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A review by leda
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
4.0
Like Susan Sontag, I spent most of my adolescence in a hurry to read all the books I could find. Like Sontag. I am devoted to the idea of transformation. “I‘m only interested in people engaged in a project of transformation,” Sontag wrote in her journal in 1971. “If the desire for transformation can derive from a lack of positive self-satisfaction, it is also the enemy of self-satisfaction in the negative sense, of smugness and complacency,” argues Benjamin Moser, the author of the Sontag’s biography.
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, etc. “Interpretation,” she wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag taught me not to trust the critics – an irony, as she was herself a critic. She has also change the way I see art, the way I read books and the way I write about books.
Read more on Notes of a Curious Mind
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, etc. “Interpretation,” she wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag taught me not to trust the critics – an irony, as she was herself a critic. She has also change the way I see art, the way I read books and the way I write about books.
Read more on Notes of a Curious Mind