As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Starred review from February 27, 2012
“The notebook has become an art form,” writes Sontag toward the end of this second collection of her own notebooks and journals. Beginning as the Vietnam War is heating up and ending right before the Reagan era, this volume offers at times deliciously mad and maddening aphorisms (even notes for an essay on the aphorism), compulsively compiled lists (“Movies I saw as a child...”), and acute observations on her self, oddly without veering into autobiography. There are surprisingly few allusions to her cancer in the mid-1970s. “These journals show Sontag playing with and discovering the words to express many of the central themes of her most scintillating work, such as kitsch. She also treats themes as disparate as Marshall McLuhan, Samuel Beckett, her one-time lover María Irene Fornés, and as the ’60s close, revolution, and much more. Editor Rieff, Sontag’s son, eschews footnotes in favor of bracketed identification of people, as well as the meaning of many shorthand fragments. America’s Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, and Simone Weil rolled into one, Sontag fascinates with her teeming interests turning in on themselves. Agent: The Wylie Agency.

November 15, 2011

Issued in 2008, the first volume of Sontag's journals and notebooks covered her early years. This second of three volumes, also edited by Sontag's son, David Rieff, jumps right in mid-Sixties to her emergence as a significant critic. Juicy reading for all intellectual sorts.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2012
As in Reborn (2008), the first volume in the planned Sontag journals and notebooks trilogy, Sontag's son, David Rieff, begins the second with a strikingly candid introduction. In the full-tilt, questioning, and expressive entries that follow, Sontag suffers epically over love and heartbreak in her relationships with women and her hasty marriage and grapples with haunting memories of her wounding childhood. Angst blooms repeatedly, followed by self-chiding for her emotional turmoil and an oft-repeated refrain, I must be strong. Toward her son, adoration flows unstintingly, however self-sustainingly. One thing I know: if I hadn't had David, I would have killed myself last year. A champion list-maker, Sontag keeps track of books, movies, resolutions, even qualities that turn me on. Her journals accompany her all over the world as her stature rises. She writes incisively about the many remarkable writers, dancers, and artists she meets, and she is happiest recounting time spent with Joseph Brodsky. A truly moving and illuminating chronicle of the vital inner life of an exceptionally nuanced thinker and risk-taking artist coming into her full powers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)