In America: Amazon.co.uk: Susan Sontag: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Susan Sontag's In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-travelling form and illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past", she notes in a first-person prologue, "perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past". There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.

It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become". And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose:

They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else.

Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total"). She includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus, Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk Review

As an essayist, Susan Sontag has tended to stick pretty rigorously to the modern age, whether she's anatomizing the wild world of camp or roasting Leni Riefenstahl over the coals. But in her fiction--particularly in such fin-de-siècle productions as The Volcano Lover--she's clearly felt the allure of the past. And In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-traveling form. What's more, it illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past", she notes in a first-person prologue, "perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past". There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.

It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in (you've guessed it) California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become". And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child, and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose:

They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else.

Like every utopia in human history, Maryna's is a failure. Following its collapse, she is moved to return to the theatre--but as an American, now, plugged securely into the middlebrow culture of her adopted land. The rest of the novel charts her brilliant career among the philistines, along with a number of heated erotic detours.

Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total"). And she includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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A 5 star novel 17 Aug 2009

By Lawrence Jones

Format:Paperback

This is a brilliant, brilliant novel. I've never read any of Sontag's fictional works before so 'In America' was an eye-opener for me. I especially liked how Sontag opens her novel by looking at the novel itself as an act of creation. The narrator (I assume it's Sontag) is imagining the creation of her characters as we read each sentence. At first, I was wondering what Sontag was trying to do but (after a couple of re-readings) was reminded of Fowles' 'French Lieutenant's Woman' which famously has the author showing the reader that the novel is a construction by Fowles. It was when I made this connection that I realised what Sontag was trying to do i.e. reveal that the novel is a contruction and is not 'real'.

The final chapter of Sontag's novel continues this theme by having the character of Edwin Booth speak his lines as if he is in a play. Sontag deftly includes script directions which state what the characters should do when on stage.

But this novel is more than just a space where Sontag uses wonderful techniques to show that a novel is an act of creation - it is also a fascinating insight into the migrant experience of America in the mid nineteenth century, a really enjoyable account of the beginnings of the American theatre, as well as a wonderful critique into how the cult of celebrity started in America.

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Into the mind of America 20 April 2009

By Sofia

This is the first book I've read by Susan Sontag and to be honest, half way through the prologue, I nearly gave up. The first 27 pages of "In America" have Sontag very much on the page, imagining her characters, deciding upon what to call them, ruminating on their links to one another. It is all very clever and arty, but it makes for a really tough opening read.

That said, after the prologue, Sontag settles down to a more conventional story-telling and the novel comes alive. We follow celebrated actress Maryna from Polish stardom to a new life in the American west in the late 19th century, from where she launches a new quest for stardom on the American stage.

The novel is fascinating and enjoyable on several levels. As an historical piece it's full of interesting details about the foundation of modern America: the novelty of the phone, presumed as an invention that would bring theatre to your house; the ugliness of American cities compared to the Europe Maryna leaves behind; the various communities that travel to America in search of different freedoms; the mining towns and the expectation that performers of the day would travel constantly. As a character piece it is also a strong read. Maryna is a portrait of egotism, who lives every step as if on the stage, self-consciously entertaining and commanding her family and supporters. This alongside the repeated portrayal of American values, favouring the big over the interesting, the new over the old, the curious over the cultured, the self over the many makes for a real analysis of what made America and what continues to make it such a lure for those in search of new beginnings. There is also much discussion here about art, Maryna's life in the theatre brings the reader a lot about the purpose of the theatre, but in Jakob (the artist) and Ryszard (the writer) Sontag also gives us much to ponder on the role and purpose of the arts in general, where art can be superceded by photography and novels by journalism.

As other reviewers have mentioned, this is a cerebral novel, there is no great drama here despite the subject matter, but it is a novel bursting with things to think about. While not always entirely convincing (there's no real background as to exactly why Maryna decides to leave a life of national stardom in Poland behind) there's enough to drive the novel along and the ideas held within and around the plot make it well worth the read.

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Being witness to a single-minded tornado 19 July 2001

By A Customer

Susan Sontag's In America takes us on a journey from the Old World of Central Europe to the New World of America in the mid-late 1800s. We follow the travels and thoughts of the renowned, gifted and charismatic Polish actress, Maryna, and her hangers-on. Sontag succeeds in creating an exceptionally strong central character whose actions impact upon the rest of the group. To prevent the story becoming overwhelmed by one character's introspection, however, Sontag employs a number of narrative devices such as letters, diary entries, speech and internal monologues from the other émigrés and her very real accomplishment is to provide us with a rounded and in-depth study of the motivations of those emigrating during this period. Additionally, she reveals the workings of both European and American theatre at this time and this unexpected history lesson came as a pleasant surprise to a first time reader of Sontag's work. I am sure to read more of her writing. Having previously read Isabel's Allende's Daughter of Fortune set a couple of decades earlier, I thought In America made for an excellent sequel.