Paperback, 832 pages
Published Sept. 15, 2020 by Ecco.
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in.
No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the …
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in.
No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.
I knew nothing about Susan Sontag before reading this. It is meticulous in its research and takes a neutral view. I found it worthwhile and very interesting.
Like Susan Sontag, I spent most of my adolescence in a hurry to read all the books I could find. Like Sontag. I am devoted to the idea of transformation. “I‘m only interested in people engaged in a project of transformation,” Sontag wrote in her journal in 1971. “If the desire for transformation can derive from a lack of positive self-satisfaction, it is also the enemy of self-satisfaction in the negative sense, of smugness and complacency,” argues Benjamin Moser, the author of the Sontag’s biography.
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, …
Like Susan Sontag, I spent most of my adolescence in a hurry to read all the books I could find. Like Sontag. I am devoted to the idea of transformation. “I‘m only interested in people engaged in a project of transformation,” Sontag wrote in her journal in 1971. “If the desire for transformation can derive from a lack of positive self-satisfaction, it is also the enemy of self-satisfaction in the negative sense, of smugness and complacency,” argues Benjamin Moser, the author of the Sontag’s biography.
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, etc. “Interpretation,” she wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag taught me not to trust the critics – an irony, as she was herself a critic. She has also change the way I see art, the way I read books and the way I write about books.
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