They grumble about the troubles of their life with no understanding of their own role in creating them. Most of the time, they are hilariously lacking in self-awareness. Teoria is an amusing and unreliable narrator.

Feeling is more compelling and insistent than what we call ‘ideas’. Why is it that the mind can be caught up so heavily in feeling? We have been taught that the mind can be marshalled and feeling can be sublimated, but this, I swear, is false. My distractions seem more compelling than the dissertation. You see, “Teoria,” as one lover calls the narrator, is one of those PhD students who finds it hard to do anything but work on their thesis, while at the same time seeming to never make any progress in actually finishing it. Although they certainly have a lot to say about the women themselves, a lot of the focus is on how the lovers interrupt and fuel the narrator’s decade-long dissertation project. Told in the first person from an unnamed academic narrator (likely a Black woman or afab person-but deliberately ambiguous), Theory chronicle their life’s important love affairs. How meta would it be to study this book in a post-secondary classroom or in a university professor’s research, this book which is about both of those things?įor those readers who are plot-centred, it might feel like a stretch to call Theory a novel at all. At least in its niche market, I imagine it will become an important text.

Theory is almost two years old at this point but I can’t imagine it being irrelevant anytime soon. (As you can see what with my use of the word discourse, I’m slipping back into my academic jargon already). It’s written in a self-referential discourse that is bitingly authentic to arts and humanities academia, so much so that it’s hard to imagine anyone without that background being interested in the book at all. Dionne Brand’s most recent book, Theory, is one of those novels that does what it sets out to do absolutely perfectly but what it sets out to do isn’t going to be for everyone.

Theory dionne brand