$39.99
ISBN: 9780062896391
Availability: Click Title for IN STOCK Location
Published: Ecco - September 17th, 2019
No one, not even herself or her closest friends, truly understood why or how Susan Sontag became famous. In her eyes, she and all people preferred living their metaphors’ imagery over the life necessitated within their own physical body, so perhaps because she was beautiful, the only lineage she inherited from her unloving mother, and maybe because she was friends with Andy Warhol, whose genius helped manufacture an entire era’s fame, Sontag herself lived into her own genius, and she just became one, and thus lived as one, her lived metaphor of choice. As her biographer, Benjamin Moser, shows in greatly scenic detail, Sontag was raised in the Nazi era of heightened Jewish persecution, and in growing up from her mother’s utter cold and her father’s absence, she lived to transcend such oppression, dabbling in a succession of diminishing human relationships, including multiple failed marriages; an abundance of lovers, both male and female; and sincere forays into S&M guises, all of which described her character in the Freudian terms which she studied and wrote about in her essays, and which shaped her fame with greater clarity than even her physical beauty could. Sontag grew into the impression her lifetime’s critics defined, though, that her fictions were only mediocre, while her essays’ nonfictions were brilliant, her seminal studies on “camp,” and in Against Interpretation, On Photography, and perhaps especially in Illness as Metaphor, furthering her generation’s break from establishment lifestyles, for how she provided the imagery for that break, works which remain in print now fifteen years following her death, while her fictions fade, absent their stories’ universal insights. ~ Reviewed by Ray Marsocci
