This post consists of shorter reviews of several books I am reading. At this time I have not finished these books, but likely will before year's end.
The first story, Pilgrimage, excited me. I related to the lightly fictionalized character, based on Sontag herself, who is overwhelmed when she has tea with Thomas Mann, a writer whose books had left an impression on the teenager. I discovered Mann as a teen, his story of Tonio Krueger especially resonating with me with it's view of the artist as outsider. I had collected his novels afterward, but never read them all.
In the story, two teenagers contact Mann and are invited to visit him over tea. "We were prodigious of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishments," we are told. The teens struggle to know what to say, and listen to Mann talk. What she remembers best was embarrassment.
The first time one meets one's idol can be a shock, learning "the gap between the person and the work" a jolt.
The narrator seeks to escape "childhood's asphyxiations, the "long prison sentence of childhood" and its enforced culture of suburban life which held no meaning for her.
In one story a successful man--good job, wife, children--is tired of his life and creates a robotic substitute to take his place. The original man just bums around, but is more content with sleeping in the train station. What a condemnation of the Middle Class way of life!
Many of the other stories left me perplexed and unsure of my own intellectual capacity: what was I missing? I asked myself. Some experimented with form, such as Unguided Tour which reminded me of a Monet painting of Rheims Cathedral, leaving an impression without real detail or form. Whereas Monet leaves me with an emotional reaction, Sontag seeks to elicit an intellectual one.
Are some of these stories inaccessible to the general reader, or are they mere failures in storytelling? I would guess it is some of each.
Debriefing: Collected Stories
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374100759
Hardcover $27.00
Winter by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is the second in his series of essays and letters written to his unborn daughter. Knausgaard is well known for his six volume biography My Struggle. His writing breaks all 'rules' about writing, and is spontaneous, unstudied, often confessional, and sometimes mundane.
In almost daily meditations over December, January, and February, the author wrote about whatever was on his mind. Owls, Christmas, people he knows, the mythical legend Loki, and even toothbrushes. In the first letter, he warns his daughter that we expect life to be full of joy and light, but instead we encounter pain and suffering and loss. At times he shares an insight that sparks a new way of looking at things, such as the thought that society is based on a belief in the fiction that a coin has intrinsic value, but if our belief vanishes, so does a coin's value. He tries to describe inanimate things, but I note that his descriptions include concepts that are not concrete, which seems to defeat his intention. Some essays just left wondering what the point was.
I have been reading several essays each night before bed. I will finish the book, just to plumb it for those unexpected gems.
I won this book on a Goodreads giveaway.
