- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (17 Jun 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099223813
- ISBN-13: 978-0099223818
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 498,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson, this novel is about sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsession, and love. The author also wrote "The Benefactor", "Death Kit", "AIDS and its Metaphors" and "The Way We Live Now".
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Volcano Lover is Sir William Hamilton, English Ambassador at the Court of Naples from1764-1800. Some years after his first wife has died, he accepts the role of protector of his nephew's discarded mistress, Emma, but becomes her lover and finally her husband. Nelson appears about halfway through the novel and, not without irony, is referred to as "the hero" thereafter. As with Goethe who has a walk on part earlier in the tale, the fact of his greatness is deftly indicated without much psychologising, which leaves room for the imagination of the reader. The gradual adjustment to the now notorious menage a trois is convincingly described, and although the author criticises them for their connivance in the hundreds of executions following the suppression of the Republican uprising in Naples, her portraits of them are by no means wholly unsympathetic.
From time to time the 20th century authorial voice, rises above the narrative to reflect on human foibles, the status of women, and social injustice but without impeding the forward impetus of the story. There are witty digressions on Don Giovanni and Tosca, and after a dying monologue from Sir William, there are posthumous utterances by Emma Hamilton and her mother, and by Eleonora Pimental, executed in 1799 by tht King's party. This Republican has the final words and their power and integrity end the book with a thunderclap.
There is humour,pathos,wit and passion in this wonderfully readable and unfailingly intelligent book. A tour de force.
From time to time the 20th century authorial voice, rises above the narrative to reflect on human foibles, the status of women, and social injustice but without impeding the forward impetus of the story. There are witty digressions on Don Giovanni and Tosca, and after a dying monologue from Sir William, there are posthumous utterances by Emma Hamilton and her mother, and by Eleonora Pimental, executed in 1799 by tht King's party. This Republican has the final words and their power and integrity end the book with a thunderclap.
There is humour,pathos,wit and passion in this wonderfully readable and unfailingly intelligent book. A tour de force.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Great subject matter; fascinating period. But this didn't quite work for me. The narrative is not quite fiction, not quite non-fiction; it doesn't have the storytelling drive that keeps you reading, nor a real engagement with the characters. It felt cold, and the style rather dated. It's certainly clever, but not very warm, or appealing. I have to admit to skipping bits in order to get it finished. I admire Susan Sontag so was very ready to like this book, but I found myself getting bored and distracted.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
42 of 45 people found the following review helpful
vindicating the enlightenment...one vain feeling at a time.
31 July 2003
Format:Paperback
In The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag writes beautifully about people she eventually condemns. Not that they have done anything wrong, they are the privileged aristrocracy of the late 18th century. They are absorbed by love, art and by their professional duties. They live beautiful, active, somewhat intelligent lives. Page after page, we live and grow with them. But then there's the world around them. It appears in the form of the distant and then not so distant French Revolution, which swells in the background trying to break into a story that is fundamentally intimate and personal. Or is it really? As our heroes leisurely love, celebrate and keep busy, drawing us into their own self absorbtion, thousands get killed and butchered because they dreamt a better world. A real nuisance if you ask our characters. Lord Hamilton is in love with a volcano but completely bypasses,as we do, the much more relevant, violent and deadly force of the political upheaval. Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover is ultimately a beautiful story of people who don't care. How normal they are. How they fool us into thinking them deep and interesting. So much that by the end of the book, the realization comes as a shock. They were vain, reactionary, at best irrelevant like Emma. They missed the point. A wonderful tour de force.
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
A Wonderful History Book About the Human Heart
9 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
Susan Sontag's THE VOLCANO LOVER (1992) is about Sir William Hamiliton, for decades British Embassador to the Court of Naples, his young wife Emma (who clearly was not of our class) and her lover, the Great Hero, Horatio Nelson. The three of them were bound together in a very odd relationship. The kind, elderly Hamilton had a brilliant aesthetic eye and was a connoisseur of beautiful antiquities. He assembled a great collection, much of which is now in the British Museum, including the sublime 1st century Roman cameo glass vessel, the PORTLAND VASE. THE VOLCANO LOVER is also about Vesuvius, a still active volcano which periodically puts on a show, and about passion, acquisitiveness, beauty, romance, corruption and lots more. The first three-quarters of this dense novel is rendered mostly in the present tense: the style is quite formal and slightly archaic: the voice is cool, uninflected, detached - but not unfeeling. For the attentive reader, the effect is hypnotic. Sontag is an admirably careful, spare writer. Her distinctive, emphatic rhythms are always evident, but never obtrusive.
41 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Romance First, Details Later
1 Mar 2002
Format:Paperback
I read this book three times and each time it seemed like a new novel. After my first read, I thought I'd read a love story, after the other two, I was captivated by history and technique. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the Queen of Naples is none other than the sister of the recently guillotined, Marie Antoinette. Both Austrian women were sent to foreign lands to reign as queens. The contempt of the people, actually displaced subversion toward their inept spouses, was mismanaged by both sisters. Both, failed to transcend the 'foreign' cloak. They had none of the scheming, political savy of their mother, Maria Theresa. The Royal Court of Napels is impossibly crude. We are introduced to the maloderous, strainings and grunts of the sovereign's daily bowel movements, to which Ambassador, Lord Hamilton, bestower of the title of the book, is honored by a position closest to the specially constructed raised,'throne.' The dull-witted, physicaly repulsive monarch, besides keeping his wife chronically pregnant, with offspring numbering in the teens, has one other passion, which he indulges with equal lust. That is his daily 'hunting' of hundreds of animals, which are dragged and thrown in the streets and there left to rot. A self-indulgent glutton; those many hungry subjects receive nothing from the daily slaughter.
Lord and Lady Hamilton are the sole intimates of the monarchs, despite her Ladyship's low origins, evening performances and love for spirits. In the glorious Naples, these two British subjects live in marked splendor surrounded by Hamilton's obsession with 'treasures' he unearths from his obsession with Vesuvious.
The love affair that is ignited when Nelson's fleet comes to rest in the bay is one of the great passions of history and the details are satisfying to romantic readers. The years pass and Emma grows fat and more frequently drunk. Nelson loses his sight in one eye and an arm, but continues to be victorious on the sea. Love is blind, the two are consumed with the perfection of the other. Lady Hamilton continues to sing and 'pose' but she is fat and bloated, her voice lost. The British hero does not follow orders, stays too long, and returns to transport his friends and the royal family when outbreaks of violence threaten their lives.
Human and volcanic, the lava flow of war and destruction, the end of a kind of civilization flows into the equally bloody sea. Vesuvious is the only lord, he issues warnings and humanity at play must reckon with their ultimate mortality. Love and civilizations die, and who among us are equally dormant, in our fear, in our passions? The Volcano Lover is an intensely vital and artistically flawless work. It is a cautionary and thereby completely modern tale of the fate of nations and individuals who fail to honor the Gods.
Lord and Lady Hamilton are the sole intimates of the monarchs, despite her Ladyship's low origins, evening performances and love for spirits. In the glorious Naples, these two British subjects live in marked splendor surrounded by Hamilton's obsession with 'treasures' he unearths from his obsession with Vesuvious.
The love affair that is ignited when Nelson's fleet comes to rest in the bay is one of the great passions of history and the details are satisfying to romantic readers. The years pass and Emma grows fat and more frequently drunk. Nelson loses his sight in one eye and an arm, but continues to be victorious on the sea. Love is blind, the two are consumed with the perfection of the other. Lady Hamilton continues to sing and 'pose' but she is fat and bloated, her voice lost. The British hero does not follow orders, stays too long, and returns to transport his friends and the royal family when outbreaks of violence threaten their lives.
Human and volcanic, the lava flow of war and destruction, the end of a kind of civilization flows into the equally bloody sea. Vesuvious is the only lord, he issues warnings and humanity at play must reckon with their ultimate mortality. Love and civilizations die, and who among us are equally dormant, in our fear, in our passions? The Volcano Lover is an intensely vital and artistically flawless work. It is a cautionary and thereby completely modern tale of the fate of nations and individuals who fail to honor the Gods.
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