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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
About the author
Susan Sontag
196 books5,807 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 194 reviews
March 3, 2026
3,5*
O que as outras pessoas pensavam de mim suscitava-me pouquíssima reflexão, já que as outras pessoas me pareciam de vistas extraordinariamente curtas, bem como muito pouco curiosas, ao passo que eu ansiava por aprender tudo: a diferença exasperante entre mim e toda a gente que já tinha conhecido – até então. Tinha a certeza de que havia uma multidão igual a mim, noutro sítio. E nunca me passou pela cabeça que alguém me pudesse impedir de continuar assim.
- “Peregrinação”
“Histórias” reúne o melhor e o pior que Susan Sontag escreveu na vida. Por cada uma que raia a perfeição, há outra que leva ao enfado. Basta ler “alegoria” e “parábola” na sinopse para perceber porquê. Desta vez, porém, a dificuldade em apreciar os contos da autora não é um exclusivo meu, o que me conforta, como se pode comprovar pelas declarações de Sigrid Nunez em “Sempre Susan”:
“Na verdade, não parecia haver fortes defensores de sua ficção, nem mesmo entre seus amigos. Acostumou-se a ouvir que seria melhor se ater ao que fazia de maneira tão brilhante (a alguns olhos, talvez melhor do que qualquer outra pessoa). Isso a colocou (ou, mais acuradamente falando, ela se colocou) na posição de ser sua própria defensora. Estava sempre intercedendo em favor de sua ficção, tentando chamar atenção para ela, empurrando-a para as pessoas que não a apreciavam. Uma posição estranha e desmoralizante. Em particular e em público, repetidas vezes, insistia que, independentemente do que todos pudessem dizer, ela era uma escritora de ficção que por acaso escrevia ensaios, e não o contrário. O fato de ninguém ter comprado essa ideia foi uma das maiores frustrações de sua vida.
A tendência para impor os seus contos aos outros era tal que gorava as expectativas dos seus leitores que pensavam que iam ouvir uma palestra ou a leitura de um ensaio e eram brindados com uma das suas histórias, por sinal, bastante extensas. Não é de admirar que ambicionasse ter “um bocadinho de Lizzie”, referindo-se à sua amiga Elizabeth Hardwick, que considerava a rainha dos adjectivos, já que a sua escrita é amiúde seca, vaga e prolixa.
Além de “Declaração” e “A Maneira como Vivemos Agora”, que destaquei com recensões individuais, assinalo também “O Boneco”, sobre um homem que criou um duplo de plástico para o substituir…
Os problemas deste mundo apenas são verdadeiramente resolvidos de duas maneiras: através da extinção ou da duplicação. As épocas anteriores possuíam tão-só a primeira opção. Mas não vejo razão para não aproveitar as maravilhas da tecnologia moderna em prol da libertação pessoal. Posso escolher. E não sendo suicida por natureza, decidi duplicar-me.
…”Baby”, um conto extremamente inventivo na forma, sobre um casal que faz psicoterapia durante anos devido ao seu filho problemático…
Dizer-lhe que chorámos de autêntica alegria quando nasceu. Dizer-lhe, quando ele nasceu, nós começámos a morrer.
…”Projeto para uma Viagem à China”, apontamentos autobiográficos sobre a China, onde o pai trabalhou e morreu quando ela tinha cinco anos…
O David usa o anel do meu pai. O anel, um lanço branco de seda com as iniciais do meu pai bordadas em fio de seda preto, e uma carteira de pele de porco curtida com o nome dele gravado em pequenas letras douradas, no interior, são tudo o que possuo do que lhe pertenceu.
…mas especialmente “Peregrinação” onde conta sobre a visita que fez a Thomas Mann quando era adolescente. Desafiada por um amigo, que trata de combinar todos os pormenores com a mulher de Mann, ainda que a contragosto, Susan não resiste a ir tomar chá com o grande escritor alemão que se exilara nos Estados Unidos em 1938, com a ascensão do regime nazi. O constrangimento, a falta de assunto, o medo de não parecer inteligente, a falta de correspondência entre escritor e indivíduo, tudo me leva a compadecer da autora, pois também é isso que me impede, por exemplo, de ir a sessões de autógrafos dos meus autores preferidos.
Anos mais tarde, já depois de me ter tornado escritora e de conhecer muitos outros escritores, viria a aprender a ser mais tolerante em relação ao hiato entre a pessoa e a obra. E, no entanto, mesmo agora, aquele encontro continua a parecer-me ilícito, indevido. Por experiência própria, as recordações mais profundas correspondem, com grande frequência, a recordações de desconforto.
Peregrinação-5*
Projeto para uma viagem à China-4*
Espíritos Americanos-2*
A Cena da Carta-DNF
O boneco-4*
Viagem sem Guia-3*
Velhas Queixas Revisitadas-DNF
Baby-4*
Dr. Jekyll- DNF
Declaração-4,5*
A Maneira Como Vivemos agora-4,5*
O que as outras pessoas pensavam de mim suscitava-me pouquíssima reflexão, já que as outras pessoas me pareciam de vistas extraordinariamente curtas, bem como muito pouco curiosas, ao passo que eu ansiava por aprender tudo: a diferença exasperante entre mim e toda a gente que já tinha conhecido – até então. Tinha a certeza de que havia uma multidão igual a mim, noutro sítio. E nunca me passou pela cabeça que alguém me pudesse impedir de continuar assim.
- “Peregrinação”
“Histórias” reúne o melhor e o pior que Susan Sontag escreveu na vida. Por cada uma que raia a perfeição, há outra que leva ao enfado. Basta ler “alegoria” e “parábola” na sinopse para perceber porquê. Desta vez, porém, a dificuldade em apreciar os contos da autora não é um exclusivo meu, o que me conforta, como se pode comprovar pelas declarações de Sigrid Nunez em “Sempre Susan”:
“Na verdade, não parecia haver fortes defensores de sua ficção, nem mesmo entre seus amigos. Acostumou-se a ouvir que seria melhor se ater ao que fazia de maneira tão brilhante (a alguns olhos, talvez melhor do que qualquer outra pessoa). Isso a colocou (ou, mais acuradamente falando, ela se colocou) na posição de ser sua própria defensora. Estava sempre intercedendo em favor de sua ficção, tentando chamar atenção para ela, empurrando-a para as pessoas que não a apreciavam. Uma posição estranha e desmoralizante. Em particular e em público, repetidas vezes, insistia que, independentemente do que todos pudessem dizer, ela era uma escritora de ficção que por acaso escrevia ensaios, e não o contrário. O fato de ninguém ter comprado essa ideia foi uma das maiores frustrações de sua vida.
A tendência para impor os seus contos aos outros era tal que gorava as expectativas dos seus leitores que pensavam que iam ouvir uma palestra ou a leitura de um ensaio e eram brindados com uma das suas histórias, por sinal, bastante extensas. Não é de admirar que ambicionasse ter “um bocadinho de Lizzie”, referindo-se à sua amiga Elizabeth Hardwick, que considerava a rainha dos adjectivos, já que a sua escrita é amiúde seca, vaga e prolixa.
Além de “Declaração” e “A Maneira como Vivemos Agora”, que destaquei com recensões individuais, assinalo também “O Boneco”, sobre um homem que criou um duplo de plástico para o substituir…
Os problemas deste mundo apenas são verdadeiramente resolvidos de duas maneiras: através da extinção ou da duplicação. As épocas anteriores possuíam tão-só a primeira opção. Mas não vejo razão para não aproveitar as maravilhas da tecnologia moderna em prol da libertação pessoal. Posso escolher. E não sendo suicida por natureza, decidi duplicar-me.
…”Baby”, um conto extremamente inventivo na forma, sobre um casal que faz psicoterapia durante anos devido ao seu filho problemático…
Dizer-lhe que chorámos de autêntica alegria quando nasceu. Dizer-lhe, quando ele nasceu, nós começámos a morrer.
…”Projeto para uma Viagem à China”, apontamentos autobiográficos sobre a China, onde o pai trabalhou e morreu quando ela tinha cinco anos…
O David usa o anel do meu pai. O anel, um lanço branco de seda com as iniciais do meu pai bordadas em fio de seda preto, e uma carteira de pele de porco curtida com o nome dele gravado em pequenas letras douradas, no interior, são tudo o que possuo do que lhe pertenceu.
…mas especialmente “Peregrinação” onde conta sobre a visita que fez a Thomas Mann quando era adolescente. Desafiada por um amigo, que trata de combinar todos os pormenores com a mulher de Mann, ainda que a contragosto, Susan não resiste a ir tomar chá com o grande escritor alemão que se exilara nos Estados Unidos em 1938, com a ascensão do regime nazi. O constrangimento, a falta de assunto, o medo de não parecer inteligente, a falta de correspondência entre escritor e indivíduo, tudo me leva a compadecer da autora, pois também é isso que me impede, por exemplo, de ir a sessões de autógrafos dos meus autores preferidos.
Anos mais tarde, já depois de me ter tornado escritora e de conhecer muitos outros escritores, viria a aprender a ser mais tolerante em relação ao hiato entre a pessoa e a obra. E, no entanto, mesmo agora, aquele encontro continua a parecer-me ilícito, indevido. Por experiência própria, as recordações mais profundas correspondem, com grande frequência, a recordações de desconforto.
Peregrinação-5*
Projeto para uma viagem à China-4*
Espíritos Americanos-2*
A Cena da Carta-DNF
O boneco-4*
Viagem sem Guia-3*
Velhas Queixas Revisitadas-DNF
Baby-4*
Dr. Jekyll- DNF
Declaração-4,5*
A Maneira Como Vivemos agora-4,5*
February 26, 2026
#short stories in the shortest month
4,5*
À nossa volta, tanto quanto me é possível ver, as pessoas andam a tentar ser normais. O que exige grande esforço. A normalidade, considerada geralmente mais segura, tornou-se mais rara do que costumava ser.
É difícil encontrar um meio-termo nas histórias de Susan Sontag: ora são excelentes, ora são ilegíveis para o meu cérebro. “Declaração” inclui-se na primeira categoria, embora me pareça que o título em português não transmite o que implica o título original, “Debriefing”, que é um balanço depois dos factos consumados.
Julia, uma amiga de longa data da narradora, sofre de depressão, alimenta-se a pão e café, não sai de casa, descura a higiene…
O sofrimento cheira mal.
…tendo abdicado de todas as actividades que fazia antes por, alegadamente, agora só ter tempo para se interrogar. Também a narradora se interroga sobre várias coisas, incluindo “O que Alivia, Consola e Ajuda”, onde se percebe o seu apego e a sua preocupação com a amiga, apesar de ter dado a entender que aquela amizade era um fardo.
É um prazer partilharmos as nossas recordações. Tudo o que é recordado é querido, encantador, tocante, precioso. Pelo menos, o passado é seguro – embora não o soubéssemos na altura. Sabemo-lo agora. Porque faz parte do passado; porque sobrevivemos.
Não sei se Sontag alguma vez foi a amiga não deprimida que exorta, interfere, se impacienta e que, ao dar conselhos, percebe que são excelentes mas para si mesma, como ela própria comenta, no entanto, há aqui um saber de experiência feito e um pesar que fazem deste conto uma melacólica ode à amizade.
Tu que és as lágrimas das coisas e eu não. Se chorares por mim, eu choro por ti. Ajuda-me, não quero chorar por mim mesma.
4,5*
À nossa volta, tanto quanto me é possível ver, as pessoas andam a tentar ser normais. O que exige grande esforço. A normalidade, considerada geralmente mais segura, tornou-se mais rara do que costumava ser.
É difícil encontrar um meio-termo nas histórias de Susan Sontag: ora são excelentes, ora são ilegíveis para o meu cérebro. “Declaração” inclui-se na primeira categoria, embora me pareça que o título em português não transmite o que implica o título original, “Debriefing”, que é um balanço depois dos factos consumados.
Julia, uma amiga de longa data da narradora, sofre de depressão, alimenta-se a pão e café, não sai de casa, descura a higiene…
O sofrimento cheira mal.
…tendo abdicado de todas as actividades que fazia antes por, alegadamente, agora só ter tempo para se interrogar. Também a narradora se interroga sobre várias coisas, incluindo “O que Alivia, Consola e Ajuda”, onde se percebe o seu apego e a sua preocupação com a amiga, apesar de ter dado a entender que aquela amizade era um fardo.
É um prazer partilharmos as nossas recordações. Tudo o que é recordado é querido, encantador, tocante, precioso. Pelo menos, o passado é seguro – embora não o soubéssemos na altura. Sabemo-lo agora. Porque faz parte do passado; porque sobrevivemos.
Não sei se Sontag alguma vez foi a amiga não deprimida que exorta, interfere, se impacienta e que, ao dar conselhos, percebe que são excelentes mas para si mesma, como ela própria comenta, no entanto, há aqui um saber de experiência feito e um pesar que fazem deste conto uma melacólica ode à amizade.
Tu que és as lágrimas das coisas e eu não. Se chorares por mim, eu choro por ti. Ajuda-me, não quero chorar por mim mesma.
November 8, 2018
This was at parts brilliant, at parts a bit underdeveloped and confusing. Sontag is known for her essay writing but once I saw that she has written short stories too, I needed to pick this up. All the stories are so different from each other. Some of them feel more like experiments instead of finished short stories, and some are some of the best short stories I have read in a very long time. So yes, a mixed bag and very difficult to rate. I haven't picked up any nonfiction by her so I am keeping my fingers crossed that her essays will be as brilliant as some of the stories in this.
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.
April 1, 2019
Esperava muito mais da Sontag. Nunca lhe tinha lido a ficção e não me deslumbrou.
O primeiro texto é soberbo, sobretudo porque não estou certa de que seja o relato de um evento real (li os diários dela contemporâneos desse episódio e nem uma só entrada sobre o assunto...). A partir daí é sempre a descer com ligeiras e pontuais subidas.
O primeiro texto é soberbo, sobretudo porque não estou certa de que seja o relato de um evento real (li os diários dela contemporâneos desse episódio e nem uma só entrada sobre o assunto...). A partir daí é sempre a descer com ligeiras e pontuais subidas.
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.
May 19, 2018
Until Stories, I had only known Susan Sontag‘s work as an essayist. However, when it came to my attention that Penguin Random House was publishing Stories, in 2017, I felt compelled to know this other side of Sontag’s writing.
The author wrote these stories to fathom the world she lives in, to find her place in it and to understand her mind and thoughts.
Sontag's voice and writing style varies throughout these eleven short stories. One of my favourite from this collection, called Pilgrimage, is perhaps the most traditional. Sontag reveals the first great encounter of her life: the day she met Thomas Mann. She was only fifteen years-old. However, as I said, her register changes completely throughout the book. The influence of science fiction or of the New French Novel is explicit in other texts, for instance.
Although I loved some of the tales, there were others that weren’t so successful, in my opinion. Old Complaints Revisited – another allegory – was a very dull text to read. I nearly gave up on that story.
Overall, I think Susan Sontag was one of the greatest intellectuals of last century and that is enough reason to recommend Stories. It’s a book one slowly savours and apprehends.
I’d like to thank Penguin Random House UK for sending me a copy of the book.
For more reviews, follow me on Instagram: @booksturnyouon
The author wrote these stories to fathom the world she lives in, to find her place in it and to understand her mind and thoughts.
Sontag's voice and writing style varies throughout these eleven short stories. One of my favourite from this collection, called Pilgrimage, is perhaps the most traditional. Sontag reveals the first great encounter of her life: the day she met Thomas Mann. She was only fifteen years-old. However, as I said, her register changes completely throughout the book. The influence of science fiction or of the New French Novel is explicit in other texts, for instance.
Although I loved some of the tales, there were others that weren’t so successful, in my opinion. Old Complaints Revisited – another allegory – was a very dull text to read. I nearly gave up on that story.
Overall, I think Susan Sontag was one of the greatest intellectuals of last century and that is enough reason to recommend Stories. It’s a book one slowly savours and apprehends.
I’d like to thank Penguin Random House UK for sending me a copy of the book.
For more reviews, follow me on Instagram: @booksturnyouon
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
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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?
May 5, 2019
Sontag parece elegir las palabras una por una. La riqueza de su lenguaje es increíble, hace que se saboreen las oraciones, más allá de qué dicen. Sus cuentos me contrariaron, los disfruté mucho o nada. Algunas historias parecían apuntes esporádicos, desordenados, sin fundamento, con oraciones geniales dispersas por el texto. Otras historias abrumadoras, originales, divertidas, profundas, riquísimas. Me quedo con estas. Y con ganas de repetir.
May 10, 2021
My favourite story from the collection was ‘the letter scene’. along with some others it rlly touched me, and I loved her unconventional writing style. Perspective stitched together, one sided conversations etc. I did find sometime her message came quite convoluted but still enjoyed it. Sometimes overtly autobiographical sometimes not, I’m looking forward to reading some of her non fiction essays.
November 19, 2024
2.5
Die Kurzgeschichten waren mir so egal, nur die erste ist haften geblieben, in der zwei Jugendliche auf ihren Lieblingsautoren Thomas Mann treffen und bei ihm zu Kaffee und Kuchen eingeladen werden
Die Kurzgeschichten waren mir so egal, nur die erste ist haften geblieben, in der zwei Jugendliche auf ihren Lieblingsautoren Thomas Mann treffen und bei ihm zu Kaffee und Kuchen eingeladen werden
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...
October 22, 2025
Most people know of this author's essays and she's quoted all the time even on Tumblr (in the past) and Twitter (now), so imagine my surprise when I found out she had a short story collection too. It's nothing like what I imagined. The foreword said that they should feel contemporary in the year of 2017, but I feel like literary fiction has evolved very significantly in the past decade, so these stories feel dated but only in comparison to what's being published now.
What's really interesting is that the collection does not have a unifying theme save the fact that they were all written by a famous essayist. Each story is very different from the next. Some sound plausibly autobiographical ('Pilgrimage'), others are abstract and more challenging to figure out, with lots of references to the concept of Literature ('Project for a Trip to China', 'The Letter Scene', 'Unguided Tour', 'Debriefing') Some even feel like novellas disguised as short stories ('Old Complaints Revisited', 'Doctor Jekyll'). Some have dark humour and an unexpected bite ('Baby').
My favourite is 'American Spirits', which reads a little like a fable for repressed middle aged women, encouraging them to throw aside patriarchal institutions like wife-and-motherhood to live and love freely. I also loved 'The Dummy', in which a man creates a machine replica of himself to live his life and actually does it very well. His wife, children, and colleagues all believe it's him. One day, this dummy falls in love with a colleague and is driven to the heights of passion, ruining the man's plans of shirking his familial and societal duties. To solve this new problem, the man makes a second dummy. I would love to assign this story to a class of teenagers.
What's really interesting is that the collection does not have a unifying theme save the fact that they were all written by a famous essayist. Each story is very different from the next. Some sound plausibly autobiographical ('Pilgrimage'), others are abstract and more challenging to figure out, with lots of references to the concept of Literature ('Project for a Trip to China', 'The Letter Scene', 'Unguided Tour', 'Debriefing') Some even feel like novellas disguised as short stories ('Old Complaints Revisited', 'Doctor Jekyll'). Some have dark humour and an unexpected bite ('Baby').
My favourite is 'American Spirits', which reads a little like a fable for repressed middle aged women, encouraging them to throw aside patriarchal institutions like wife-and-motherhood to live and love freely. I also loved 'The Dummy', in which a man creates a machine replica of himself to live his life and actually does it very well. His wife, children, and colleagues all believe it's him. One day, this dummy falls in love with a colleague and is driven to the heights of passion, ruining the man's plans of shirking his familial and societal duties. To solve this new problem, the man makes a second dummy. I would love to assign this story to a class of teenagers.
October 15, 2021
Until I saw this collection in the public library racks, I'd never associated Susan Sontag with fiction. Other than her essays, my only other experience of reading her was the much acclaimed book 'On photography'. The first story itself, titled 'Pilgrimage', was quite a surprise, portraying her awkward meeting with Thomas Mann in her childhood days. The whole narrative leading up to the meeting, her anger with her friend for dialing up Mann's house directly and requesting for the meeting and her own wish for that meeting not to happen, all that make for an engaging read as much as their meeting with the writer, during which he is surprised at their "serious" reading at that young age.
The story 'Project for a trip to China', with its fragmented structure and its subject of travel, reminded me of 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk. 'Old complaints revisited' is also an elaborate plan, though not a fragmented narrative, with the protagonist planning to leave from a secret organisation. Structure-wise, the story 'Baby' is quite inventive with each successive chapter having a couple and taking turns meeting a counsellor to discuss an issue that has been simmering between them. We get to see only their answers to the counsellor's questions, not the questions themselves, and often end up playing a guessing game, until the reveal in the end. But, it has to be said that not every story in this collection is as engrossing as the best ones in the collection.
The story 'Project for a trip to China', with its fragmented structure and its subject of travel, reminded me of 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk. 'Old complaints revisited' is also an elaborate plan, though not a fragmented narrative, with the protagonist planning to leave from a secret organisation. Structure-wise, the story 'Baby' is quite inventive with each successive chapter having a couple and taking turns meeting a counsellor to discuss an issue that has been simmering between them. We get to see only their answers to the counsellor's questions, not the questions themselves, and often end up playing a guessing game, until the reveal in the end. But, it has to be said that not every story in this collection is as engrossing as the best ones in the collection.
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March 24, 2020“Histórias”de Susan Suntag reúne um conjunto de textos ficcionais, através dos quais o leitor capta dimensões íntimas e de certo modo autobiográficas, através de metáforas, entrecruzadas com abordagens mais pessoais. Obra constituída por onze contos que abordam temas diversos que mostram aspetos dramáticos da vida humana, nomeadamente, a perda, o suicídio de uma amiga, e o casamento, entre outros.
CDU:
821.111(73)-34
Livro recomendado PNL2027 - 2019 2.º Sem. - Literatura - dos 15-18 anos - maiores 18 anos
http://pnl2027.gov.pt/np4/livrospnl?c...
CDU:
821.111(73)-34
Livro recomendado PNL2027 - 2019 2.º Sem. - Literatura - dos 15-18 anos - maiores 18 anos
http://pnl2027.gov.pt/np4/livrospnl?c...
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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.
February 14, 2019
3.5 collections of stories are always tricky. Some of these were 5* and really clever and we'll written, others quite honestly I couldn't get into at all and had to slog my way through. The ones that were good, very very very good!
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
July 4, 2026
Some stories I liked some I did not. Nevertheless curious to delve into her essays.
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