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Amazon.co.uk Review
Susan Sontag produces a riveting new volume of essays that reflects her polygamous interests in Where the Stress Falls. The American writer, famous for her fiction, is equally prolific in her essay writing, including such titles as Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will and Illness as Metaphor. These latest essays range from her take on the cultural philosopher Roland Barthes, accounts of working in Sarajevo, to the traditions of Western Gardens to the history of travel writing. As she writes of her youthful understanding of her craft, "my idea of a writer was someone who was interested in "everything"'. Perhaps most intriguingly, she revisits her 1966 book, (then her second publication), Against Interpretation and provides an autobiographical context for her essays on Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Pavese and Michel Leiris. In these early works she saw herself as a "pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist". Sontag fought to pave the way for making photograph and cinema subjects worthy of serious cultural criticism.
Although several of these essays have been written in the last couple of years, many are reprinted from magazine articles and the book forms a thought-provoking collection rather than a selection of new writing. Given Sontag's outspoken views on the recent events in America and Afghanistan, it is rather frustrating that there isn't more of her political writing in this volume and it is hard to understand why certain "interludes" were chosen. But as always with Sontag, there is much for even the faint-hearted to savour and ponder. --Julie Wheelwright --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
'[The essays] invariably also leave one with the urgent desire to read the book or see the painting, play, dance she describes. Her passion evokes that urgency...' Bookforum
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15 reviews
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch!
11 Nov 2001
Format:Hardcover
To those reviewers who find Susan Sontag a literary snob and anti-American, request a copy of her reading at Chapters Literary Bookstore in Washington, DC from C-CPAN2 (aired 11/10/2001) to get the benefit of her own words without media filtering. Her essays are gifts to writers and readers, to Americans and to the world of humankind. She simply asks all of us to THINK...what a concept!
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Vintage Sontag
23 Dec 2001
Format:Hardcover
Bravo Susan Sontag- great book, greater writer - her stature is directly proportional to the lengths her critics have gone to character-assassinate her. I now will buy the book! No, I'll buy two.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Good stuff but...
10 Dec 2005
Format:Paperback
I generally prefer Sontag's longer and more personal essays usually found in her earlier work. This collection is a compilation of essays on art gathered from some of the last years of her life; they cover a wide range of topics, from literature to Italian photography. I felt that the most interesting section was her essays on her solidarity trips to Sarejevo during the Serbs' bombardment, where she directed a production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot; it's a wonderful testament to the universality of great art. I'm afraid I can't sustain the same kind of equality of interest to the arts collectively as Sontag did, and I must admit I found her pieces on garden art and dance terribly boring. That aside, she does include some characteristically excellent essays on film, such as her elaborate review of Fassbinder's adaptation of Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz which immediately imparted me with an urge to see the film and read the book. She also writes a brief review of cinema's 100 year history, which is a bit simplistic as any short piece on this topic would have to be. She maintains that silent cinema was born which brought forth two directions in cinema: art and entertainment. The films during the silent era were largely adaptations of plays and were truly great art. Then the sound period came into being and film receded into "Hollywood" adaptations of great novels which largely failed, until the pioneer directors of the period such as Howard Hawks perfected the genre style mode of filmmaking. Then the French New Wave came along, led by the genius of Jean-Luc Godard and Francoise Truffaut and turned movies into a high art for 20 years. Unfortunately, when production costs escalated in the 80's Hollywood took over gain and turned the cinema into an industry once again. This narrative has elements of truth, but it really denies the significance of many American and Asian filmmakers who played an important role in the history of film, Sontag prefers to label Godard the patron saint of the cinema, a view I hold only in his relationship with the progression of French cinema as a whole, a history which of course includes Jean Renoir, Sontag's essay does not acknowledge such masters.
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