Word: sontag
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sontag recalls herself as "a psychologically abandoned child." Until she was six, she and her younger sister were raised mostly by aunts, in the New York area. Her parents, Polish Jews who came to the U.S. while young, spent most of their time in China, where her father was a fur trader. After his death there from tuberculosis, her mother returned to the U.S. and remarried. (Sontag uses her stepfather's last name.) In time, the new family ended up living in Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, though it would be truer to say that Sontag lived in books...
...paradox of Sontag is that she is an ardent modernist with the earnestness -- and superabundant energy -- of a Victorian moralist. If she likes to "go faster," it's partly because she has so much to cram in. In August, for instance, she attended the biennial gathering of the writers group PEN International (she is president of PEN's American chapter) in Seoul and managed to infuriate Korean authorities by insistently raising the issue of imprisoned South Korean writers. Late September brought the New York Film Festival premiere of Sarah, a documentary on Sarah Bernhardt that Sontag narrates, and a week...
Politically Sontag describes herself as a social democrat. But in the 1960s, amid the revulsion aroused by the Viet Nam War, she traveled to Havana and Hanoi and wrote about both places sympathetically, though not without misgivings. Read today, the mismatch in those essays between her complex inquiries and the nostrums of Communism is palpable. Her lingering reputation as a leftist, however, explains the fire storm she set off with a brief speech six years ago at a New York City forum to voice support for Poland's Solidarity labor union. Though the session had been organized by a coalition...
Newspapers around the world dissected the event for weeks afterward. The left attacked her as a pawn of the right and the right as a latecomer to anti- Communism. Sontag was stunned by the response, especially the assumption that her rejection of Communism was a recent development or that it signaled a sharp move rightward on her part. As early as 1971, she points out, she was protesting Cuba's imprisonment of writers like the poet Heberto Padilla, now a friend living in the U.S. She also insists that her views are not the result of the close friendships...
...Sontag's earlier novels have met a mixed reception, and not just in Bull Durham. Though she builds an absorbing puzzle in The Benefactor (1963), in parts of Death Kit (1967) the scientific instrument of her prose is never quite equal to a musical instrument of the imagination. But in her more recent short stories, many of them collected in I, etcetera (1978), she triumphs, neatly drawing thought into the shapes of feeling. At the end of the story Debriefing, about the psychic perils of city life, she even makes what could be a gently funny summation...