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Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher |
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SEMPRE SUSAN
Sigrid Nunez was a young writer new to the New York literary world when she met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, her blindingly bright intelligence, and her edgy personal style. A magnetic presence, intimidating and blunt, Sontag established herself as the main interpreter of the avant-garde with Against Interpretation the book, claims Nunez, that made her want to become a writer.
"There could be no nobler pursuit, no greater adventure, no more rewarding quest." Her memoir, at once piercing and deeply empathic, gives a sharp sense of the charged, polarizing atmosphere that enveloped Sontag whenever she published a book, gave a lecture, or simply walked into a room. Published six years after the author's death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who, through sheer force of will, made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation. "She was so New York," writes Nunez. She sustained herself on opera, ballet, avant-garde films; her friends and lovers - the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, the publisher Roger Straus - were among the most interesting people in the city.
Nunez's nuanced portrait of Sontag is both respectful and intimate. She shows us a writer's day-to-day life - living on Campbell's soup, writing her most famous essays on a regimen of cigarettes and dexedrine, knocking on the author's door late at night to share the details of a party. Sontag lived for literature; she had read with urgent avidity the thousands of books in her library. But she hated the writer's solitary life, and could never stand to be alone. A novelist and controversial filmmaker as well as an essayist, she yearned to be recognized not only as a critic but as an artist. In a sense, her greatest work of art was her life.
When she died of cancer at the age of 71 (having miraculously survived a first bout in her early 40s that inspired her celebrated essay, Illness as Metaphor), her death hit hard. "She was a vital presence, and that she should have been felled in this way is very disturbing," Nunez quotes the friend who brought her the news. The author of five critically acclaimed novels - her most recent, Salvation City, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as "a satisfying, provocative, and very powerful novel" - has producd a masterly character portrait reminiscent of James Lord on Giacometti and Shirley Hazzard on Graham Greene. The novelist and biographer Edmund White calls Sempre Susan "the best thing written on Sontag."
Nunez's nuanced portrait of Sontag is both respectful and intimate. She shows us a writer's day-to-day life - living on Campbell's soup, writing her most famous essays on a regimen of cigarettes and dexedrine, knocking on the author's door late at night to share the details of a party. Sontag lived for literature; she had read with urgent avidity the thousands of books in her library. But she hated the writer's solitary life, and could never stand to be alone. A novelist and controversial filmmaker as well as an essayist, she yearned to be recognized not only as a critic but as an artist. In a sense, her greatest work of art was her life.
When she died of cancer at the age of 71 (having miraculously survived a first bout in her early 40s that inspired her celebrated essay, Illness as Metaphor), her death hit hard. "She was a vital presence, and that she should have been felled in this way is very disturbing," Nunez quotes the friend who brought her the news. The author of five critically acclaimed novels - her most recent, Salvation City, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as "a satisfying, provocative, and very powerful novel" - has producd a masterly character portrait reminiscent of James Lord on Giacometti and Shirley Hazzard on Graham Greene. The novelist and biographer Edmund White calls Sempre Susan "the best thing written on Sontag."
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Book Published 2014-10-07 by Riverhead |
Book Published 2014-10-07 by Riverhead |