Brian Dillon
Radical Will
Susan Sontag
By Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Reaktion 214pp £10.95
Ten years after her death, the question of Susan Sontag’s standing as a critic and novelist remains as vexed as it was in her life, but for more dismaying reasons. In her last decades it seemed, with some exceptions (notably the reflections on images of atrocity in Regarding the Pain of Others), that Sontag had squandered the hard, sleek brilliance of her early criticism in grand inflated verities. But now we’re also asked to accept the relatively trivial point that behind her cosmopolitan élan and erudition, she was, well, not very nice. And worse, that the strenuous literary self-invention, careerist fretting and personal animus on show in her diaries (two volumes of which have appeared since her death) prove nothing less than what her detractors had always claimed: Sontag was a charlatan, gussying banalities in avant-garde togs, shrugging on and off the philosophical or political garb of her intellectual betters.
In fact the diaries, and now this short but instructive biography, prove the opposite, or at least make a more generous case. Above all, Sontag was a writer – with all the longing, doubt, envy and occasional sabotage of her own talent that implies. I can’t be alone in thinking
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk