"Testifying to the greatness of an underappreciated work of art is the core purpose of criticism, and Dyer has delivered a loving example that's executed with as much care and craft as he finds in his subject...he finds elements along the way that will keep even non-"cineastes" onboard. While he dedicates ample energy to how the movie's deliberate pacing runs contrary to modern cinema, its troubled production and the nuts and bolts of its deceptively simple parts, Dyer's rich, restless mind draws the reader in with specific, personal details." -"Los Angeles Times "
"Dyer's evocation of "Stalker" is vivid; his reading is acute and sometimes brilliant...Dyer is giving a performance, and it's another Russian genius who presides over his book, namely Vladimir Nabokov..."Zona" is extremely clever." -"New York Times Book Review"
"Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin's high definition, not all great, perhaps, but so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre? The English writer Geoff Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys. There is nothing anywhere like Dyer's semi-fictional rhapsody about jazz, "But Beautiful, "or his book about the First World War, "The Missing of the Somme, " or his autobiographical essay about D. H. Lawrence, "Out of Sheer Rage, " or his essayistic travelogue, "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do it." Dyer's work is so restlessly various that it moves somewhere else before it can gather a family. He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight."--James Wood, "The New Yorker "
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