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Susan Sontag: A Biography
对桑塔格来说，“最后的知识分子”的荣誉应该属于本雅明。《在土星的标志下》的末尾有一段令人十分动容的话，它不仅标志着一个个体存在于世的使命，更标志了知识分子时代的终结。这段话也是桑塔格一生的基调，她写道：在末日审判时，这位最后的知识分子——现代文化具有土星气质的英雄，带着他的残篇断简、他睥睨一切的神色、他的沉思，还有他那无法克服的忧郁和俯视的目光——会解释说，他占据许多“立场”，并会以他所能拥有的正义且超人的方式来捍卫精神的生活，直到永远。
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
19 people are currently reading
712 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Schreiber
42 books189 followersDaniel Schreiber, geboren 1977, ist als Kunstkritiker für verschiedene internationale Zeitungen und Magazine tätig. Er ist Autor der Susan-Sontag-Biografie 'Geist und Glamour' (2007) sowie der hochgelobten Essays Nüchtern (2014), Zuhause (2017) und des Bestsellers Allein (2021). Er lebt in Berlin.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 11, 2022
"Bei Susan Sontag saß man entweder auf dem Beifahrersitz oder man war ein überfahrenes Tier am Straßenrand. Aber auf dem Beifahrersitz war es eine großartige Erfahrung."
Jeff Seroy (Publicity Director von FSG)
Zur ersten Einordnung der Person Susan Sontag hat mir diese Bio gut gefallen. Kein dröges runterbeten der Eckdaten. Liest sich sehr süffig. Insbesondere die gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklungen der 60er bis 2000er waren toll mit eingewoben.
Jedenfalls hat mich das Susan Sontag Fieber gepackt. Um diese Bio vernünftig bewerten zu können, komme ich nach weiterer Literatur über Sontag und von ihr selbst geschrieben, nochmal zu dieser zurück….
August 5, 2025
Daniel Schreiber, der sechs Jahre lang in New York lebte und dort auch die erste umfassende Biografie zu Susan Sontag schrieb, wirft einen distanzierten Blick auf ihr Leben. Schreiber beschäftigt sich überwiegend mit dem öffentlichen Bild Sontags, hat für seine Recherche mit vielen Freunden, Bekannten und Weggefährten Sontags gesprochen und stark ihr publiziertes Werk analysiert.
Sontag ist ein Mensch, der immer auf Mission ist. Sie hat einen Bildungsauftrag und nimmt diesen Ernst. Ihre Texte haben große Kraft. Sie ist ein Mensch, der sich gleichzeitig ständig in den Mittelpunkt stellt und doch wichtige Seiten ihrer selbst im Hintergrund lässt. Sie ist ein extrem privater Mensch, der meines Erachtens schon zu verstehen gibt, ich kann mich erst zeigen, wenn ihr als Gesellschaft toleranter wärt. Sie macht sich immer wieder angreifbar und zeigt sich auch verletzlich in ihren Selbstwidersprüchen, die ihr Werk durchziehen.
Die komplette Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/12/06/the...
Sontag ist ein Mensch, der immer auf Mission ist. Sie hat einen Bildungsauftrag und nimmt diesen Ernst. Ihre Texte haben große Kraft. Sie ist ein Mensch, der sich gleichzeitig ständig in den Mittelpunkt stellt und doch wichtige Seiten ihrer selbst im Hintergrund lässt. Sie ist ein extrem privater Mensch, der meines Erachtens schon zu verstehen gibt, ich kann mich erst zeigen, wenn ihr als Gesellschaft toleranter wärt. Sie macht sich immer wieder angreifbar und zeigt sich auch verletzlich in ihren Selbstwidersprüchen, die ihr Werk durchziehen.
Die komplette Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/12/06/the...
October 16, 2014
Though it's a considerable improvement that the only previous biography of Sontag, this brief account of her life is hindered by a lack of access to Sontag's diaries and unpublished works, a sense that the author patched it together from existing press clippings, and a few sections that could have used careful fact-checking. (Did you know that John Lennon and Bob Dylan were leaders of the anti-war movement? Or, writing of Sontag's 1968 trip to Hanoi, that "other prominent peace activists including ... Jane Fonda had made the strenuous journey to Hanoi" -even though Fonda's visit took place in 1972?)
March 10, 2015
The first proper full length biography of Sontag the book suffers from her zealously guarded sense of privacy and the lack of access to her papers but fills a gap.
However, what emerges is a portrait of a woman who was America's version of a European public intellectual, someone of deep paradoxes, unafraid to reinvent herself, a person drawn instinctively to the public gaze while violently protective of her privacy.
Sontag must surely live up to the tag of one of our last great public intellectuals not least because the story of her rise to fame on the basis of writing informed cultural criticism and commentary could never happen today. She helped to tear down the bastions between high brow and low brow only to see low brow completely drive high culture into an increasingly precarious corner.
There is much I admire about Sontag that the book brings to the fore: her insatiable thirst for life and conversation. An indiscriminate love for all of the arts be it literature, visual art, dance, theater, photography and especially film, all of which she was a practitioner of or dabbler at some point in her life. Most of all a belief that art matters.
The book does humanize her: while acknowledging her at times insufferable arrogance and prickliness it shows her vulnerability particularly her determination to deny and defy death.
In the end though the book can only do so much with such a wide-ranging intellect and oversized personality. For someone who truly wants a more intimate sense of Sontag' personality nothing beats reading her journals (two volumes published the third forthcoming). This biography is at best a useful supplement.
However, what emerges is a portrait of a woman who was America's version of a European public intellectual, someone of deep paradoxes, unafraid to reinvent herself, a person drawn instinctively to the public gaze while violently protective of her privacy.
Sontag must surely live up to the tag of one of our last great public intellectuals not least because the story of her rise to fame on the basis of writing informed cultural criticism and commentary could never happen today. She helped to tear down the bastions between high brow and low brow only to see low brow completely drive high culture into an increasingly precarious corner.
There is much I admire about Sontag that the book brings to the fore: her insatiable thirst for life and conversation. An indiscriminate love for all of the arts be it literature, visual art, dance, theater, photography and especially film, all of which she was a practitioner of or dabbler at some point in her life. Most of all a belief that art matters.
The book does humanize her: while acknowledging her at times insufferable arrogance and prickliness it shows her vulnerability particularly her determination to deny and defy death.
In the end though the book can only do so much with such a wide-ranging intellect and oversized personality. For someone who truly wants a more intimate sense of Sontag' personality nothing beats reading her journals (two volumes published the third forthcoming). This biography is at best a useful supplement.
April 24, 2016
Have read pretty much all the book resources in this biography, it came as not much surprise. I would say, the book has a fantastic beginning part. It makes you think it is not an ordinary biography. It's not academic, but intellectual, just like Susan Sontag herself. However, the main body part does not weight the same as its fantastic beginning. In the end, the author focus on Sontag's German awards which is a bit novel, I would say, given the fact that the author is German origin. However, it ends rapidly as well.
Good biography after all, very well translated.
Good biography after all, very well translated.
September 25, 2016
Superficial,cut-and-paste work with little insight into the woman or the work but may be useful as a basic introduction...
June 27, 2022
3,5 *
May 3, 2015
"Susan Sontag, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity.” This salvo from Joseph Epstein would undoubtedly be termed neoconservative by Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag’s latest biographer. Schreiber never quite explains what he means by “neoconservative” in his intellectually incoherent narrative. But it seems that virtually anyone who has qualms about treating Sontag as a major writer and the public intellectual of her time invites Schreiber to label them reactionary. In this biographer’s world a neoconservative is ipso facto a bad hat. The truly odd thing, though, is that the criticisms of Sontag by so-called neoconservatives are the same postmortem criticisms her own friends supplied to Schreiber. In other words, only those inside the Sontag tent are allowed to affix their charges to the indictment because, as these accusers are quick to add, Sontag must be forgiven her transgressions. Why will become apparent anon.
Doubts about Sontag’s stature fester in Schreiber’s narrative like an open wound that he constantly tries to close with tributes to her influence, her magnetism, her beauty (Schreiber, like a gushing biographer of a Hollywood star, marvels at how well-preserved Sontag remained as she aged), her good deeds, her courage, her assistance to young writers, and on and on and on.
So what made Susan Sontag a cynosure of her epoch? It is not too much to say—or even gush using the expected cliches—that she burst upon the New York scene in the 1960s, a tall, dark beauty appearing in photographs on the book jackets of an avant garde novel, The Benefactor, and an iconoclastic collection of essays, Against Interpretation. She was made to look like the femme fatale in a film noir. And she was a killer—in this case of the New York intellectuals, a group of leading lights illuminating Partisan Review, which published the work of Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and the journal’s editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, among others. Whatever their differences, these writers united in their devotion to modernism, to high literary art, and to the notion that mass culture and its popular derivatives could not mix with great works of art. Sontag entered the precincts of Partisan Review, having bewitched Phillips and bested the skeptical Rahv, proclaiming that the Beatles as well as Beethoven deserved the best intellectual treatment first-class writers could provide. Can I not dance to rock-and-roll and also read Kafka? Sontag asked the question with such sangfroid that legions of the cognoscenti gravitated to her trend-setting, epigrammatic remarks. Sontag and her ideas traveled well. She was a great platform performer and looked good on television, too. Andy Warhol shot her screen test.
But how did Sontag retain her hold on her intellectual fans from the 1960s into 1990s and beyond? She did so by employing the time-tested American trick of self reinvention. When the argument of Against Interpretation that art is a matter of form, not content—that conveying messages is not the purpose of art, but that art in itself is the message—got stale and became a staple of too many critics, Sontag switched sides. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she declared that the content of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and photographs is irretrievably fascist and cannot be countermanded by considerations of form and style. At every stage of her career, Sontag performed a similar volte face, saying, for example, that communism is fascism with a human face—although earlier she had shouted “Viva Fidel!” The capper on this career-long repudiation of her own ideas came when she said she never really believed what she wrote in Against Interpretation. And, she added, she never really liked the nouveau roman that her some of her own work—The Benefactor, for example—was said to emulate. In fact, when her novel The Volcano Lover became a bestseller, she even claimed that she would not be upset if posterity favored her novels and forgot her essays. Her last works of fiction were essentially conventional historical novels, as Schreiber admits, so all her pretensions about subverting conventional narrative became . . . well, just pretensions.
But Sontag, so expert at marketing herself, always proclaimed her recantations as discoveries, bold revisions by an intellectual who was always ready to reconsider and deepen her understanding of art and politics. And in some cases—as with her best books, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor—she did succeed in exploring the play of ideas that have made these works classics. Similarly, her literary portraits in Under the Sign of Saturn display an inquiring intellect that remains beguiling and provocative. All these works show her arguing with herself, revealing a powerful mind at work. They constitute the core of what will probably remain as her legacy.
Sontag will also live on because of her place in literary history and for the way she created, like a world-class politician, a following, one which to this day arms itself against any critic or biographer who dares to write from outside its circle. A case in point is Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. This was the first Sontag biography, which Schreiber dismisses as a plot executed by two neoconservatives who are filled with personal animus and obsessed with scandal and gossip. No part of that characterization is true, but Schreiber would not know as much because he does not for a moment consider how that biography came to be published by W. W. Norton.
In any event, nothing in that first biography compares with the forthright criticisms that Schreiber and Sontag’s own friends deliver. Here is a sampling:
The image she created of herself was too compelling. Even she succumbed to it. (Schreiber summarizing Salman Rushdie)
Her descriptions of her reading serve above all to promote the aura of genius in which Sontag consciously wrapped herself later in life. (Schreiber)
She could be very, very nice to people—even seductive—to people she wanted something from. She just could not talk to stupid people. (Richard Howard)
But even her best friends, such as Stephen Koch and Richard Howard, say that in these years [1984–88] Sontag’s egotism was “difficult” or even “unbearable.” (Schreiber)
Sometimes her demands could be monstrous, but at The New York Review of Books we felt that she was our monster. (Darryl Pinckney)
Richard Howard reports that he and other PEN members asked Sontag to take this important step [declaring her lesbianism] for the movement in the hope that it would increase public acceptance of gays and lesbians. (Schreiber)
[S]he could mobilize Andrew Wylie, Roger Straus, and their attorneys when she wanted to prevent the publication of something unpleasant about her. (Schreiber)
Compared to the studied, circumspect language of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, the above remarks tell a far more damning story. Richard Howard, by the way, stated in writing to the authors of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon that he did not know Sontag well enough to comment about her. The fault of that first biography is that it was the first and that it was not sanctioned by Sontag, even though some of those close to Sontag did speak to the biographers on and off the record.
Schreiber condemns Rollyson and Paddock for outing Sontag’s lesbianism—as if lesbianism is itself a scandal. And then, almost in the next breath, he quotes Howard, who knew quite well that her writing on AIDS would have had a far more powerful impact if she made a statement about her own sexuality. And it was not only neoconservatives, but also the residents of besieged Sarajevo who, in Schreiber’s words, thought Sontag “more interested in promoting herself as the heroine of a city in ruins.”
The question remains as to why Sontag’s friends and Sontag herself could excuse not merely her bad behavior but all her preening and prevarication. She could be charming, spirited, generous, and powerfully supportive of other writers’ careers, but her friends knew what it meant to enjoy Sontag’s company and to remain in her good graces. Schreiber reports the hold Sontag had on friends but is incapable of understanding the consequences: “[Ariel] Dorfman and [Robert] Wilson, with all their theater experience, could not bring themselves to criticize her work even when Sontag complained bitterly that her plays were not performed. . . .” This behavior is intellectual and artistic cowardice of a very high order, one that allowed Susan Sontag to dismiss her critics—to say nothing of her biographers.
If no one is willing to tell the monarch the truth, what is she supposed to believe? In short, it was not merely that Susan Sontag believed in the legend of her own greatness; the concerted and loyal efforts of her retinue helped maintain the train of her literary majesty. That Schreiber cannot see the evidence before him is remarkable, but no more remarkable than the willful blindness of the entire Sontag contingent. From biographies, however, readers ought to expect much more.
Doubts about Sontag’s stature fester in Schreiber’s narrative like an open wound that he constantly tries to close with tributes to her influence, her magnetism, her beauty (Schreiber, like a gushing biographer of a Hollywood star, marvels at how well-preserved Sontag remained as she aged), her good deeds, her courage, her assistance to young writers, and on and on and on.
So what made Susan Sontag a cynosure of her epoch? It is not too much to say—or even gush using the expected cliches—that she burst upon the New York scene in the 1960s, a tall, dark beauty appearing in photographs on the book jackets of an avant garde novel, The Benefactor, and an iconoclastic collection of essays, Against Interpretation. She was made to look like the femme fatale in a film noir. And she was a killer—in this case of the New York intellectuals, a group of leading lights illuminating Partisan Review, which published the work of Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and the journal’s editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, among others. Whatever their differences, these writers united in their devotion to modernism, to high literary art, and to the notion that mass culture and its popular derivatives could not mix with great works of art. Sontag entered the precincts of Partisan Review, having bewitched Phillips and bested the skeptical Rahv, proclaiming that the Beatles as well as Beethoven deserved the best intellectual treatment first-class writers could provide. Can I not dance to rock-and-roll and also read Kafka? Sontag asked the question with such sangfroid that legions of the cognoscenti gravitated to her trend-setting, epigrammatic remarks. Sontag and her ideas traveled well. She was a great platform performer and looked good on television, too. Andy Warhol shot her screen test.
But how did Sontag retain her hold on her intellectual fans from the 1960s into 1990s and beyond? She did so by employing the time-tested American trick of self reinvention. When the argument of Against Interpretation that art is a matter of form, not content—that conveying messages is not the purpose of art, but that art in itself is the message—got stale and became a staple of too many critics, Sontag switched sides. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she declared that the content of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and photographs is irretrievably fascist and cannot be countermanded by considerations of form and style. At every stage of her career, Sontag performed a similar volte face, saying, for example, that communism is fascism with a human face—although earlier she had shouted “Viva Fidel!” The capper on this career-long repudiation of her own ideas came when she said she never really believed what she wrote in Against Interpretation. And, she added, she never really liked the nouveau roman that her some of her own work—The Benefactor, for example—was said to emulate. In fact, when her novel The Volcano Lover became a bestseller, she even claimed that she would not be upset if posterity favored her novels and forgot her essays. Her last works of fiction were essentially conventional historical novels, as Schreiber admits, so all her pretensions about subverting conventional narrative became . . . well, just pretensions.
But Sontag, so expert at marketing herself, always proclaimed her recantations as discoveries, bold revisions by an intellectual who was always ready to reconsider and deepen her understanding of art and politics. And in some cases—as with her best books, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor—she did succeed in exploring the play of ideas that have made these works classics. Similarly, her literary portraits in Under the Sign of Saturn display an inquiring intellect that remains beguiling and provocative. All these works show her arguing with herself, revealing a powerful mind at work. They constitute the core of what will probably remain as her legacy.
Sontag will also live on because of her place in literary history and for the way she created, like a world-class politician, a following, one which to this day arms itself against any critic or biographer who dares to write from outside its circle. A case in point is Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. This was the first Sontag biography, which Schreiber dismisses as a plot executed by two neoconservatives who are filled with personal animus and obsessed with scandal and gossip. No part of that characterization is true, but Schreiber would not know as much because he does not for a moment consider how that biography came to be published by W. W. Norton.
In any event, nothing in that first biography compares with the forthright criticisms that Schreiber and Sontag’s own friends deliver. Here is a sampling:
The image she created of herself was too compelling. Even she succumbed to it. (Schreiber summarizing Salman Rushdie)
Her descriptions of her reading serve above all to promote the aura of genius in which Sontag consciously wrapped herself later in life. (Schreiber)
She could be very, very nice to people—even seductive—to people she wanted something from. She just could not talk to stupid people. (Richard Howard)
But even her best friends, such as Stephen Koch and Richard Howard, say that in these years [1984–88] Sontag’s egotism was “difficult” or even “unbearable.” (Schreiber)
Sometimes her demands could be monstrous, but at The New York Review of Books we felt that she was our monster. (Darryl Pinckney)
Richard Howard reports that he and other PEN members asked Sontag to take this important step [declaring her lesbianism] for the movement in the hope that it would increase public acceptance of gays and lesbians. (Schreiber)
[S]he could mobilize Andrew Wylie, Roger Straus, and their attorneys when she wanted to prevent the publication of something unpleasant about her. (Schreiber)
Compared to the studied, circumspect language of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, the above remarks tell a far more damning story. Richard Howard, by the way, stated in writing to the authors of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon that he did not know Sontag well enough to comment about her. The fault of that first biography is that it was the first and that it was not sanctioned by Sontag, even though some of those close to Sontag did speak to the biographers on and off the record.
Schreiber condemns Rollyson and Paddock for outing Sontag’s lesbianism—as if lesbianism is itself a scandal. And then, almost in the next breath, he quotes Howard, who knew quite well that her writing on AIDS would have had a far more powerful impact if she made a statement about her own sexuality. And it was not only neoconservatives, but also the residents of besieged Sarajevo who, in Schreiber’s words, thought Sontag “more interested in promoting herself as the heroine of a city in ruins.”
The question remains as to why Sontag’s friends and Sontag herself could excuse not merely her bad behavior but all her preening and prevarication. She could be charming, spirited, generous, and powerfully supportive of other writers’ careers, but her friends knew what it meant to enjoy Sontag’s company and to remain in her good graces. Schreiber reports the hold Sontag had on friends but is incapable of understanding the consequences: “[Ariel] Dorfman and [Robert] Wilson, with all their theater experience, could not bring themselves to criticize her work even when Sontag complained bitterly that her plays were not performed. . . .” This behavior is intellectual and artistic cowardice of a very high order, one that allowed Susan Sontag to dismiss her critics—to say nothing of her biographers.
If no one is willing to tell the monarch the truth, what is she supposed to believe? In short, it was not merely that Susan Sontag believed in the legend of her own greatness; the concerted and loyal efforts of her retinue helped maintain the train of her literary majesty. That Schreiber cannot see the evidence before him is remarkable, but no more remarkable than the willful blindness of the entire Sontag contingent. From biographies, however, readers ought to expect much more.
December 28, 2025
Un personaje que ha despertado en mi admiración y a un tiempo cierto rechazo. Quizás es envidia por su capacidad y clarividencia, por su espíritu libre.
April 16, 2024
Sontag was an influencer in her day. She had the intellect, knowledge, connections, drive and charisma to get, and stay, noticed. She was also into both high and pop culture. She championed the arts and film. Seems to have enjoyed controversy and conflict. Her opinions evolved over her lifetime. Schreiber indicates that Sontag did not care to admit that. On to “A Susan Sontag Reader.”
March 5, 2019
Hace varios años leí los diarios tempranos de Susan Sontag y la odié desde la primera entrada: "Voy a Cal este semestre si puedo conseguir dormitorio". No podía soportar su petulancia filosófica, gusto por Jim Morrison o reflexiones sobre "La Montaña Mágica". Pero seguía leyéndola.
Obvio: era verme adolescente en un espejo y me daba rabia todo lo que logró después: la academia, meterse en los medios con éxito, mezclar alta/baja cultura en los sesenta, intervenir públicamente, grabar películas en Suecia, explorar -antes que nadie- el tema de la fotografía y el cine como bellas artes en EE.UU., haberse atrevido a levantar la voz cuando hasta el NYT apoyaba la invasión de Bush tras la caída de las torres gemelas. Este libro ordena -con mucha cita y entrevistas con involucrados- el tránsito intelectual de Sontag.
Tampoco es más que eso. De hecho, tira la piedra y esconde la mano con el tema de la adicción a las anfetaminas, su "pose" ante los medios como impostura, el duro entorno afectivo donde se desarrollo o su temor a involucrarse demasiado en la causa LGBT.
El autor, Daniel Schreiber se documentó, llegando incluso a calcular el sueldo de escritor que recibía Sontag revisando los informes financieros de las editoriales donde trabajó, pero no profundiza en aspectos claves como su obsesión por usar la cultura popular como laboratorio de análisis de procesos sociales (era asidua al CBGB en los años del punk), su identidad judía escondida en un apellido adoptado de su padrastro (lo que incide en su postura crítica ante EE.UU.) o cómo fue modificando sus discursos o intereses.
Si buscamos en una biografía introducirnos en un autor, su obra y contexto, cumple. Para todo lo demás, quedaremos insatisfechos.
Obvio: era verme adolescente en un espejo y me daba rabia todo lo que logró después: la academia, meterse en los medios con éxito, mezclar alta/baja cultura en los sesenta, intervenir públicamente, grabar películas en Suecia, explorar -antes que nadie- el tema de la fotografía y el cine como bellas artes en EE.UU., haberse atrevido a levantar la voz cuando hasta el NYT apoyaba la invasión de Bush tras la caída de las torres gemelas. Este libro ordena -con mucha cita y entrevistas con involucrados- el tránsito intelectual de Sontag.
Tampoco es más que eso. De hecho, tira la piedra y esconde la mano con el tema de la adicción a las anfetaminas, su "pose" ante los medios como impostura, el duro entorno afectivo donde se desarrollo o su temor a involucrarse demasiado en la causa LGBT.
El autor, Daniel Schreiber se documentó, llegando incluso a calcular el sueldo de escritor que recibía Sontag revisando los informes financieros de las editoriales donde trabajó, pero no profundiza en aspectos claves como su obsesión por usar la cultura popular como laboratorio de análisis de procesos sociales (era asidua al CBGB en los años del punk), su identidad judía escondida en un apellido adoptado de su padrastro (lo que incide en su postura crítica ante EE.UU.) o cómo fue modificando sus discursos o intereses.
Si buscamos en una biografía introducirnos en un autor, su obra y contexto, cumple. Para todo lo demás, quedaremos insatisfechos.
April 9, 2015
Perplexed by some of the unfavorable reviews of this text. As someone 1.) who wasn't around during Sontag's heyday but 2.) who has previously read Nunez's and Rieff's biographies (memoirs?) on Sontag as well as Google Books snippets of The Making of An Icon, I closed this book feeling as though I had a better sense of Sontag's work in addition to her character.
I appreciated the thorough overview of her childhood and essay collections. I feel as though some of the criticisms about hyperbole in previous reviews have more to do with this book being translated from German than the author's intent: Schrieber clearly did his homework with this text. One thing I would like clarification about, however, is whether or not Terry Castle and Sontag were merely colleagues or companions (this biography says both, but Castle has never said they were partners). I also would have appreciated more attention to Sontag's year of college California.
I appreciated the thorough overview of her childhood and essay collections. I feel as though some of the criticisms about hyperbole in previous reviews have more to do with this book being translated from German than the author's intent: Schrieber clearly did his homework with this text. One thing I would like clarification about, however, is whether or not Terry Castle and Sontag were merely colleagues or companions (this biography says both, but Castle has never said they were partners). I also would have appreciated more attention to Sontag's year of college California.
June 19, 2020
Eine gut lesbare Biografie, auf Basis der damals zur Verfügung stehenden Quellen (die Tagebücher waren noch nicht zugänglich). Es ist alles andere als eine Hagiografie. Schon im Prolog bringt Schreiber seine Ambivalenz Sontag gegenüber zum Ausdruck. Besonderes Augenmerk und ein roter Faden des Buches (der noch deutlicher sein könnte) sind Sontags Selbstinszenierungen und ihr Bild in der Öffentlichkeit. Schreiber ist nicht meinungsfaul und kommt zu gut begründeten sowie fair erscheinenden Einschätzungen von Sontags Werk, das von Essays und Kurzgeschichten (die gut wegkommen) über Roman, Filme und Theaterinszenierungen reichte (nicht gut). Sontag erscheint in der Biografie wie eine Figur, die Autorin wird, nicht weil sie sich ausdrücken muss, sondern weil sie den Lebensstil einer Intellektuellen leben will. Letztlich scheint auch Schreiber die Frage umzutreiben, wie man ein intellektuelles Leben führt und finanziert.
January 7, 2012
Susan Sontag war nach ihrem Besuch bei Thomas Mann enttäuscht, von sich selbst und von ihm. So ähnlich geht es mir nach dem Lesen dieses Buches.
Über das Leben von Menschen zu lesen, die man bewundert, ist ein zweischneidiges Schwert - man kann durch die nähere Beschäftigung mit ihnen ebenso gut mehr bewundern wie weniger.
Sontag war eine einzigartige Frau mit einem brillianten Verstand, einem fantastischen Gespür für gegenwärtige und aufkommende Geistesströmungen und einem unaufhaltsamen Willen zum Ruhm. Vor allem diesem letzteren kann man kritisch gegenüber stehen, Schreiber hält sich jedoch auf Distanz, und bleibt in seiner Unparteilichkeit an den Rändern der Geschichte.
Das ist einerseits angenehm, da man seine Meinungen und Vermutungen nicht aus dem Text separieren muß, bedeutet aber auch, daß man kein tiefergehendes Bild von Susan Sontag erhält.
Über das Leben von Menschen zu lesen, die man bewundert, ist ein zweischneidiges Schwert - man kann durch die nähere Beschäftigung mit ihnen ebenso gut mehr bewundern wie weniger.
Sontag war eine einzigartige Frau mit einem brillianten Verstand, einem fantastischen Gespür für gegenwärtige und aufkommende Geistesströmungen und einem unaufhaltsamen Willen zum Ruhm. Vor allem diesem letzteren kann man kritisch gegenüber stehen, Schreiber hält sich jedoch auf Distanz, und bleibt in seiner Unparteilichkeit an den Rändern der Geschichte.
Das ist einerseits angenehm, da man seine Meinungen und Vermutungen nicht aus dem Text separieren muß, bedeutet aber auch, daß man kein tiefergehendes Bild von Susan Sontag erhält.
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August 3, 2015"Maybe it's the single most surprising thing I've witnessed in my life. The death of high-mindedness. It's my impression that most people now find quite alien, almost incomprehensible, the idea that you might do something out of principle, something altruistic, whatever the financial incentives to do otherwise, or the degree of inconvenience or discomfort or personal danger," said Susan Sontag in 1995.
This is a low-key, objective biography of a woman who remained at the top of her intellectual game her whole life and, to my mind, did a lot of good. I'm not interested in her novels, but her essays have been very illuminating.
This is a low-key, objective biography of a woman who remained at the top of her intellectual game her whole life and, to my mind, did a lot of good. I'm not interested in her novels, but her essays have been very illuminating.
February 10, 2015
I am endlessly fascinated by Susan Sontag, and was excited when I discovered this recently published biography. Unfortunately it didn't meet my expectations, not even a little bit. The writing felt stuffy, the information seemed cobbled together, and while the focus of this biography was on Sontag's extensive literary career, the author paid very little attention to her personal life, which greatly influenced her writing.
December 13, 2017
Great book, an amazing story about Susan Sontag, with so many details of her life and her special way to see the world. I felt that I could see the most important moments of the second part of Twentieth century trough Susan's eyes and to know better recent history. Susan Sontag, a great intellectual, but most a great woman that still inspire our world.
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February 25, 2016Vile, arrogant woman. Even her biographer, initially an admirer, ended up with mixed feelings.
December 16, 2016
you get the names, not much more
January 22, 2017
Perfunctory. There had better be a better biography to come.
March 21, 2017
A nice, quick, easy read that details the extent of Sontag's life and work. I found the English translation to be somewhat clunky in areas but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this biography.
March 28, 2017
I won't recommend any body to read this book,it was not my cup of tea!
April 20, 2017
Hermoso libro. Una fenomenal mujer
June 1, 2017
wow, brilliant, genius, & Big E go
she will be remembered a 100 years from now
she will be remembered a 100 years from now
October 30, 2020
Journalistic biography that provides a clear outline of Sontag's life, but doesn't delve particularly deeply into the complexities.
January 17, 2021
A truly inspiring person. Lived a very Bohemian life style while young.
This book kinda explains her distinct writing style and critical points.
But
in terms of life
no thank you
.
This book kinda explains her distinct writing style and critical points.
But
in terms of life
no thank you
.
May 15, 2023
mi niña, la quiero mucho.
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