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Sontag Audiobook Summary

The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face.

No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money–and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated–and undermined–her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.

Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo–Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait–a great American novel in the form of a biography.

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Sontag Audiobook Narrator

Tavia Gilbert is the narrator of Sontag audiobook that was written by Benjamin Moser

Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books. 

About the Author(s) of Sontag

Benjamin Moser is the author of Sontag

More From the Same

Sontag Full Details

Narrator Tavia Gilbert
Length 22 hours 4 minutes
Author Benjamin Moser
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date September 17, 2019
ISBN 9780062957856

Subjects

The publisher of the Sontag is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Biography & Autobiography, Gay & Lesbian

Additional info

The publisher of the Sontag is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062957856.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

William2

July 24, 2022

As a Sontag admirer, I’m saddened to learn one of my favorite writers was such an asshole. There are reasons for it, but they don’t excuse her. Well, Sarajevo, may in part excuse her — maybe…“When, after her death, extracts from Sontag’s‘s diaries were published, many who knew her were surprised by the often-remorseless self-awareness they revealed. ‘I've always identified with the Lady Bitch Who Destroys Herself,’ she wrote, for example, in 1960. ‘I'm not a good person,’ she emphasized in 1961. ‘Say this 20 times a day. “Sorry, that's the way it is.”’ A few days later, she added: ‘Better yet. Say, “Who the hell are you?”’ She did not think she was bad, she wrote in 1965. Rather, she was‘incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave, etc.).’ . . . ‘Rather, it’s that I’m dumb, insensitive.’” (p. 245)Sontag lost her intriging father, an importer who often traveled to China, when she was very young. Sontag’s mother, spoiled by opulence and many servants in Tientsen — well before the Revolution — taught her daughter to suppress unpleasant news. The book calls her the Queen of Denial. Nothing negative was to be uttered in her presence. She ran off to another room when that happened. She drank vodka from a tumbler while offering guests water out of similar glasses. At Berkeley however Sontag broke free. She had an affair with a woman which she celebrated in her journals yet quickly sought to expunge. Shame? She was a 17 year old beauty and wunderkind when she went to Chicago University and married her professor. This in an attempt, apparently, to heterosexualize herself. During this time she wrote his first book for him — Freud: The Mind of the Moralist — which he published under his name.A few highlights:1. Sontag had no visual eye.“‘She would forbid David to look out of the window from buses or trains when they were traveling,’ said one of David's later girlfriends, Joanna Robertson. ‘She used to say that he needed to hear all about a place in terms of facts and history in order to understand it, but that looking out of the window would tell him nothing. She never looked out of the window on journeys like that- I remember her, always talking about the places we were in or were headed towards, but never curious to simply look out to see them.’" (p. 162)2. She was apolitical.“Her time in Paris coincided with one of the turning points of French history: in May, as a result of the ongoing disaster in Algeria, civil war loomed. The American embassy considered evacuating its citizens as France fell under martial law: Corsica was conquered by dissident elements from the French Algerian army, and only an emergency government under General de Gaulle prevented a coup d'état. Yet there is not a word about this in Susan's journals. ‘I came to Paris in 1957 and I saw nothing,’ she said ten years later. ‘I stayed closed off in a milieu that was in itself a milieu of foreigners. But I felt the city.’“She was so weighed down by heavy choices that she could spare little attention for even the most dramatic events; later, when she became a public figure called upon to pronounce on world affairs, her difficulty in seeing political matters became clear.” (p. 165)3. She was irrational in the face of death.I understand this is the biography of an asshole. I also understand the biographer’s need to give the reader a balanced portrait. But isn’t this a bit cruel?“Her alienation from her body was so extreme that she had to remind herself to bathe. She neglected her health in astonishing ways. She never exercised. She barely slept. Sometimes she forgot to eat, and sometimes she gorged. She was a heavy smoker —and lied about her habit even to her oncologist. But in Illness as Metaphor—in her zeal to transform her story of guilt, shame, and fear into something usable—she acknowledged none of this. Instead, she dismissed ‘crude statistics’ brandished for the general public, such as that 90 percent of all cancers are 'environmentally caused,’ or that imprudent diet and tobacco smoking alone account for 75 percent of all cancer deaths. She does not say what is crude about these statistics, or display any interest in the science behind them.“The pathogenesis of cancer is extremely complex; the disease strikes for all sorts of reasons. But under the onslaught she lost her ability, so recently acquired, to distinguish between tragedy and drama. Her dismissal of personal responsibility—for some cancers, for some people—made contracting cancer from chain-smoking Marlboros sound as inexplicable as being dashed to pieces by a meteor. She chose to dissociate her choices from anypotential responsibility for her disease, and created, instead, a story about why she had been saved. She credited her survival to her own determination to be treated by the most radical methods, and to the doctor who had administered them. At the heart of this story was an impossible paradox. She was not responsible for her illness--but she was responsible for its cure.” (pp. 375-376)The author makes a good point. But because this bit has to do with her mental state during her illness, it strikes me as beyond cruel. Alas, there’s no way around it for the author. As Sontag said, “The job of writers is to speak out.” (p. 486) So her irrationality during illness is an ugliness we must see — like photos of a cataclysm that make no exception for personal dignity.4. She was in deep need of psychoanalysis but never got it.“‘I loved Susan,’ said Leon Wieseltier, speaking for many others. ‘But I didn't like her.’ She grew more and more insulting toward the people who did love her, and as a result her isolation often astonished people who knew her only as a famous public figure. Many formerly close friends abandoned her. ‘It was like Marilyn Monroe, who couldn't get a date on a Saturday night,’ Wieseltier said. ‘She had absolutely no understanding of herself.’ And so she suffered genuinely from the cruelty and indifference she perceived in others. But she could not perceive her effect on those she hurt in turn, and friends and acquaintances were constantly befuddled by her behavior, which they would still be analyzing years after her death.” (p. 480)5. She made 11 visits to Sarajevo. In a life of so emotionally fraught, this may have been her finest hour.“At the end of that first visit, he (David Reiff) spoke to Miro Purivatra, who later founded the Sarajevo Film Festival, and asked if there was anything, or anyone, he could bring back. ‘One of the persons who could be perfect to come here to understand what's going on would definitely be Susan Sontag,’ he [Purivatra] said. Without mentioning the connection—‘for sure," Miro said, ‘I did not know that he was her son’—David said he would do what he could. He appeared at Miro's door a few weeks later. ‘We hugged each other and he told me, “Okay, you asked me something and I brought your guest here.” Just behind the door, it was her. Susan Sontag. I was frozen.’ It would be at least a month before he figured out their relationship: ‘They never told me.’” (p.556)“‘She was the first international person who said publicly that what is happening in Bosnia in 1993 was a genocide," said Haris Pasovié, a young theater director. ‘The first. She deeply understood this. She was absolutely one hundred percent dedicated to this because she thought it was important for Bosnia but it was also important for the world.’" (p. 558)6. Somehow, in Bosnia, Susan became nice. Her return from Sarajevo, though, when I read about it, reminded me of a closing line in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”:”She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”But back in New York, there was no such incentive."’Everything she said about Bosnia was admirable,’ said Stephen Koch. ‘Her behavior about it was insufferable. Because if you had not gone to Sarajevo yourself, you were obviously just a morally inferior being. And she let that be known very clearly, with almost sneering condescension.’“ (p. 589)As her posthumous journals attest she could never quite believe she was working hard enough. This was reflected in her final months. She undertook a bone marrow transplant that, according to the author, was almost suicidally toxic and unlikely to work because this was her third cancer. The treatment was another way of working hard. It’s a shame she should have achieved so much yet enjoyed it so little. Her life really as I read it was paradoxical. This is an excellent critical biography. No admirer of Sontag will want to miss it.

Loring

July 13, 2019

I found it a little bit odd that some reviewers of the ARC of this book complained that they did not want to waste 700 pages reading about such a difficult person. I tend to think of gushing hagiographies of historical figures as being almost as creepy as biographies of high-profile villains like Hitler or Napoleon. It's far better to read in detail about challenging personalities, warts and all - and Sontag certainly had her share of warts.Some may wonder in the opening pages if Benjamin Moser was the right person to pull this off, since he tends to analyze deep motivations in almost a post-Freudian sense, and offer the results as a true picture. Certainly, one could challenge his certainty if not his conclusions at times, but the reason this ends up working is because Moser's conclusions ring true. The book exceeds 700 pages because Moser wants to give us a flavor of all the decades, from the 1940s to the early 2000s, when Sontag influenced late-20th-century politics, culture, and intellectual life. And love her or hate her, she certainly did play a leading role in defining those worlds. Moser is not afraid to say that many of her novels, plays, and film experiments were only partially successful, but he concludes by showing that Sontag mattered in ways we may not fully understand for decades to come.Moser digs deeper than the simplest explanation to show why Sontag was often unhappy or willing to lash out at friends. The most common view is that Sontag was never comfortable with the idea of "coming out" as a lesbian, and to the end of her life resisted addressing any aspect of her gender identity. Moser shows that there was a good deal of truth in this, but it was also related to Sontag's uncomfortable relationship with her own body. She was not grounded in her body, she did not take care of her health, but in her three bouts with cancer, she seemed willing to abuse her body horribly merely to make sure her mind could go on. Moser also takes the leap to say that the underlying challenge in both queer politics and body familiarity was that Sontag was the child of an alcoholic. Certainly her mother's odd and detached manner, and Sontag's bitter relationship with her mom, was reflected later in Sontag's own strange relationship with her son, David Rieff. Though Sontag herself never showed aspects of a substance-abusive personality, the damages wrought by even a single generation of parent with alcohol or drug addiction can live on in many succeeding generations.The "juicy newsbyte" that many publicists seem to focus on in this book is the revelation that Sontag essentially wrote the entirety of her ex-husband Philip Rieff's 1950s book, Freud, The Mind of the Moralist. I find this scarcely surprising and largely irrelevant, because it was all so long ago and because Freud matters so little these days. It certainly shows the degree of male dominance in academia in the 1950s, and later descriptions of the divorce underscore what a terribly creepy person Philip Rieff was, but this story is a very minor sidelight in the book.Moser hints at an aspect of philosophy and public-intellectual life that I fleshed out a little in my own mind, though Moser himself was not this explicit. He showed that Sontag got a classic 1940s-intellectual education at the University of Chicago, heavily influenced by Greek and Roman authors, Marx, Freud, and many 18th-century philosophers. As a result, she believed in disembodied mental images and philosophy. She never subscribed at all to the post-modernist realm in which Theory in academia became paramount to lives actually lived. I say, good for her for that! Her legacy will live on long after the likes of Derrida and Foucault are forgotten.It is often said that Sontag and her contemporaries were the last generation of public intellectuals, and there are no comparative figures today. Some would respond by saying that the philosophers of the 21st century are in fields such as cognitive neuroscience and comparative microbiology. I will go so far as to guess that if Sontag had encountered thinkers like Daniel Dennett and George Lakoff earlier in her career (a physical impossibility, unless she had been born later), she would have eagerly followed the neuroscience-philosophers and would have been more at peace with her body and her sexuality as a result. To cite but one example, in Lakoff's work Philosophy in the Flesh, he cites the key role of metaphor as being central to the "hidden layer" of the neural network, one that makes philosophy and abstraction possible. Moser makes metaphor central to his entire biography of Sontag. Lakoff concludes his book by tossing out a good deal of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Freud, and others, saying any philosophy that assumes the existence of a disembodied intelligence, and that does not center itself on emergent intelligence arising from the human body, is next to worthless. If Sontag and many of her contemporary philosophers had tossed out 3/4 of the classical education offered at University of Chicago, Berkeley, and most Ivy League schools in the 1940s and 1950s, she might have been a much happier genius. But of course, then we would not have seen the 1960s trajectory of the public intellectual that we saw in Sontag.Sontag often is cited as a New Left public intellectual, but Moser said it is more complex than that. Sontag always was more interested in meaning, metaphor, and representation than in ideology. When she seemed to mouth platitudes in Havana or Hanoi, it was often because she was not paying attention to realities on the ground (another factor of being uncomfortable with her own being-in-the-world), rather than because she believed in any centralized socialist ideologies. In talking about the evolution of New York public-intellectual life in the 1950s through 1970s, Moser shows what an inbred and cloistered group these writers were. It wasn't just that people put up with sexist jackasses like Norman Mailer far longer than they should have. It was that the editors of The New York Review of Books considered themselves far more influential than they really were. Moser brings up the case of the shunning of the radical poet Adrienne Rich. Who the hell cares what these people thought? It reminded me of the number of young novelists in the 1980s who centered their stories on lives and loves among Manhattan and Brooklyn literati. Who the hell cares? The artificial cultural island of New York quite simply didn't matter, and Sontag was right to stop paying attention to her compatriots in many such matters.The problem was, she never did so with kindness or consistency, a result of having no Buddhist or self-love principles to fall back on. Sontag would regularly shun, betray or trash-talk both close friends and lovers, because she had no effective way of stating her independence without bad-mouthing those she loved. A classic case came in the post-Yugoslavia wars largely initiated by the Serbs. When Sontag made long stays in Sarajevo during the siege of that city, she rightly berated U.S. and Western European intellectuals for their silence on Bosnia, and their apparent willingness to give Slobodan Milosevic a free pass. But there is a wrong and right way to berate. One can snidely call a close ally a "useful idiot" yet still find a way to talk to them tomorrow, but Sontag seemed to be an expert at permanently burning bridges. Sure it showed her as an independent thinker, but it did not show her as a kind person.Her late-life relationships, particularly her odd deep love with photographer Annie Leibovitz, were particularly abusive in this regard, and once again, it all boiled down to a fear of death and a fear of the body. Unfortunately, some of these behaviors rubbed off on her son David Rieff, who seemed to grow more sullen and uncaring with others as he entered middle age. It ended up making her twin memorial services following her death a mockery, an indication of all that had been broken in her way of seeing herself and others.Moser's epilogue, aptly titled "The Body and Its Metaphors," concludes on a positive note by pointing out that she offered volumes of useful observations on the relationship between language and reality, as well as the relation between image and reality. In her book On Photography, she explored what McLuhan had hinted at, at how immediate visual access to information (and later the impact of a always-on Internet) changed our perception of reality. But in the new era of deepfakes, we can no longer trust photographic or video evidence. We may no longer be able to trust reality itself. Where would Sontag have gone in exploring linguistic concepts of reality with the likes of Chomsky or Lakoff? Moser points out that it's useless to ask how Sontag would have confronted problems arising later in the 21st century - it's enough to know that she would have been the first to ask the right questions. Still, it would have been interesting to see if a familiarity with the body might have made her a fundamentally happier person.

Khush

December 27, 2020

A wonderful book. Moser shows patience, love, intelligence and goodwill toward his subject, Susan Sontag. Most books I read on Sontag are by people who knew her personally, and their books read more like a revenge on her. While reading Moser's book, I never thought about the biographer. He kept himself resolutely out of the book. His focus remains on Sontag's life and her work. I enjoyed reading Moser's take on Sontag's essays and her fiction, and how her work intersect with the works of other authors. Usually, I prefer books no longer than 250-300 pages, so reading this one is an exception. A nice one.

Sebastian

October 18, 2022

I have to admit my knowledge about Susan Sontag before listening to this biography was very very scant. But I loved getting to know her better, her life in different shapes and forms, the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. What I admired the most in this account of her life is its realness and its raw honesty. I really got the impression after finishing this book that I got to know her, precisely as she was: extremely intelligent, hard-working, always striving for perfection, difficult, direct, sometimes unfriendly, but also magnetic. Benjamin Moser did an amazing job researching her life, untangling the knots of hidden secrets and unspoken aversions. And I enjoyed the queer perspective on the life of Susan provided in this biography, it added another level of complexity to this overly complex persona.

Matthew

September 26, 2019

Susan was, beyond all else, an example. She was an avatar of erudition and high purpose that we didn’t have in American letters in the twentieth century. The closest comparable know-it-all is Harold Bloom, but he’s a traditionalist; Susan was interested in the bleeding edge of culture, the difficult stuff that demanded the most of us. (Why did she never write on Straub-Huillet? She must have known that work.)Moser, who seems to be part of this fellowship, diagnoses Susan as an Adult Child of Alcoholics. He also makes a lot of hay out of Susan’s not wanting to come out—which in 2019 makes a little sense in that she didn’t wanted to be affixed with an ID card from Team Lesbian: I suspect our current identity politics would have nauseated her. There are some specious claims within—such as her having balled Bobby Kennedy and Warren Beatty, both of which I find REALLY hard to believe. (A tale of Warren’s calling Susan day and night is just pure silliness.) And there is a lot of evidence of Sudan the bad parent, though she clearly loved her kid. (One particularly shocking moment features her taking off on a vacation abroad with a girlfriend at the moment her son goes into the hospital for cancer surgery.) What do we learn about this protean genius, this woman of infinite appetites? She didn’t like to bathe, she ate gross food, and she was so mean to people that by the 90s...maybe even the 80s...she had driven everyone away. I must say I came away from Moser’s wonderfully written, sober, practical and engaging biography with...if not more, as much love for Susan as ever. She was the person I wanted to be as a child—the urban sophisticate who is the ultimate Cocteau-like hyphenate and is right at the epicenter of the culture in every imaginable arena. We live, to be sure, in a post-Sontagian culture. But does she not give us, in this haplessly fallen world, something to aspire toward?

Simon

February 11, 2021

An icon of 20th century literature and what it means to be a writer, critic and upholder of asthetic concerns for culture/artistic reality.

Lars

August 06, 2020

Ik was geïntimideerd door de omvang, maar het boek bleek bijzonder vlot en leesbaar. Ik zou ‘m met plezier herlezen.

Daniela

June 01, 2020

Creo que nunca había terminado un libro con ganas de leérmelo otra vez, inmediatamente. Y quisiera que existiera un museo que traduzca el paseo por la vida de la autora que está tan bellamente descrito y tan juiciosamente documentado, enriqueciéndolo con todas las fotos e imágenes de lugares y momentos históricos que en mi lectura casi sin pausas no busqué inmediatamente.

Elly

September 25, 2021

Om de een of andere duistere reden was dit de eerste biografie die ik ooit heb gelezen, en nu weet ik niet of ik vanaf nu alleen nog maar biografieën moet gaan lezen (omdat dit zo mooi en interessant was) of dat ik het hier juist voorgoed bij moet laten (omdat alle andere biografieën nu wel moeten tegenvallen). Wat een pageturner, wat een intelligent en tegelijkertijd ontzettend leesbaar boek. Ik moet toegeven: ik heb er lang over gedaan (het is een dikkerd) dus over de opbouw kan ik moeilijk iets zeggen, daarvoor mis ik het overzicht. Misschien is het wel uit balans, al denk ik eigenlijk van niet. Heel veel nadruk wel op het liefdesleven en de seksualiteit van Susan Sontag, maar overbodig voelt dat niet — Moser maakt aannemelijk dat dat ook echt een belangrijk deel van haar leven én haar denken was. En het is echt een verhaal over haar leven en haar werk — de verwevenheid daarvan wordt heel mooi en natuurlijk weergegeven, vind ik. De teksten die besproken werden die ik al gelezen had, kregen zo voor mij ook meer diepte en ik kon ze beter plaatsen. Nu moet ik nog wel Against Interpretation uitlezen — daar ben ik eerder in begonnen dan hierin, maar tot mijn schande moet ik toegeven dat ik dat denkwerk meer heb uitgesteld dan dit. Ik weet nu wel weer zeker dat het echt de moeite waard gaat zijn. Dus hup!

Jason

June 17, 2021

Je ne pensais pas lire une biographie plus fascinante cette année que celle de Mike Nichols par Mark Harris. Bin voilà.

Rute

October 17, 2022

Uma biografia escrita magistralmente. A vida de Sontag é por si só, uma viagem imensa e cheia de nuances obscuras.Sontag já tinha-me chamado à atenção há alguns meses quando li os seus diários.Para ser sincera, ainda só fui bisbilhoteira, mas o que li impulsionou-me para outras descobertas; outras leituras muito diferentes daquilo que sempre li; outros autores, enfim, poderei dizer outra literatura.Penso que as suas lutas, apesar da áurea de divã não são diferentes das não divãs e a mais importante lição que Sontag ensina é a profundidade; a luta constante de uma vida pela arte e pela cultura.Não foi perfeita, nem tão pouco a menina bem comportada; intimamente nos seus diários, nos mais de cem volumes dos seus diários, a sua procura era essa, ser a menina bem comportada. Mas essa é uma luta inglória; sê-lo é castrar-nos a nós próprios.Aconselho a sua leitura.

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