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Debriefing: Collected Stories
A collection of one of our most powerful intellectual’s short fiction
Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art—made more urgent by the passage of years—await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.
Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art—made more urgent by the passage of years—await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.
337 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 9, 2017
133 people are currently reading
1472 people want to read
About the author
Susan Sontag
229 books5,448 followersSusan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 106 reviews
July 15, 2022
2.50 Stars — Sontag writes with a prose that’s extremely distinct, it is unmistakable & generally comes with a fair amount of Malaise-wan-bite. Here I found her voice to be far too much on repeat. The stories all had a righteousness feel to them & I struggled to get through a few despite being excited to dive into this one. There’s an urgency here, but despite the familiar narrative it all felt too fragmented somehow.
Sontag showcases some strong analytical themes & her characters are — at least on the surface — diverse. However the further into each story I got, the more I realised their actually all almost the same in their motivation & true nature.
There is some good stuff here. But unfortunately for me, this book lacked anything starkly different or thought-provoking to be a more solid rating, largely given the amount of INCREDIBLE short-fiction that’s out there at present by the likes of Ferris, Barry, Levin & others.
Sontag showcases some strong analytical themes & her characters are — at least on the surface — diverse. However the further into each story I got, the more I realised their actually all almost the same in their motivation & true nature.
There is some good stuff here. But unfortunately for me, this book lacked anything starkly different or thought-provoking to be a more solid rating, largely given the amount of INCREDIBLE short-fiction that’s out there at present by the likes of Ferris, Barry, Levin & others.
September 13, 2022
Susan Sontag once said in an interview that while the living room was most appropriate for essay writing, short stories should be written in the bedroom. On the surface, this distinction may sound as if she was describing her short stories as more intimate when compared alongside the (more famous) essays. And it’s true — she approached the subject matter of her essays analytically, almost as a series of exegeses or arguments rather than a narrative or fictional étude.
I think of the bedroom as a place for pondering life’s uncertainties, a place where questions about life’s mysteries seem to spring up from nowhere. After all, I wake in the middle of many nights pondering the cosmos, where it all came from, if any of it really matters — and if it doesn’t matter, why I spend time thinking about drudgeries over things that most would agree are more immeasurable or invaluable whether or not we are just “a blip in the existence of the universe” (as Kanye West has said).
In addition to the immediacy of her writing’s sophisticated, though at times improvisatory quality, part of why I love Sontag’s short stories is because they are a response to social ills, expressions of the affects of power, and a witnessing of the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of society. They feel as personal as a diarist or memoirist would write. In “Pilgrimage,” Sontag fictionalizes her own childhood experience of meeting Thomas Mann in his home for tea and discussion of The Magic Mountain (a work, according to the story, early-teenaged Sontag read numerous times and loved). Other stories seem to allow for a riffing on and personification of her beliefs about contemporary culture; some of the stories also become speculative imaginings of how a given social construct will fare in the coming decades: “American Spirits,” is a satire on the role of women in society, while “The Dummy” provides commentary on the family, particularly the role of men in a family of the future.
Although Debriefing is both the title of her book of collected stories (published posthumously) and a story within the collection itself, I can’t help but to feel that the set’s final story, “The Way We Live Now,” is most deserving of the titular tale.
It’s an account of a hospitalized man that is told from the shifting perspectives of a group of his friends. Capitalizing on the technique of free association, Sontag utilizes the run-on sentence and less-than-average punctuation in a way that creates a spiral of words and sentences. The opening lines:
The entire story is one long paragraph, which on one hand puts it in a literary continuum of very gutsy, experimental writing most recently seen in Lucy Ellmann’s critically lauded Ducks, Newburyport (a 1040-page novel that has a total of one period — after the final word of the book). But, it’s a style that is undoubtedly exhausting as a reader; “The Way We Live Now” is twenty pages but at times feels double that length. Elements of the short story form that are usually introduced gradually throughout a narrative are foregrounded from the first page; just in the first three pages, for example, more than twenty recurring characters are named. None of these characters are developed — they’re mere conduits of information about (and reactions toward) an unnamed friend who is suffering in the hospital from an unnamed disease, in addition to that disease’s effect on everyday life (“everybody is worried about everybody now…that seems to be the way we live, the way we live now.”)
The story itself is simple, but the way it’s told is not. Much of the characters’ unease around their friend’s condition and their own situation is embodied through stylistic decisions that, 35 years after publication, still feel current if not outright progressive. Because of the perpetual fragmentation of conversations and impartations throughout the story, it’s often difficult to track which character believes what and how exactly each is related to the protagonist, the unnamed hospitalized man, if not to one another. An impersonal third-person narrator also chooses never to hone in on the patient’s own perspective, since information that the reader receives is filtered only through the gaze of individuals within his group of friends.
Published in The New Yorker in 1986, it’s very evident that the disease Sontag chose not to name in “The Way We Live Now” was HIV/AIDS. There are hints throughout: one character puts himself in charge of “keeping the mother in Mississippi informed, well, mainly keeping her from flying to New York” — a common AIDS narrative that frequently makes an appearance in film and stage theatre; one character’s gynecologist has told her that everyone is at risk, that “sexuality is a chain that links each of us” and becomes a “chain of death”; a male character remarks to his (presumably heterosexual, female friend), “It’s not the same for you as it is for me or Lewis or Frank or Paolo or Max, I’m more and more frightened”; a character says, “it could be a lot worse, you could have gotten the disease two years ago, but now so many scientists are working on it, the American team and the French team, everyone bucking for that Nobel Prize a few years down the road, that all you have to do is stay healthy for another year or two and then there will be good treatment, real treatment”; at one point the characters realize that “we are the family he’s founded, without meaning to,” although some in the group are the patient’s ex-lovers (rhetoric around one’s “chosen family” over biological family has become a noted talking point in LGBTQ circles).
Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that “How We Live Now” could find a newfound resonance with those of us who lived through the early days of the covid-19 pandemic. Without the knowledge we have of AIDS in the year 2022, the story could read just like any other pandemic or disease narrative (could The Magic Mountain have inspired “How We Live Now”?) — full of the angst and uncertainty that was in the air, but also the lack of information about the virus, its causes, and its effects. The tone is a less fantastical, more naturalist version of Camus’s The Plague or José Saramago’s Blindness.
***
In her 2003 book of social theory Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag devotes the final section to exploring the deficiencies of images (particularly photographs, particularly war photographs) that depict human pain. With the proliferation and availability of photographs, why do they not cause us to act in ways that would alleviate suffering and its causes? What is the motive of people who capture such images on film? The final lines of the book invoke people who lived through tragedies such as the war crimes of the Vietnam War or the Rwandan genocide.
Strangely, “The Way We Live Now” ends with the same sort of bold proclamation about a given artform. Instead of the negativistic realization that concludes Regarding the Pain of Others — that visual representations of suffering do not and cannot supplant lived experience — the short story instead ends with an optimistic ode to the merits of literature.
I read those final lines in a number of ways. First, given the autobiographical nature of Sontag’s stories, I can’t help but wonder who in her life was going through what the unnamed character experienced. In that sense, “He’s still alive” could represent a kind of hopefulness that someone she knows who contracted the virus was indeed still alive after being hospitalized for weeks and (if the story matches what happened in real life) had just recovered enough to be released from the hospital. “He’s still alive” could thus be a substitution for a sentence like “He’s going to live,” which millions of people could have related to in the 1980s and can relate to since 2020.
Considered non-autobiographically — even perhaps allegorically — however, Sontag concludes with a nod to her place in fiction writing as a whole. The merit of stories — of literature — is that you can say “He’s still alive” and have it express something unique to literature, an artform that, in and of itself, is indeed still alive. Other examples of meta narrative often also involve an artist rendering themself in the process of creating the very material that is being consumed by a reader, viewer, or listener. In the visual arts, Van Gogh’s Self Portrait as a Painter and Triple Self-Portrait by Norman Rockwell are apt examples, as both are self portraits of the practice of self portraiture. Many people find this practice egotistical and postmodern, while others may use the words ‘ironic’ and ‘cynical’ — two devices that allow the artist (and consumer) distance from sometimes-difficult, uncomfortable, or critical content. Perhaps the style that Sontag uses throughout her story is designed to do just that: provide the reader a more detached vantage point during an intensely personal situation while still heralding the ability to use literature to document a particular experience.
It’s more than that, though. The ending presents itself as a gesture of gratitude — for the continuation of life of a friend, for thousands of other survivors, for hope being fulfilled, for the role of the arts in telling others about what exactly happened, for the history and continuation of a form of communication and expression, for the ability (the gift, even) of being able to make a literary contribution while being a witness to the experience of marginalized individuals. In other words, the beauty of what Sontag accomplished in “The Way We Live Now” was in her ability to use the line “He’s still alive” in multiple parallel contexts: a man living with AIDS in Reagan-era America, and a broader literary context that comments upon the art of words, stories, and literature itself. It’s a story that provides a sense of catharsis while inviting interpretation, re-reading, and analysis of the entire work.
***
I first came by Susan Sontag’s name from the musical Rent. In the song “La Vie Boheme” — essentially a progressive vision for society in song form — characters sing the line “To Sontag / to Sondheim / to anything taboo.” Those were just names to me the first time I heard the musical, but years later, I would read a critical essay on Sontag — specifically, on a critique of “the phenomenon of Susan Sontag.” The writer, Joseph Epstein, wrote backhandedly of her:
Epstein might as well have tempted me with a forbidden fruit. His tough words provided even more intrigue around the late writer. Earlier this year, I finished On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others within the span of several weeks, then turned to her recorded interviews.
Obviously, I disagree with Epstein, as I find Sontag’s nonfiction writing to be astute, timely (and timeless), and uncanny in her ability to understand the present age in the context of what has come before. For example, a significant portion of On Photography is spent analyzing how human perception changed with the ability to photograph rather than paint a person, place, or event in front of us — how seemingly overnight we developed the ability to chart lives through photographs, to see images of ourselves from the past.
“The Way We Live Now” offers a similar charting of the inner workings of a given scenario, and (as the story’s conclusion states) the literary arts provided the medium that was needed to express such an alternative perspective of the AIDS epidemic (a group of friends talking about the condition of one, the patient, rather than a narrative told by or about the patient himself). At the time of publication, perhaps “He’s still alive” also offered an alternative perspective to the AIDS narrative, as by 1986, the virus had already claimed 50,000 lives and was still considered by many as an inevitable death sentence. Yet another of Sontag’s divergences in the “genre” of illness narratives is the fact that she chooses not to name the disease throughout the story. In a sense, she does through words what Steven Spielberg did in Jaws and Jurassic Park, what Ridley Scott did in Alien, and what Myrick-Sanchez did in The Blair Witch Project: give footage of the “monster” little-to-no air time as a way of creating suspense to the very end. By not naming the disease, Sontag does the same not only as a way to creating tension, but also to accurately represent the hush surrounding certain communities impacted by AIDS in the 1980s.
In Illness as Metaphor , Sontag points out the ways society demonizes the chronically ill; in AIDS and Its Metaphors , she continues the argument, writing that metaphors are what cause us to stigmatize the disease and its victims (yet another reason, I would imagine, that she never names the disease, nor allows any metaphors to form around it). Prevalent in critical theory of the time was the belief that the emergence of AIDS ended the 70s era of sexual freedom; sex was thus transformed into a form of suicide or murder (from “The Way We Live Now”: “…if you have a conscience, you can never make love, make love fully, as you’d been wont — wantonly, Ira said — to do. But it’s better than dying, said Frank.”).
Apart from the story’s cathartic ending, one of the more interesting aspects recalls Sontag’s earlier proclamation that personal writing (in her case, short story writing) is best practiced in the bedroom. Throughout the work, the reader catches glimpses of the patient and his friends writing in their notebooks and diaries while laying in their nightly beds. Like author, like character?
The patient’s bedridden writing is described as:
Ultimately, Sontag subverts the illness narrative by making her story as much about personal self discovery, hope, redemption, and life, as it is about the greater angst and uncertainty surrounding the disease. Several commentators at the time of its publication remarked that the story was an empathic response from within the epidemic, a respite amidst the lesser informed, xenophobic actors in society. Five years after its publication in The New Yorker, Tony Kushner's play Angels in America would premiere in New York City and win the Pulitzer Prize; five more years later, Jonathan Larson's Rent would debut on Broadway. By that point, artists such as Larson had proclaimed the "alternative" narrative so much that its rhetoric became mainstream. (During another moment from Rent's "La Vie Boheme", the characters raise their glasses "To people living with, living with, living with / not dying from disease.") But unlike those more theatrical, fantasia-prone forms, “The Way We Live Now” necessitates its form as a short story — in Sontag’s fiction writing, the personal takes precedent over the general, the experiential over the argumentative, and the bedroom over the living room.
I think of the bedroom as a place for pondering life’s uncertainties, a place where questions about life’s mysteries seem to spring up from nowhere. After all, I wake in the middle of many nights pondering the cosmos, where it all came from, if any of it really matters — and if it doesn’t matter, why I spend time thinking about drudgeries over things that most would agree are more immeasurable or invaluable whether or not we are just “a blip in the existence of the universe” (as Kanye West has said).
In addition to the immediacy of her writing’s sophisticated, though at times improvisatory quality, part of why I love Sontag’s short stories is because they are a response to social ills, expressions of the affects of power, and a witnessing of the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of society. They feel as personal as a diarist or memoirist would write. In “Pilgrimage,” Sontag fictionalizes her own childhood experience of meeting Thomas Mann in his home for tea and discussion of The Magic Mountain (a work, according to the story, early-teenaged Sontag read numerous times and loved). Other stories seem to allow for a riffing on and personification of her beliefs about contemporary culture; some of the stories also become speculative imaginings of how a given social construct will fare in the coming decades: “American Spirits,” is a satire on the role of women in society, while “The Dummy” provides commentary on the family, particularly the role of men in a family of the future.
Although Debriefing is both the title of her book of collected stories (published posthumously) and a story within the collection itself, I can’t help but to feel that the set’s final story, “The Way We Live Now,” is most deserving of the titular tale.
It’s an account of a hospitalized man that is told from the shifting perspectives of a group of his friends. Capitalizing on the technique of free association, Sontag utilizes the run-on sentence and less-than-average punctuation in a way that creates a spiral of words and sentences. The opening lines:
At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs being ache-free for the first time in years.
The entire story is one long paragraph, which on one hand puts it in a literary continuum of very gutsy, experimental writing most recently seen in Lucy Ellmann’s critically lauded Ducks, Newburyport (a 1040-page novel that has a total of one period — after the final word of the book). But, it’s a style that is undoubtedly exhausting as a reader; “The Way We Live Now” is twenty pages but at times feels double that length. Elements of the short story form that are usually introduced gradually throughout a narrative are foregrounded from the first page; just in the first three pages, for example, more than twenty recurring characters are named. None of these characters are developed — they’re mere conduits of information about (and reactions toward) an unnamed friend who is suffering in the hospital from an unnamed disease, in addition to that disease’s effect on everyday life (“everybody is worried about everybody now…that seems to be the way we live, the way we live now.”)
The story itself is simple, but the way it’s told is not. Much of the characters’ unease around their friend’s condition and their own situation is embodied through stylistic decisions that, 35 years after publication, still feel current if not outright progressive. Because of the perpetual fragmentation of conversations and impartations throughout the story, it’s often difficult to track which character believes what and how exactly each is related to the protagonist, the unnamed hospitalized man, if not to one another. An impersonal third-person narrator also chooses never to hone in on the patient’s own perspective, since information that the reader receives is filtered only through the gaze of individuals within his group of friends.
Published in The New Yorker in 1986, it’s very evident that the disease Sontag chose not to name in “The Way We Live Now” was HIV/AIDS. There are hints throughout: one character puts himself in charge of “keeping the mother in Mississippi informed, well, mainly keeping her from flying to New York” — a common AIDS narrative that frequently makes an appearance in film and stage theatre; one character’s gynecologist has told her that everyone is at risk, that “sexuality is a chain that links each of us” and becomes a “chain of death”; a male character remarks to his (presumably heterosexual, female friend), “It’s not the same for you as it is for me or Lewis or Frank or Paolo or Max, I’m more and more frightened”; a character says, “it could be a lot worse, you could have gotten the disease two years ago, but now so many scientists are working on it, the American team and the French team, everyone bucking for that Nobel Prize a few years down the road, that all you have to do is stay healthy for another year or two and then there will be good treatment, real treatment”; at one point the characters realize that “we are the family he’s founded, without meaning to,” although some in the group are the patient’s ex-lovers (rhetoric around one’s “chosen family” over biological family has become a noted talking point in LGBTQ circles).
Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that “How We Live Now” could find a newfound resonance with those of us who lived through the early days of the covid-19 pandemic. Without the knowledge we have of AIDS in the year 2022, the story could read just like any other pandemic or disease narrative (could The Magic Mountain have inspired “How We Live Now”?) — full of the angst and uncertainty that was in the air, but also the lack of information about the virus, its causes, and its effects. The tone is a less fantastical, more naturalist version of Camus’s The Plague or José Saramago’s Blindness.
***
In her 2003 book of social theory Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag devotes the final section to exploring the deficiencies of images (particularly photographs, particularly war photographs) that depict human pain. With the proliferation and availability of photographs, why do they not cause us to act in ways that would alleviate suffering and its causes? What is the motive of people who capture such images on film? The final lines of the book invoke people who lived through tragedies such as the war crimes of the Vietnam War or the Rwandan genocide.
We truly cannot image what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.
Strangely, “The Way We Live Now” ends with the same sort of bold proclamation about a given artform. Instead of the negativistic realization that concludes Regarding the Pain of Others — that visual representations of suffering do not and cannot supplant lived experience — the short story instead ends with an optimistic ode to the merits of literature.
I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still.” You can just show him being alive.
He’s still alive, Stephen said.
I read those final lines in a number of ways. First, given the autobiographical nature of Sontag’s stories, I can’t help but wonder who in her life was going through what the unnamed character experienced. In that sense, “He’s still alive” could represent a kind of hopefulness that someone she knows who contracted the virus was indeed still alive after being hospitalized for weeks and (if the story matches what happened in real life) had just recovered enough to be released from the hospital. “He’s still alive” could thus be a substitution for a sentence like “He’s going to live,” which millions of people could have related to in the 1980s and can relate to since 2020.
Considered non-autobiographically — even perhaps allegorically — however, Sontag concludes with a nod to her place in fiction writing as a whole. The merit of stories — of literature — is that you can say “He’s still alive” and have it express something unique to literature, an artform that, in and of itself, is indeed still alive. Other examples of meta narrative often also involve an artist rendering themself in the process of creating the very material that is being consumed by a reader, viewer, or listener. In the visual arts, Van Gogh’s Self Portrait as a Painter and Triple Self-Portrait by Norman Rockwell are apt examples, as both are self portraits of the practice of self portraiture. Many people find this practice egotistical and postmodern, while others may use the words ‘ironic’ and ‘cynical’ — two devices that allow the artist (and consumer) distance from sometimes-difficult, uncomfortable, or critical content. Perhaps the style that Sontag uses throughout her story is designed to do just that: provide the reader a more detached vantage point during an intensely personal situation while still heralding the ability to use literature to document a particular experience.
It’s more than that, though. The ending presents itself as a gesture of gratitude — for the continuation of life of a friend, for thousands of other survivors, for hope being fulfilled, for the role of the arts in telling others about what exactly happened, for the history and continuation of a form of communication and expression, for the ability (the gift, even) of being able to make a literary contribution while being a witness to the experience of marginalized individuals. In other words, the beauty of what Sontag accomplished in “The Way We Live Now” was in her ability to use the line “He’s still alive” in multiple parallel contexts: a man living with AIDS in Reagan-era America, and a broader literary context that comments upon the art of words, stories, and literature itself. It’s a story that provides a sense of catharsis while inviting interpretation, re-reading, and analysis of the entire work.
***
I first came by Susan Sontag’s name from the musical Rent. In the song “La Vie Boheme” — essentially a progressive vision for society in song form — characters sing the line “To Sontag / to Sondheim / to anything taboo.” Those were just names to me the first time I heard the musical, but years later, I would read a critical essay on Sontag — specifically, on a critique of “the phenomenon of Susan Sontag.” The writer, Joseph Epstein, wrote backhandedly of her:
Susan Sontag belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity… Outside of the movies and politics, Sontag must have been one of the most photographed women of the second half of the past century. Her obituary in the New York Times was accompanied by no fewer than four photographs — an instance of intellectual cheesecake. Tall and striking, with thickish black hair later showing a signature white streak at the front, she was the beautiful young woman every male graduate student regretted not having had a tumble with, a fantasy that would have been difficult to arrange since she was, with only an occasional lapse, a lesbian… If Susan Sontag had been a less striking woman when younger, her ideas would not have had the reach that they did. Deluded until the end, she had no notion that not literature but self-promotion was her true métier.
Epstein might as well have tempted me with a forbidden fruit. His tough words provided even more intrigue around the late writer. Earlier this year, I finished On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others within the span of several weeks, then turned to her recorded interviews.
Obviously, I disagree with Epstein, as I find Sontag’s nonfiction writing to be astute, timely (and timeless), and uncanny in her ability to understand the present age in the context of what has come before. For example, a significant portion of On Photography is spent analyzing how human perception changed with the ability to photograph rather than paint a person, place, or event in front of us — how seemingly overnight we developed the ability to chart lives through photographs, to see images of ourselves from the past.
“The Way We Live Now” offers a similar charting of the inner workings of a given scenario, and (as the story’s conclusion states) the literary arts provided the medium that was needed to express such an alternative perspective of the AIDS epidemic (a group of friends talking about the condition of one, the patient, rather than a narrative told by or about the patient himself). At the time of publication, perhaps “He’s still alive” also offered an alternative perspective to the AIDS narrative, as by 1986, the virus had already claimed 50,000 lives and was still considered by many as an inevitable death sentence. Yet another of Sontag’s divergences in the “genre” of illness narratives is the fact that she chooses not to name the disease throughout the story. In a sense, she does through words what Steven Spielberg did in Jaws and Jurassic Park, what Ridley Scott did in Alien, and what Myrick-Sanchez did in The Blair Witch Project: give footage of the “monster” little-to-no air time as a way of creating suspense to the very end. By not naming the disease, Sontag does the same not only as a way to creating tension, but also to accurately represent the hush surrounding certain communities impacted by AIDS in the 1980s.
In Illness as Metaphor , Sontag points out the ways society demonizes the chronically ill; in AIDS and Its Metaphors , she continues the argument, writing that metaphors are what cause us to stigmatize the disease and its victims (yet another reason, I would imagine, that she never names the disease, nor allows any metaphors to form around it). Prevalent in critical theory of the time was the belief that the emergence of AIDS ended the 70s era of sexual freedom; sex was thus transformed into a form of suicide or murder (from “The Way We Live Now”: “…if you have a conscience, you can never make love, make love fully, as you’d been wont — wantonly, Ira said — to do. But it’s better than dying, said Frank.”).
Apart from the story’s cathartic ending, one of the more interesting aspects recalls Sontag’s earlier proclamation that personal writing (in her case, short story writing) is best practiced in the bedroom. Throughout the work, the reader catches glimpses of the patient and his friends writing in their notebooks and diaries while laying in their nightly beds. Like author, like character?
The patient’s bedridden writing is described as:
…little more than the usual banalities about terror and amazement that this was happening to him, to him also, plus the usual remorseful assessments of his past life, his pardonable superficialities, capped by resolves to live better, more deeply, more in touch with his work and his friends, and not to care so passionately about what people thought of him, interspersed with admonitions to himself that in this situation his will to live counted more than anything else and that if he really wanted to live, and trusted life, and liked himself well enough (down, ol’ debbil Thanatos!), he would live, he would be an exception…
Ultimately, Sontag subverts the illness narrative by making her story as much about personal self discovery, hope, redemption, and life, as it is about the greater angst and uncertainty surrounding the disease. Several commentators at the time of its publication remarked that the story was an empathic response from within the epidemic, a respite amidst the lesser informed, xenophobic actors in society. Five years after its publication in The New Yorker, Tony Kushner's play Angels in America would premiere in New York City and win the Pulitzer Prize; five more years later, Jonathan Larson's Rent would debut on Broadway. By that point, artists such as Larson had proclaimed the "alternative" narrative so much that its rhetoric became mainstream. (During another moment from Rent's "La Vie Boheme", the characters raise their glasses "To people living with, living with, living with / not dying from disease.") But unlike those more theatrical, fantasia-prone forms, “The Way We Live Now” necessitates its form as a short story — in Sontag’s fiction writing, the personal takes precedent over the general, the experiential over the argumentative, and the bedroom over the living room.
January 7, 2018
Debriefing by Susan Sontag gathers her short stories together in one volume. I will admit that I have never read Sontag, although I remember when her many books came out and garnered a great deal of press. I won this nook from the publisher in a giveaway.
The first story, Pilgrimage, excited me. I related to the lightly fictionalized character, based on Sontag herself, who is overwhelmed when she has tea with Thomas Mann, a writer whose books had left an impression on the teenager. I discovered Mann as a teen, his story of Tonio Krueger especially resonating with me with it's view of the artist as outside. I had collected his novels afterward, but never read them all.
In the story, two teenagers contact Mann and are invited to visit him over tea. "We were prodigious of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishments," we are told. The teens struggle to know what to say, and listen to Mann talk. What she remembers best was embarrassment.
The first time one meets one's idol can be a shock, learning "the gap between the person and the work" a jolt.
The narrator seeks to escape "childhood's asphyxiations, the "long prison sentence of childhood" and its enforced culture of suburban life which held no meaning for her.
In one story a successful man--good job, wife, children--is tired of his life and creates a robotic substitute to take his place. The original man just bums around, but is more content with sleeping in the train station. What a condemnation of the Middle Class way of life!
Many of the other stories left me perplexed and unsure of my own intellectual capacity: what was I missing? I asked myself. Some experimented with form, such as Unguided Tour which reminded me of a Monet painting of Rheims Cathedral, leaving an impression without real detail or form. Whereas Monet leaves me with an emotional reaction, Sontag seeks to elicit an intellectual one.
Are some of these stories inaccessible to the general reader, or are they mere failures in storytelling? I would guess it is some of each.
January 2018 Update
The last story, How We Live Now, is another of my favorites. The presentation is interesting and the read moving. We hear a social group's reaction to a friend who is aflicted with AIDS in the early days. It has some great lines like, "I can't bear to think about...someone dying with the TV on." I can't bear to think about how after giving birth a nurse put on daytime television, and I was alone for an hour but too weak to turn the damn thing off. It was hell. And the line, "we are all learning how to die." The dying d0 teach us. I know my folks did.
I also am haunted by Baby. A couple's comments to the therapist they each see separately is presented. They talk about their child, only the description of the child morphs and changes. The end line is a whopper, and we realize the true pain behind the parent's stories.
Overall, I am glad to have read these stories.
I received a free book from the publisher on a giveaway.
The first story, Pilgrimage, excited me. I related to the lightly fictionalized character, based on Sontag herself, who is overwhelmed when she has tea with Thomas Mann, a writer whose books had left an impression on the teenager. I discovered Mann as a teen, his story of Tonio Krueger especially resonating with me with it's view of the artist as outside. I had collected his novels afterward, but never read them all.
In the story, two teenagers contact Mann and are invited to visit him over tea. "We were prodigious of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishments," we are told. The teens struggle to know what to say, and listen to Mann talk. What she remembers best was embarrassment.
The first time one meets one's idol can be a shock, learning "the gap between the person and the work" a jolt.
The narrator seeks to escape "childhood's asphyxiations, the "long prison sentence of childhood" and its enforced culture of suburban life which held no meaning for her.
In one story a successful man--good job, wife, children--is tired of his life and creates a robotic substitute to take his place. The original man just bums around, but is more content with sleeping in the train station. What a condemnation of the Middle Class way of life!
Many of the other stories left me perplexed and unsure of my own intellectual capacity: what was I missing? I asked myself. Some experimented with form, such as Unguided Tour which reminded me of a Monet painting of Rheims Cathedral, leaving an impression without real detail or form. Whereas Monet leaves me with an emotional reaction, Sontag seeks to elicit an intellectual one.
Are some of these stories inaccessible to the general reader, or are they mere failures in storytelling? I would guess it is some of each.
January 2018 Update
The last story, How We Live Now, is another of my favorites. The presentation is interesting and the read moving. We hear a social group's reaction to a friend who is aflicted with AIDS in the early days. It has some great lines like, "I can't bear to think about...someone dying with the TV on." I can't bear to think about how after giving birth a nurse put on daytime television, and I was alone for an hour but too weak to turn the damn thing off. It was hell. And the line, "we are all learning how to die." The dying d0 teach us. I know my folks did.
I also am haunted by Baby. A couple's comments to the therapist they each see separately is presented. They talk about their child, only the description of the child morphs and changes. The end line is a whopper, and we realize the true pain behind the parent's stories.
Overall, I am glad to have read these stories.
I received a free book from the publisher on a giveaway.
April 19, 2020
If you tend to buy books before reading them, as I do (as opposed to borrowing them from a friend or a library), do you keep them if you end up not liking them, or do you put them in a stack somewhere, to give away or trade in the next time you visit a used bookstore?
There is something nice about keeping a book, even the bad books, simply to keep a sort of physical record of what you've read (perhaps this is sheer vanity). On the other hand, there's also something nice about having a library that consists only of the books you've read and really liked and the books you haven't read yet but plan to eventually get around to.
I find myself pondering this having now finished this collection of short stories by Susan Sontag.
Sontag is one of those authors who has long been on my to-read list, but I understand now that it's primarily her nonfiction that made her name.
I wish I had known that before.
There are a couple of alright stories here. The first, "Pilgrimage," is about, we presume, the teenage Sontag who, along with a friend, is given an invitation to have tea at the LA home of the great German author, Thomas Mann. That's a a pleasant enough story, but things go downhill from there.
"Unguided Tour" is pretty meh, redeemed only by the excellent line, "I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." "The Dummy" reads like second rate Kafka or Hans Christian Andersen, and is about a man who makes a copy of himself that then wants a copy of itself, and, yeah, that's about all that was worth remembering about this collection, most of which isn't fiction at all but vague memories and snippets of conversation that Sontag, for whatever reason, felt was worthy of putting out in the world.
I've placed "Debriefing" on the stack of books to be discarded, but not before removing the bookmark, which I got when visiting the Frick Collection in NYC last November, a memory I don't intend to donate along with this book.
Yes, the author's name looks good on the shelf, but why, my thinking goes, keep a book one didn't enjoy?
There is something nice about keeping a book, even the bad books, simply to keep a sort of physical record of what you've read (perhaps this is sheer vanity). On the other hand, there's also something nice about having a library that consists only of the books you've read and really liked and the books you haven't read yet but plan to eventually get around to.
I find myself pondering this having now finished this collection of short stories by Susan Sontag.
Sontag is one of those authors who has long been on my to-read list, but I understand now that it's primarily her nonfiction that made her name.
I wish I had known that before.
There are a couple of alright stories here. The first, "Pilgrimage," is about, we presume, the teenage Sontag who, along with a friend, is given an invitation to have tea at the LA home of the great German author, Thomas Mann. That's a a pleasant enough story, but things go downhill from there.
"Unguided Tour" is pretty meh, redeemed only by the excellent line, "I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." "The Dummy" reads like second rate Kafka or Hans Christian Andersen, and is about a man who makes a copy of himself that then wants a copy of itself, and, yeah, that's about all that was worth remembering about this collection, most of which isn't fiction at all but vague memories and snippets of conversation that Sontag, for whatever reason, felt was worthy of putting out in the world.
I've placed "Debriefing" on the stack of books to be discarded, but not before removing the bookmark, which I got when visiting the Frick Collection in NYC last November, a memory I don't intend to donate along with this book.
Yes, the author's name looks good on the shelf, but why, my thinking goes, keep a book one didn't enjoy?
April 2, 2018
Strictly speaking, most of these are barely classifiable as stories.
e.g. Pilgrimage is a recollection of having, as a teenager met Thomas Mann; The Letter Scene is a contemplation of the Pushkin story; Unguided Tour is a sort of conversation, as is Baby, I suppose. A couple of others are fantasies and the rest can best be described as musings. What Sontag displays is a rather bizarre take on late-20th-century life and a general disregard for conventional form. Personally, I found that most of her disjointed ramblings failed to hold my attention. Whatever else she accomplished as a writer, this genre was not her strong point.
e.g. Pilgrimage is a recollection of having, as a teenager met Thomas Mann; The Letter Scene is a contemplation of the Pushkin story; Unguided Tour is a sort of conversation, as is Baby, I suppose. A couple of others are fantasies and the rest can best be described as musings. What Sontag displays is a rather bizarre take on late-20th-century life and a general disregard for conventional form. Personally, I found that most of her disjointed ramblings failed to hold my attention. Whatever else she accomplished as a writer, this genre was not her strong point.
January 10, 2022
A strange array of short stories that defy traditional structures and narratives. Sontag's essays have always been, at the very least, thought-provoking. I may say the same for these stories, but for different reasons - it was so difficult to get my head around many of them. Still, some stand out to me and will likely stay in my memory for some while. "Pilgrimage" was a a great memoir-ish look at what happens when precocious youths meet their literary idols. "Baby" was a strange and wonderful ride. And the story, "The Way We Live Now" was a deeply affecting look at friends impacted by the mid 80's AIDS crisis.
April 26, 2022
مجموعة قصص قصيرة وصلت في قرائتها إلى القصة الثالثة ولم أستطع أبدا إلزام نفسي بإكمالها!
لا تستطيع مجاملة ترجمة رديئة جدا .. سيئة .. بحرفية قاتلة لروح القصة وثقافة البلد..
متأكدة لو قرأتها بلغتها الأصلية سأمنحها أكثر من ثلاث نجوم
لا تستطيع مجاملة ترجمة رديئة جدا .. سيئة .. بحرفية قاتلة لروح القصة وثقافة البلد..
متأكدة لو قرأتها بلغتها الأصلية سأمنحها أكثر من ثلاث نجوم
Read
August 24, 2025some nice short stories I hope to return to once I slow down. Fav quote: “we’re really radical but we don’t show it. Baby thinks we’re radicals. Baby is going through a conservative period like a lot of kids nowadays. We don’t criticize him but we hope he outgrows it. Baby has a confederate flag over his bed.”
February 21, 2019
Not quite as good as I anticipated, Sontag's Debriefing is comprised of 11 short stories memorable enough for their experimental structure but they run in a circular track, lingering there, with their frequent nonlinearity.
Most of these stories begin interestingly only for them to slide down the rambling hole, their inconsistency apparent, and unfortunately, Sontag can't seem to get away from her style for her comfort in writing her essays overlaps with her intriguing prose which parts of these stories echo.
However it is worth mentioning three of these stories stand out to me personally namely The Dummy, Baby, and The Way We Live Now. In The Dummy, a small tribute to the sci-fi genre, a man creates a dummy with his own likeness. This dummy then takes over his life thereby giving the man freedom to live another life until things go south forcing him to create another dummy. The unforeseen circumstances were not surprising but they're a little funny. It's a question of freedom and how we make use of it when we have it in our hands completely. The man's freedom to make choices for himself, unchained from responsibilities and roles, limits the freedom itself. Another story titled Baby is a one-way conversation; a couple seemingly talk to a therapist about their child. It's a little confusing at first because they share moments about their exceptional child in blurry years and ages. Their contradicting, disjointed memories coalesce into a series of hard-hitting regret and grief. The ending itself is staggeringly magnificent and the reader themselves take the shoes of the therapist. Lastly, The Way We Live Now is a pass-the-message structured narrative of people linked through a person diagnosed with an unnamed disease (though it closely resembles AIDS). Whilst reading this I can't help but imagine everyone in one room walking around whispering successively to each other then change their places for another to whisper again. At the same time as the story progresses I can't help but wonder how this person manages to keep this amount of people in his life. All of them care about him. I don't think the number of people who care about me surpasses my five fingers. All the paranoia, concern, hearsay, and love here mirror the impact of such a life; it is minuscule yet profound. In the nearness of death there could be bouts of reprieve through people we have touched and that's something painfully beautiful.
Honourable mentions are Project For a Trip to China and Pilgrimage. Project For a Trip to China is a lamentation of knowing a place but not setting a foot there. It's a weak story as it jumps from idea to idea of China yet how Sontag mingles this with her own personal struggle and affliction in obtaining peace with her absent father, a father she only knows through photographs and stories, perhaps trying to know him by wanting/being in a place he lived, is poignant to me. Pilgrimage recounts Sontag's meeting with author Thomas Mann. Her need to appease and impress him turns out to be an ordinary encounter, underwhelming even. How most of us think of someone we admire highly, too highly in fact that we have pre-conceived ideas of the person and a set of expectations to whet the curiosity, based from their works alone. But sometimes it could be disappointing if The Man himself is not as brilliant as his works. Strangely enough, parts of this story could be a cross between fiction and reality. Who knows how it really went?
Most of these stories begin interestingly only for them to slide down the rambling hole, their inconsistency apparent, and unfortunately, Sontag can't seem to get away from her style for her comfort in writing her essays overlaps with her intriguing prose which parts of these stories echo.
However it is worth mentioning three of these stories stand out to me personally namely The Dummy, Baby, and The Way We Live Now. In The Dummy, a small tribute to the sci-fi genre, a man creates a dummy with his own likeness. This dummy then takes over his life thereby giving the man freedom to live another life until things go south forcing him to create another dummy. The unforeseen circumstances were not surprising but they're a little funny. It's a question of freedom and how we make use of it when we have it in our hands completely. The man's freedom to make choices for himself, unchained from responsibilities and roles, limits the freedom itself. Another story titled Baby is a one-way conversation; a couple seemingly talk to a therapist about their child. It's a little confusing at first because they share moments about their exceptional child in blurry years and ages. Their contradicting, disjointed memories coalesce into a series of hard-hitting regret and grief. The ending itself is staggeringly magnificent and the reader themselves take the shoes of the therapist. Lastly, The Way We Live Now is a pass-the-message structured narrative of people linked through a person diagnosed with an unnamed disease (though it closely resembles AIDS). Whilst reading this I can't help but imagine everyone in one room walking around whispering successively to each other then change their places for another to whisper again. At the same time as the story progresses I can't help but wonder how this person manages to keep this amount of people in his life. All of them care about him. I don't think the number of people who care about me surpasses my five fingers. All the paranoia, concern, hearsay, and love here mirror the impact of such a life; it is minuscule yet profound. In the nearness of death there could be bouts of reprieve through people we have touched and that's something painfully beautiful.
Honourable mentions are Project For a Trip to China and Pilgrimage. Project For a Trip to China is a lamentation of knowing a place but not setting a foot there. It's a weak story as it jumps from idea to idea of China yet how Sontag mingles this with her own personal struggle and affliction in obtaining peace with her absent father, a father she only knows through photographs and stories, perhaps trying to know him by wanting/being in a place he lived, is poignant to me. Pilgrimage recounts Sontag's meeting with author Thomas Mann. Her need to appease and impress him turns out to be an ordinary encounter, underwhelming even. How most of us think of someone we admire highly, too highly in fact that we have pre-conceived ideas of the person and a set of expectations to whet the curiosity, based from their works alone. But sometimes it could be disappointing if The Man himself is not as brilliant as his works. Strangely enough, parts of this story could be a cross between fiction and reality. Who knows how it really went?
November 23, 2017
Susan Sontag is one of those writers I have been intending to read. It is her essays that were mostly on my mind, her writings on war, illness, culture and art. But for me, essays are something I have to actively be in the mood for. Unlike short stories or novels, it is not as easy to sink away into an essay. There are arguments to be followed, facts to take in, statements to agree or disagree with. So when I saw that there was a collection of short stories by Sontag coming out I figured it would be as good a, if not a better, introduction to this fascinating woman as her essays. And they certainly worked for me. Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
For me, one of the clearest descriptions of, and keys to, this collection comes from the blurb:
"The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode."
In the stories collected in Debriefing you can feel the wrestling that Sontag is doing. An essay requires a driving thrust, a clear argument towards a resolution or at the very least a suggestion. The issues addressed in these stories can’t be resolved that way, so Sontag battles with them in short stories. Each story is full of questions, partially rhetorical and meant to go unanswered, but partially also desperately waiting for someone to provide an answer. The stories in and of themselves will not necessarily give you any answers or solutions, rather, they will drop you into a situation and make you consider it, join Sontag in approaching it from different angles, and recognize your own questions in hers. There is no clear link, per se, that ties these different stories together, except for the fact that they all deal, in a way, with the human condition. Adolescent desire for adulthood, parenthood, wanderlust, love, companionship, illness, it all features in Debriefing in one way or another.
Sontag’s writing is potentially not for everyone. It is very “wordy”, to put it one way. Where other authors might use two words, Sontag uses two sentences to get to a point. Her language meanders, expands, evades and uncovers. For me, her writing style felt very much like the way thoughts work, without becoming an internal monologue. A story is clearly being told, but chronology or argument doesn’t really hold sway. The story will go where it goes, if it is inspired to move one way now and the other later, then that is what it will do. This can definitely be confusing but it also keeps the story fresh and engaging. Sontag uses different forms throughout the stories collected in Debriefing. Some stories are made up of bullet points, in others we only get one side of a dialogue. Then there are those which feel mystical and those who deal honestly with real life diseases. Sontag’s writing shines through all of these stories for me, always turning a phrase or sentence into something more. Her writing is very descriptive but never sinks into melodrama for me. And some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.
I really enjoyed reading Debriefing! Sontag’s stories have something absurd yet highly recognizable about them, as if someone has taking an everyday problem and makes you look at it through a prism. You know what you’re seeing and yet you’re not quite sure how it all comes together, or even if it can come together. Although Debriefing may not be for everyone, I would definitely recommend it to those interested in challenging short stories.
For full review: http://universeinwords.blogspot.com/2...
For me, one of the clearest descriptions of, and keys to, this collection comes from the blurb:
"The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode."
In the stories collected in Debriefing you can feel the wrestling that Sontag is doing. An essay requires a driving thrust, a clear argument towards a resolution or at the very least a suggestion. The issues addressed in these stories can’t be resolved that way, so Sontag battles with them in short stories. Each story is full of questions, partially rhetorical and meant to go unanswered, but partially also desperately waiting for someone to provide an answer. The stories in and of themselves will not necessarily give you any answers or solutions, rather, they will drop you into a situation and make you consider it, join Sontag in approaching it from different angles, and recognize your own questions in hers. There is no clear link, per se, that ties these different stories together, except for the fact that they all deal, in a way, with the human condition. Adolescent desire for adulthood, parenthood, wanderlust, love, companionship, illness, it all features in Debriefing in one way or another.
Sontag’s writing is potentially not for everyone. It is very “wordy”, to put it one way. Where other authors might use two words, Sontag uses two sentences to get to a point. Her language meanders, expands, evades and uncovers. For me, her writing style felt very much like the way thoughts work, without becoming an internal monologue. A story is clearly being told, but chronology or argument doesn’t really hold sway. The story will go where it goes, if it is inspired to move one way now and the other later, then that is what it will do. This can definitely be confusing but it also keeps the story fresh and engaging. Sontag uses different forms throughout the stories collected in Debriefing. Some stories are made up of bullet points, in others we only get one side of a dialogue. Then there are those which feel mystical and those who deal honestly with real life diseases. Sontag’s writing shines through all of these stories for me, always turning a phrase or sentence into something more. Her writing is very descriptive but never sinks into melodrama for me. And some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.
I really enjoyed reading Debriefing! Sontag’s stories have something absurd yet highly recognizable about them, as if someone has taking an everyday problem and makes you look at it through a prism. You know what you’re seeing and yet you’re not quite sure how it all comes together, or even if it can come together. Although Debriefing may not be for everyone, I would definitely recommend it to those interested in challenging short stories.
For full review: http://universeinwords.blogspot.com/2...
Read
April 11, 2018I'm not sure whether the short story ever was Sontag's best fit but whenever it did, it really did. This collection is worthy of any bookshelf space if only for the excellent stories Pilgrimage, Baby, and The Way We Live Now.
March 28, 2021
Tiene unos cuentos buenísimos, de esos que no sueltas hasta que se acaben. Mientras que otros (dos o tres... ya no recuerdo), se me hicieron eternos.
Me costó empezarlo, quizás por el momento en el que me encontraba... no sé.
Mi favorito fue “El Nene”.
Me costó empezarlo, quizás por el momento en el que me encontraba... no sé.
Mi favorito fue “El Nene”.
December 10, 2020
"Now I take a deeper breath. Readying myself, ready, faltering. My longing is pithed. It lies at hand, in words.
Turn up the halogen lamp. there's not enough light in this room.
Love, please go on writing. Your letters will always reach me. you can write me in your real, your littlest script. I will hold it to the light. I will magnify it with my love."
This is my first time reading Sontag and I'm absolutely blown away. I don't think I've ever read a better essay collection. Sontag writes about things without saying them outright, if that makes sense. She is able to speak to universal experience by writing through immensely personal stories. Her stories are at the same time visceral and logical; everyday and intimate; detached and feverish. This is borderline incoherent but I feel like I'm in a trance from her writing.
What I'm confused about is how little mention is made of Sontag in the "best American writers" discussions. Maybe I'm late to the game, but I first heard of Sontag through the Met Gala's "Camp" theme a few years back. And after briefly combing through articles on the Beat Generation, best American authors, authors that best highlight the American experience, I didn't see her name on any list. Which is quite striking to me because she traverses the American experience much better, in my opinion, than the "On the Road" observations of Kerouac.
Anyway, if you're reading this review, you need to read this book immediately.
Turn up the halogen lamp. there's not enough light in this room.
Love, please go on writing. Your letters will always reach me. you can write me in your real, your littlest script. I will hold it to the light. I will magnify it with my love."
This is my first time reading Sontag and I'm absolutely blown away. I don't think I've ever read a better essay collection. Sontag writes about things without saying them outright, if that makes sense. She is able to speak to universal experience by writing through immensely personal stories. Her stories are at the same time visceral and logical; everyday and intimate; detached and feverish. This is borderline incoherent but I feel like I'm in a trance from her writing.
What I'm confused about is how little mention is made of Sontag in the "best American writers" discussions. Maybe I'm late to the game, but I first heard of Sontag through the Met Gala's "Camp" theme a few years back. And after briefly combing through articles on the Beat Generation, best American authors, authors that best highlight the American experience, I didn't see her name on any list. Which is quite striking to me because she traverses the American experience much better, in my opinion, than the "On the Road" observations of Kerouac.
Anyway, if you're reading this review, you need to read this book immediately.
May 9, 2025
antes que nada es de decirse que yo tengo a thing con susan sontag desde que leí notes on camp (tengo la misma thing con hannah arendt) por lo que a lo largo de los años he leído varia cosa de ambas. a susan me había costado trabajo encontrarle el lado más “personal” o “biográfico” y en este libro lo pude ver un poco más. hay cuentos que me gustaría leer con una guía alado para saber que quería decir porque no caché bien todo. los últimos cuentos de i, etcétera ya estaban innecesariamente largos.
June 15, 2024
This is not a book of instant gratification. Yet, Sontag stays with you so that as time allows it, you will later marvel at her brilliance. I think maybe her grocery lists were even a work of art.
“Here I am, with my irrevocable feelings”
“Here I am, with my irrevocable feelings”
October 18, 2024
So many quotables it’s a wonder they all fit in one book
October 31, 2018
A more comprehensive, text-based way of saying what I'm saying here: http://artsfuse.org/168949/book-revie...
In some ways, I think the brilliant, worldly, perceptive, and formidably erudite Sontag was just too smart to write top-shelf fiction. Some brainiacs can write as well as they can think, but I think there is an intuitive, everyman, ethereal quality to great fiction that goes just beyond raw intelligence. Of course you have to be smart to be a writer, let alone a good one, but some people just have a particular lyrical gift that might counterbalance a lack of massive intellectual capacity. In some ways, I kinda feel bad for Sontag, because if anyone had read and could appreciate the finer points of great writing it was her. Did she ever feel like Salieri?
A couple of these stories seemed more like postmodern intellectual exercises than real deal fiction. Working out some linguistic or ontological question by writing out loud. A few interesting ideas don't quite coalesce into compelling fiction. Some stories veer more closely to the autobiographical, and thereby work better because they are based on feelings, such as "Pilgrimage", an account of an awkwardly awed teenage meeting with Thomas Mann.
I'm not saying that Crash Davis, the old catcher from Bull Durham played by the mono-emotional Kevin Costner, had it right when he claimed that her novels were "over-rated, self-indulgent crap." They're just ok. There were, as Crash found out, better ways of flirting with the magnificent Annie Savoy.
"The Way We Live Now"- a short story about a man suffering from an unnamed disease that is clearly, evocatively HIV and told Rashomon-meets-talk of the town style through jittery, flowing, overlapping accounts of the conversations, shared memories, and poignant reactions of his friends- is brilliantly conceived and deeply moving.
Easily the standout of the volume and a frustrating intimation of what could have been if she'd put her brain on the shelf next to her 7,000 volumes, read and re-read, and written more directly from the ticker.
September 4, 2021
I know that Susan sontag is mostly known for her nonfiction writing but her fiction is just absolutely delightful. I picked this up because her nonfiction was all gone at the library, and I Loved it! These are Really really good essays/stories and I love how she experiments with form and structure and it is just so good and left me staring at my ceiling after I finished each one. My favorites were American Spirit, the Dummy, Baby, Old complaints revisited and Debriefing. Baby and Debriefing were so GD Good Im thinking about them now just Ahhh so good. i think that I could really get into sontag I Want to read everything she's ever written now
June 24, 2025
::انطباع عام::
=========
بداية الكتاب كانت فوق الروعة، مشجعة جدًا على الاستمرار، عشتُ التجربة الكاملة لسوزان في ((حجها)) لإله الأدب: توماس مان. ثم بعد ذلك، وجدتُ نفسي أمام عادية القصص وعدم قدرة المترجم على نقل أسلوب سوزان بشكل متمكن، وبالتالي بدأت أضيع عند منتصف الكتاب ثم ضعت نهائيًا في آخره. لكنني بشكل عام لا يمكنني أن أكره سوزان، ولا أن أنفر من أسلوبها وقدرتها على تحويل اليومي البسيط إلى أدب حقيقي. هذه المرأة لديها قدرة عجيبة على اقتناص العادي وتحويله إلى شيء فائق.
بسبب القصة الأولى عن توماس مان، تشجعتُ لقراءة أعماله الأدبية المتوفرة ورقيًا لدي:
1_ الجبل السحري
2_ دكتور فاوستوس
3_ ��ل بودنبروك
***
::في سطور::
========
هذه مجموعة قصصية تضم كل القصص القصيرة التي كتبتها سوزان سونتاغ، وتتنوع بين الحكاية الرمزية، والأمثولات، والسيرة الذاتية الجزئية عن بداية تعرفها على عالم الأدب. في هذه القصص، تواجه سونتاغ قضايا لا يمكنها معالجتها في نصوصها النقدية أو مقالاتها، وتطرح قضاياها بشكل مفتوح دون حبكة قصصية، لكنها تستعرض خبرتها الأدبية الواسعة.
***
::القصص::
========
1_ الحج:
تتناول هذه القصة تطور شخصية سونتاغ منذ الطفولة حتى المراهقة، مع التركيز على اهتماماتها الأدبية والفنية وهوسها بالقراءة. تبرز القصة رحلة نضجها العقلي والنفسي، خاصة من خلال مقابلتها للكاتب الألماني توماس مان الذي تدعوه إله الأدب، وتُظهر كيف تفوقت ثقافتها على أقرانها بمقارنتها مع صديقها الذي تشجع وعقد ميعاد تلك الزيارة معه. كما تشير سونتاغ لرابط خفي بينها وبين توماس مان بعد تجربة قراءتها لروايته التي أثرت فيها جدًا وهي ("الجبل السحري") التي تناولت مرض السل بشكل استعاري وهو المرض نفسه الذي كان سببًا في وفاة والد سونتاغ.
"مان وزوجته كاتيا، اللذان أصبحا مواطنين أمريكيين في 1944 غادرا جنوب كاليفورنيا عائدين إلى أوروبا التي أصبحت كجبل سحري مسوى بالأرض إلى حد ما، عادا في 1952. لقد أمضيا خمس عشرة سنة في أمريكا. لقد عاش مان هنا وفي الحقيقة لم يعش هنا."
2_ مشروع رحلة إلى الصين:
تدور القصة حول فكرة السفر إلى الصين كرمز للاكتشاف والتغيير الثقافي. تستكشف القصة التوتر بين التوقعات والواقع، وكيف تؤثر الرحلات على فهم الإنسان للعالم والذات. كما تستكتشف سونتاغ هذه البلد التي توفى فيها والدها ولم يعد من سفريته، فكأنها كانت تبحث عن مدفنه أو ضياعه في تلك البلاد. واضح حب سوزان كذلك بالثقافة الصينية وعزمها على تعلم لغتها وتاريخها.
"هناك افتراض. الأشخاص الذين يبدون ذوي شأن حقيقة يعطون الانطباع أنهم من حقبة أخرى. (إما حقبة ما في الماضي وإما، ببساطة، حقبة في المستقبل). لا أحد فوق العادة يبدو أنه معاصر تماماً. الناس المعاصرون لا يظهرون أبداً: إنهم غير مرئيين.
النصح الأخلاقي أو التمسك بالفضيلة هو ميراث الماضي، بينما التمسك بالفضيلة يحكم ميدان المستقبل. نحن نتردد لأننا حذرون ومتهكمون ومتحررون من الأوهام. إلى أي مدى أصبح هذا الحاضر جسراً صعباً! كم رحلة ورحلة يجب أن نقوم بها كي لا نكون خاوين وغير مرئيين."
3_ أرواح أمريكية:
تتناول هذه القصة موضوع الهوية الأمريكية من منظور شخصي أو نقدي، مع التركيز على التناقضات الثقافية والاجتماعية، والصراعات الداخلية التي يعيشها الطبقات العليا والدنيا في المجتمع الأمريكي: التمايز الاجتماعي في الرأسمالية وسلطة السكس في ذلك.
"إن درجة اليقظة تساوي الدرجة التي يكون المرء فيها كسولاً ويتجنب العادات. كونوا متيقظين.
إن الحقيقة بسيطة، وبسيطة جداً. إنها مركزية. لكن الناس يشتهون تغذية أخرى بجانب الحقيقة. إنها تشويهات أشخاص لهم سطوة في الفلسفة والأدب. مثلاً:
إنني أقدر رغباتي الملحة، وأفقد الصبر معها.
«الأدب هو فقط فقدان الصبر بالنسبة للمعرفة«."
4_ مشهد الرسالة:
مسرحية اجتماعية.
5_ الأخرس:
تتناول بشكل متبصر جدًا فكرة الاستنساخ للشخص عبر نماذج ذكاء صناعي تقوم بأدواره. (مذهلة!)
"إن مشكلات العالم تحل بشكل صحيح فقط بطريقتين: بالإخماد أو الإلغاء، أو بالنسخ. كان الخيار الأول هو الشائع في العصور السابقة. ولكنني لا أرى سبباً ألا نتخذ من عجائب التكنولوجيا المعاصرة حلولاً لتحررنا الشخصي. عندي خيار، وكونه ليس النموذج الانتحاري، لقد قررت أن أضاعف نفسي (أن أعمل نسخة أخرى من نفسي)."
6_ رحلة بلا مرشد:
قصة عن صراع الحضارات الإنسانية.
7_ تذمرات:
صعوبة العمل الجماعي في عصرنا.
8_ بيبي:
الوراثة هي تشارك البيئة في تكون الشخصية.
9_ الدكتور جيكل:
نقل الشخصية لآخر.
10_ استخلاص:
عملية التقييم أو الاستنتاج بعد تجربة معينة.
11_ طريقة حياتنا الآن:
عزلة المرض.
*.*.*.*.*
=========
بداية الكتاب كانت فوق الروعة، مشجعة جدًا على الاستمرار، عشتُ التجربة الكاملة لسوزان في ((حجها)) لإله الأدب: توماس مان. ثم بعد ذلك، وجدتُ نفسي أمام عادية القصص وعدم قدرة المترجم على نقل أسلوب سوزان بشكل متمكن، وبالتالي بدأت أضيع عند منتصف الكتاب ثم ضعت نهائيًا في آخره. لكنني بشكل عام لا يمكنني أن أكره سوزان، ولا أن أنفر من أسلوبها وقدرتها على تحويل اليومي البسيط إلى أدب حقيقي. هذه المرأة لديها قدرة عجيبة على اقتناص العادي وتحويله إلى شيء فائق.
بسبب القصة الأولى عن توماس مان، تشجعتُ لقراءة أعماله الأدبية المتوفرة ورقيًا لدي:
1_ الجبل السحري
2_ دكتور فاوستوس
3_ ��ل بودنبروك
***
::في سطور::
========
هذه مجموعة قصصية تضم كل القصص القصيرة التي كتبتها سوزان سونتاغ، وتتنوع بين الحكاية الرمزية، والأمثولات، والسيرة الذاتية الجزئية عن بداية تعرفها على عالم الأدب. في هذه القصص، تواجه سونتاغ قضايا لا يمكنها معالجتها في نصوصها النقدية أو مقالاتها، وتطرح قضاياها بشكل مفتوح دون حبكة قصصية، لكنها تستعرض خبرتها الأدبية الواسعة.
***
::القصص::
========
1_ الحج:
تتناول هذه القصة تطور شخصية سونتاغ منذ الطفولة حتى المراهقة، مع التركيز على اهتماماتها الأدبية والفنية وهوسها بالقراءة. تبرز القصة رحلة نضجها العقلي والنفسي، خاصة من خلال مقابلتها للكاتب الألماني توماس مان الذي تدعوه إله الأدب، وتُظهر كيف تفوقت ثقافتها على أقرانها بمقارنتها مع صديقها الذي تشجع وعقد ميعاد تلك الزيارة معه. كما تشير سونتاغ لرابط خفي بينها وبين توماس مان بعد تجربة قراءتها لروايته التي أثرت فيها جدًا وهي ("الجبل السحري") التي تناولت مرض السل بشكل استعاري وهو المرض نفسه الذي كان سببًا في وفاة والد سونتاغ.
"مان وزوجته كاتيا، اللذان أصبحا مواطنين أمريكيين في 1944 غادرا جنوب كاليفورنيا عائدين إلى أوروبا التي أصبحت كجبل سحري مسوى بالأرض إلى حد ما، عادا في 1952. لقد أمضيا خمس عشرة سنة في أمريكا. لقد عاش مان هنا وفي الحقيقة لم يعش هنا."
2_ مشروع رحلة إلى الصين:
تدور القصة حول فكرة السفر إلى الصين كرمز للاكتشاف والتغيير الثقافي. تستكشف القصة التوتر بين التوقعات والواقع، وكيف تؤثر الرحلات على فهم الإنسان للعالم والذات. كما تستكتشف سونتاغ هذه البلد التي توفى فيها والدها ولم يعد من سفريته، فكأنها كانت تبحث عن مدفنه أو ضياعه في تلك البلاد. واضح حب سوزان كذلك بالثقافة الصينية وعزمها على تعلم لغتها وتاريخها.
"هناك افتراض. الأشخاص الذين يبدون ذوي شأن حقيقة يعطون الانطباع أنهم من حقبة أخرى. (إما حقبة ما في الماضي وإما، ببساطة، حقبة في المستقبل). لا أحد فوق العادة يبدو أنه معاصر تماماً. الناس المعاصرون لا يظهرون أبداً: إنهم غير مرئيين.
النصح الأخلاقي أو التمسك بالفضيلة هو ميراث الماضي، بينما التمسك بالفضيلة يحكم ميدان المستقبل. نحن نتردد لأننا حذرون ومتهكمون ومتحررون من الأوهام. إلى أي مدى أصبح هذا الحاضر جسراً صعباً! كم رحلة ورحلة يجب أن نقوم بها كي لا نكون خاوين وغير مرئيين."
3_ أرواح أمريكية:
تتناول هذه القصة موضوع الهوية الأمريكية من منظور شخصي أو نقدي، مع التركيز على التناقضات الثقافية والاجتماعية، والصراعات الداخلية التي يعيشها الطبقات العليا والدنيا في المجتمع الأمريكي: التمايز الاجتماعي في الرأسمالية وسلطة السكس في ذلك.
"إن درجة اليقظة تساوي الدرجة التي يكون المرء فيها كسولاً ويتجنب العادات. كونوا متيقظين.
إن الحقيقة بسيطة، وبسيطة جداً. إنها مركزية. لكن الناس يشتهون تغذية أخرى بجانب الحقيقة. إنها تشويهات أشخاص لهم سطوة في الفلسفة والأدب. مثلاً:
إنني أقدر رغباتي الملحة، وأفقد الصبر معها.
«الأدب هو فقط فقدان الصبر بالنسبة للمعرفة«."
4_ مشهد الرسالة:
مسرحية اجتماعية.
5_ الأخرس:
تتناول بشكل متبصر جدًا فكرة الاستنساخ للشخص عبر نماذج ذكاء صناعي تقوم بأدواره. (مذهلة!)
"إن مشكلات العالم تحل بشكل صحيح فقط بطريقتين: بالإخماد أو الإلغاء، أو بالنسخ. كان الخيار الأول هو الشائع في العصور السابقة. ولكنني لا أرى سبباً ألا نتخذ من عجائب التكنولوجيا المعاصرة حلولاً لتحررنا الشخصي. عندي خيار، وكونه ليس النموذج الانتحاري، لقد قررت أن أضاعف نفسي (أن أعمل نسخة أخرى من نفسي)."
6_ رحلة بلا مرشد:
قصة عن صراع الحضارات الإنسانية.
7_ تذمرات:
صعوبة العمل الجماعي في عصرنا.
8_ بيبي:
الوراثة هي تشارك البيئة في تكون الشخصية.
9_ الدكتور جيكل:
نقل الشخصية لآخر.
10_ استخلاص:
عملية التقييم أو الاستنتاج بعد تجربة معينة.
11_ طريقة حياتنا الآن:
عزلة المرض.
*.*.*.*.*
May 1, 2025
Mi ranking de los cuentos:
1. Diálogo entre una descendiente de Noé y un pájaro
2. Doctor Jekyll (De mis favoritos aunque me faltó mucho lore para entender)
3. El muñeco
4. El Nene
5. Así vivimos ahora
6. Declaración
7. La escena de la carta
8. Repaso de antiguas quejas (qué ironía leer la traducción de este cuento en español)
9. Descripción (de una descripción)
10. Espíritus norteamericanos
11. Peregrinación
12. Proyecto para un viaje a China
13. Viaje sin guía
14. Un Parsifal
15. El muy cómico lamento de Píramo y Tisbe
1. Diálogo entre una descendiente de Noé y un pájaro
2. Doctor Jekyll (De mis favoritos aunque me faltó mucho lore para entender)
3. El muñeco
4. El Nene
5. Así vivimos ahora
6. Declaración
7. La escena de la carta
8. Repaso de antiguas quejas (qué ironía leer la traducción de este cuento en español)
9. Descripción (de una descripción)
10. Espíritus norteamericanos
11. Peregrinación
12. Proyecto para un viaje a China
13. Viaje sin guía
14. Un Parsifal
15. El muy cómico lamento de Píramo y Tisbe
May 17, 2021
She writes well, we all know that, but these seem to be exercises in writing techniques, a sort of tour de force. I was put off by the precious and precocious initial story about a high schooler’s tea with Thomas Mann. The second story was incomprehensible snippets about a trip to China I think. The last was about the friends attending an early victim of AIDS. I stuck with it for the sake of my book club but I’m not motivated to read the rest.
October 18, 2025
m quedaron claras de principio a fin dos cosas q leí sobre susan sontag: 1. algo q la consideraba como "la mujer más inteligente de eeuu" en su tiempo y 2. q tiene un gran amor x el lenguaje. Dicho esto, agrego q las historias de este libro son experimentales y sesudas, demasiado para mí. Me pasó, entonces, q las disfruté de forma contemplativa, o sea, disfruté cómo escribía.. El Muñeco, El Nene, y Repaso de antiguas quejas sí me gustaron en todo el sentido de la palabra.
September 8, 2025
Algunas de las historias son más interesantes, personales y nostálgicas que otras. Recomiendo leer American Spirits, The Dummy, Old Complaints Revisited y Baby.
Sin lugar a duda para mí, el mejor cuento fue The letter scene, me hizo sentir identificado y explorar las diferentes cosas que se siente en la epistolografía.
Sin lugar a duda para mí, el mejor cuento fue The letter scene, me hizo sentir identificado y explorar las diferentes cosas que se siente en la epistolografía.
December 25, 2022
Los cuentos son distintos entre sí: diferentes estilos, técnicas (incluso breves guiones de teatro); hay ficción y también referencias autobiográficas.
En el libro encontré cuentos increíbles (p.e. "El nene"), pero también relatos que me resultaron demasido desos/circulares y difíciles de seguir.
En el libro encontré cuentos increíbles (p.e. "El nene"), pero también relatos que me resultaron demasido desos/circulares y difíciles de seguir.
November 11, 2023
Love Sontag as a Critic but not as a novelist unfortunately. Favourite story was the Dummy which read like one of the short submissions you read in The New Yorker
February 21, 2024
American author challenge: Susan Sontag. 1933-2004' writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novel. I read what is mostly a short story collection though some felt autobiographical, some leaned toward essay. I can't say that I liked the short stories because I didn't. My impression is that she was a ferocious reader and was compelled to write.
June 10, 2024
This book of short stories was as unsufferable as the author herself 😌
FAVORITE STORIES:
- Pilgrimage (Unfortunately the first one, which was very misleading on what quality I could expect)
- Old Complaints Revisited (The way she captured the duality of her loathing and sheep mindset for unions/party politics was insane)
STORIES TO NEVER READ AGAIN:
- Doctor Jekyll (was both so nasty nasty and boring)
FAVORITE STORIES:
- Pilgrimage (Unfortunately the first one, which was very misleading on what quality I could expect)
- Old Complaints Revisited (The way she captured the duality of her loathing and sheep mindset for unions/party politics was insane)
STORIES TO NEVER READ AGAIN:
- Doctor Jekyll (was both so nasty nasty and boring)
July 5, 2021
(3.8) Los cuentos son muy distintos el uno del otro, hasta me dio la impresión de no estar leyendo a una sola Susan, sino muchas de ellas. Algunos relatos fueron tediosos, ya fuese por la tendencia de la autora a dar vueltas o porque enredaba con su ritmo. Sin embrago, son más los cuentos que me engancharon hasta el final, tales como Peregrinación, El Muñeco, El Nene, Doctor Jekyll y Declaración. También tiene cuatro obras de teatro las cuales son siempre reflexivas y muy disfrutables.
Temáticas recurrentes en los cuentos: críticas a la sociedad estadounidense, melancolía, su orientación sexual oculta mientras estaba viva y la muerte.
Temáticas recurrentes en los cuentos: críticas a la sociedad estadounidense, melancolía, su orientación sexual oculta mientras estaba viva y la muerte.
November 16, 2017
The author is obviously brilliant and a masterful writer but to me, the material seems too wordy and not especially interesting. I enjoyed her use of language and yet it has the feeling of trying too hard. Like - throw lots of words into the mix to sound more intelligent. Perhaps this is just because the stories were written years ago so seem somewhat dated but I found them a bit tedious to read.
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