Of Sontag's work, her collection "Against Interpretation" and the long essay "On Photography" are the most popular. For my money, however, "Under the Sign of Saturn" contains her most brilliant work.
From the opening essay - ostensibly about Paul Goodman - in which she extols the virtues of solitude and hard thinking, through a penetrating essay on the fetishism of fascism, on to a superb encomium to Roland Barthes, every essay sparkles with Sontag's characteristic wit and insight.
This volume also contains one of the single best essays (alongside Hannah Arendt's introduction to "Illumination") on the much-celebrated Walter Benjamin.
And, as is the case with all her work, Sontag unfolds difficult ideas in clear and direct prose.
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What a strange beast of a book this is. Part historical novel, part spy thriller, part philosophical rumination, part radical political manifesto, this book portrays the history of the radical reformation as an allegory of our own troubled days. All written by four authors posing as one.
The book opens at Frankenhausen, the climactic battle of the German Peasant's War (1524/5). A charismatic former monk, Thomas Muntzer, led a largely unarmed peasant army against the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, believing God would intervene and bring victory. The result is not hard to predict. We meet the main character (whose name varies) attempting to escape the resulting massacre.
The rest of the book follows the narrator's trail across Europe, from one heretical sect to another, all plotting to overthrow the existing powers and establish a heaven on earth, contra the landlords and the Church. He is haunted and blocked at every turn by Q, a sinister papal agent.
The book is an allegory of the fortunes of radical, particularly radical Italian politics, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. The novel's closest contemporaries are Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, in that it is a crowded, sprawling, entertaining, hilarious, anarchic, messy joy of a novel, one that pleases at many levels, from straight-ahead thriller on to a novel of ideas.
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Aimé Césaire died on Thursday, at the age of 94. Discussions are ongoing about transferring his remains to the Pantheon in Paris - France' s highest honor to her poets, statesmen and heroes (others buried there include Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Jaurès, Schoelcher). This book will remain his lasting testament, a long prose poem, simultaneously enigmatic and topical, that more than any other captured the vicissitudes of being both French and black, of existing at that liminal space between Europe and the America. This poem overflows with imagery, coined words, long lines and unique meters, thunderous ideas: the whole of life, of Martinique, of France, of the great dilemmas of the 20th century are in here. André Breton thought it might be the greatest poem of the 20th century. I have no doubts. A thousand years from now, when our civilization fades to a distant memory, Césaire, alongside Picasso and Schoenberg, will, I believe, be remembered as capturing the true predicament of our 20th century lives.
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John Berger's "G" is one of the stranger novels of the 20th century, and certainly one of the strangest to capture the Booker prize. Putatively a retelling of the Don Juan myth, Berger's account of the eponymous anti-hero's sexual conquests also unwraps the history of the opening decades of the 20th century.
The novel could be considered postmodern in structure and style, but its spirit belongs to both the social novels of the 19th century, and to the Marxian-inspired cultural criticism of Berger's critical works. The book seems to redeem the promise of his oft-quoted line, that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." This approach fractures the narrative, between G's story, long digressions on the history of flight, the Italian working class and Italian nationalism, as well as Berger's own musings on sex, history and death.
The novel can be a hard slog but the payoff is immense. It captures, without the pomposity or pedantry of recent postmodern "total" novels, the whole breadth of the experience of an individual human life.
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(5 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
Ondaatje's "The English Patient", winner of the Booker Prize and adapted into a wildly popular (and unfairly melodramatic) movie, is his best known and most popular novel. Those who have come to love his prose, however, almost always point to "In the Skin of a Lion" as his greatest work.
It is in this book that we first meet Hannah, Hannah's father Patrick (only alluded to, in death, in "English Patient") and the thief Caravaggio. In spare, poetic prose, Ondaatje traces Patrick from his boyhood in a rural lumber camp through his life, loves, and eventual fatherhood in Toronto's immigrant community of the interwar period. In the process, through Patrick's loves, friends, job, and eventual desperate act, Ondaatje also weaves the story of Toronto's rise as a city, the joys and pains of its multi-ethnic working classes, and its history of radical politics.
"In the Skin of a Lion" is Ondaatje's finest book, and forms a pair with "The English Patient." It in truth lends "EP" a greater resonance and depth, filling in some of the allusions and passions that go unexplained in the latter novel.
It is my suspicion that Ondaatje won the Booker on the strength of this novel, and that the award to "EP" was to make up for the previous slight.
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(7 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
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Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays by Susan Sontag
Andrew Daily, August 5, 2008
Of Sontag's work, her collection "Against Interpretation" and the long essay "On Photography" are the most popular. For my money, however, "Under the Sign of Saturn" contains her most brilliant work.From the opening essay - ostensibly about Paul Goodman - in which she extols the virtues of solitude and hard thinking, through a penetrating essay on the fetishism of fascism, on to a superb encomium to Roland Barthes, every essay sparkles with Sontag's characteristic wit and insight.
This volume also contains one of the single best essays (alongside Hannah Arendt's introduction to "Illumination") on the much-celebrated Walter Benjamin.
And, as is the case with all her work, Sontag unfolds difficult ideas in clear and direct prose.
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
Q by Luther Blissett
Andrew Daily, August 4, 2008
What a strange beast of a book this is. Part historical novel, part spy thriller, part philosophical rumination, part radical political manifesto, this book portrays the history of the radical reformation as an allegory of our own troubled days. All written by four authors posing as one.The book opens at Frankenhausen, the climactic battle of the German Peasant's War (1524/5). A charismatic former monk, Thomas Muntzer, led a largely unarmed peasant army against the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, believing God would intervene and bring victory. The result is not hard to predict. We meet the main character (whose name varies) attempting to escape the resulting massacre.
The rest of the book follows the narrator's trail across Europe, from one heretical sect to another, all plotting to overthrow the existing powers and establish a heaven on earth, contra the landlords and the Church. He is haunted and blocked at every turn by Q, a sinister papal agent.
The book is an allegory of the fortunes of radical, particularly radical Italian politics, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. The novel's closest contemporaries are Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, in that it is a crowded, sprawling, entertaining, hilarious, anarchic, messy joy of a novel, one that pleases at many levels, from straight-ahead thriller on to a novel of ideas.
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan Poetry) by Aime Cesaire
Andrew Daily, April 20, 2008
Aimé Césaire died on Thursday, at the age of 94. Discussions are ongoing about transferring his remains to the Pantheon in Paris - France' s highest honor to her poets, statesmen and heroes (others buried there include Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Jaurès, Schoelcher). This book will remain his lasting testament, a long prose poem, simultaneously enigmatic and topical, that more than any other captured the vicissitudes of being both French and black, of existing at that liminal space between Europe and the America. This poem overflows with imagery, coined words, long lines and unique meters, thunderous ideas: the whole of life, of Martinique, of France, of the great dilemmas of the 20th century are in here. André Breton thought it might be the greatest poem of the 20th century. I have no doubts. A thousand years from now, when our civilization fades to a distant memory, Césaire, alongside Picasso and Schoenberg, will, I believe, be remembered as capturing the true predicament of our 20th century lives.(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
G. by John Berger
Andrew Daily, October 13, 2007
John Berger's "G" is one of the stranger novels of the 20th century, and certainly one of the strangest to capture the Booker prize. Putatively a retelling of the Don Juan myth, Berger's account of the eponymous anti-hero's sexual conquests also unwraps the history of the opening decades of the 20th century.The novel could be considered postmodern in structure and style, but its spirit belongs to both the social novels of the 19th century, and to the Marxian-inspired cultural criticism of Berger's critical works. The book seems to redeem the promise of his oft-quoted line, that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." This approach fractures the narrative, between G's story, long digressions on the history of flight, the Italian working class and Italian nationalism, as well as Berger's own musings on sex, history and death.
The novel can be a hard slog but the payoff is immense. It captures, without the pomposity or pedantry of recent postmodern "total" novels, the whole breadth of the experience of an individual human life.
(5 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
Andrew Daily, May 10, 2007
Ondaatje's "The English Patient", winner of the Booker Prize and adapted into a wildly popular (and unfairly melodramatic) movie, is his best known and most popular novel. Those who have come to love his prose, however, almost always point to "In the Skin of a Lion" as his greatest work.It is in this book that we first meet Hannah, Hannah's father Patrick (only alluded to, in death, in "English Patient") and the thief Caravaggio. In spare, poetic prose, Ondaatje traces Patrick from his boyhood in a rural lumber camp through his life, loves, and eventual fatherhood in Toronto's immigrant community of the interwar period. In the process, through Patrick's loves, friends, job, and eventual desperate act, Ondaatje also weaves the story of Toronto's rise as a city, the joys and pains of its multi-ethnic working classes, and its history of radical politics.
"In the Skin of a Lion" is Ondaatje's finest book, and forms a pair with "The English Patient." It in truth lends "EP" a greater resonance and depth, filling in some of the allusions and passions that go unexplained in the latter novel.
It is my suspicion that Ondaatje won the Booker on the strength of this novel, and that the award to "EP" was to make up for the previous slight.
(7 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
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