and anxieties.
