The photography and film essays have some highlights as well. You are really the only one who likes Walser that much. What saves this book are the lively pieces about writing. Without her literary hero-worship, it’s a lot of political posturing and one of her favorite subjects: torture, torture, and more torture.Īgain, the Sontag of the oughts is kind of a drag. This collection would benefit greatly from one of Sontag’s signature hagiographies, her essays championing semi-obscure European writers. Important takeaway: the Sontag of the oughts can be kind of a drag. The book’s reception was not all negative, however: it won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.Īt the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007)Īt the Same Time collects 16 essays and speeches all written in the last years of Sontag’s life, and they just don’t have the same playfulness or provocations as her earlier political essays do. It’s intellectually bereft it never finds the right tone. Sontag’s saga-and boy, does it read like a saga-of immigrant actress Maryna Zalewska (real name: Helena Modjeska) and her rise to stardom in the late 19th-century lacks the heft I expect from a Sontag book. As a novel it’s overwritten and overdramatic, but not quite over-the-top enough to be camp, which would have saved the whole debacle. The book that got Sontag accused of plagiarism is probably best known as that. Thus it’s hanging around here with the other Sontag fiction flotsam. If someone brought it to your graduate fiction workshop they would get an earful about whether the narrative holds up (it doesn’t). It’s cheating that this counts as its own entry, when it’s essentially just a short story about AIDS that got a lot of play. There’s no need to write about Sontag’s short stories. At least she has Jean Strouse in her corner. Poor Alice James: a miserable life in the shadow of her famous brothers and then this.
This was a close call: Sontag’s play might be worse. Why did Sontag feel she had to write experimental fiction? Was there something in the water in the 1960s that makes books like this so prevalent? This is the worst of Sontag: pretentious, overly serious, and the worst sin of all, boring. The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) TIE With her gift for always being in the zeitgeist, Sontag ensured that she’d be talked about well into her afterlife. I also have not included the essential and revelatory diaries which were published after her death: Reborn: Journals 1947-1963 and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 1964-1980 as they represent a whole new phase of Sontag’s career. I have also not ranked the book Sontag’s latest biographer, Benjamin Moser, among many others, attributed to Sontag: her ex-husband Philip Rieff’s career-making Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. I’m working off the list of the bibliography on the Susan Sontag Foundation website, sans the anthology and the film scripts (it’s so Sontag to have included the two obscure film scripts she wrote among her oeuvre). These are all books Sontag released in her lifetime ( At the Same Time was already edited but not published when she died in 2004).
SUSAN SONTAG HOW TO
As for the monographs, several of them dazzle, but how to find their proper spots among her works is rough going.
From that, we will inevitably diverge on which of her essay collections (to me, her most important work) is most vital. We are going to clash about which essays are best. You are going to disagree with what I say about her fiction, especially the early stuff. There is no way for this not to be a throwdown.
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