Reborn

Starred review from October 27, 2008
The first of three planned volumes of Sontag’s private journals, this book is extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontag’s writing—extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance toward mediocrity; Sontag’s vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise the late critic and novelist’s fans and detractors. At 15, when these journals began, Sontag (1933–2004) already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is most remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century’s leading minds. In these carefully selected excerpts (many passages are only a few lines), Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student at Berkeley discovering her sexuality (“bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual”), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of 18, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love (“physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me”) and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of 30. Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic.

February 1, 2009
Sontag's son Rieff ("A Bed for the Night"), who served as his mother's editor until her death in 2004, has edited the first of what is to be a three-volume set of her journalssome of which were originally excerpted in the "New York Times" (e.g., "On Self"). It is fascinatingand sometimes distressingto see Sontag's intense and often excoriating appraisal of herself: "No matter what I have said]my actions say]that I have not wanted the truth." The entries have been selected for "the rawness and the unvarnished portrait]of]a young person, who self-consciously and determinately went about creating the self she wanted to be"; and as Rieff puts it, "to say these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement][my] mother was not in any way a self-revealing person." Recommended for literary collections in medium to large academic and public libraries; an optional purchase for others. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 8/08.]Felicity D. Walsh, Emory Univ., Decatur, GA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2008
Rieff sensitively portrayed revered critic and novelist Sontag during her last days in Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008) and now continues to navigate the great sea of her legacy as editor of her journals. He didnt want toopen his mothers private life to public eyes, but because her papers are available to scholars, he does so preemptively, granting readers access to the innermost thoughts of a genuine prodigy. In 1948, at age 15, Sontag asks, And what is it to be young in years and suddenly awakened to the anguish, the urgency of life? After starting college at 16, shefills her journalswith passionate analysis ofbooks, her intellectual ambitions, her struggle to accept her homosexuality, and the ecstasy and torment of her first lesbian relationship. Then, suddenly, this ardent seeker becomes a wife and mother. Sheloves her son, but marriage does not suit her, and her battle to reclaim her true self is one of several dramatic rebirths punctuating this electrifyingrecord of Sontag striving to become Sontag. Two more volumes are planned.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)