Word: sontag
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Volcano Lover: A Romance, Sontag's first book in 25 years, focuses on Sir William Hamilton (Sontag calls him the Cavaliere throughout the book). Cavaliere is the British ambassador to Naples, a rabid collector of potpourri and vulcanist who married his first wife Catherine for money. After Catherine's death, the Cavaliere falls in love with Emma; through a strange twist, however, she turns around and finds love in a young British admiral...
Volcano Lover: A Romance by Susan Sontag $22.00, from Farrar, Strus and Girous Publishers...
...historical novel based on an 18th century love affair between Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson seems an unlikely subject for Susan Sontag. But the essayist, cultural critics and author of the famous "Notes on Camp" and the 1969 book Styles of Radical Will has recently written a historical novel of ideas...
...What's original about this novel," Sontag said in an interview with The Crimson, "is not the ideas as you would boil them down to a sentence or two, but rather the way they are elaborated and the way they are organic to the narrative." This is true, but readers of her earlier work will find themselves looking for the social criticism and clever observations that made Sontag so famous...
...book is filled with descriptions of European travel, war casualties and musings on the psychology of republican revolutionaries. The writing is pure Sontag--strong, reflective, and intellectual. Unfortunately, it shows little sign of the ingenuity of her earlier work. Indeed, Sontag seems eager to divorce herself from the essays which made her so famous...