Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

the editing is maddening. i have no tolerance for it. i love the journals and the notebooks, their halting unrestrainedness (as if she planned for them to be read), their candor, their (at times) bombast and naivete, but i become so frustrated with the editor's interference that at times, i have to put the book down.

It depends on what you want to get from the memoirs of Sontag. I bought this book for two reasons: 1. I wanted to know more about her lesbianism in her early days; 2. I was fascinated by occasional witty (if not cynical) entries. Her words offered me unique insights and visions that could only come from an intellectual and educated scholar. However, many of the entries recorded many banal and meticulous details that would only amuse Sontag scholars. And they in turn become the tedious part that kills the joy of reading this significant book published after her death.

Sontag, Susan. "Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1946-1963", edited by David Rieff, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008. Remembering Sontag Amos Lassen Susan Sontag became an icon of modern culture. Her books and ideas characterize a generation and her death is a loss to us all. "Reborn" is the first of three planned volumes of Sontag's private journals and we anticipate learning a great deal from her writing. Sontag did not tolerate mediocrity; she was a serious writer and an authority on modern culture. There are surprises in these journals as we see that beneath the hard façade, Sontag was extremely vulnerable and very, very human. The journals begin when Sontag was 15 and that early do we see signs of the woman she was to become. She was already hungry to learn and from that hunger developed one of the leading minds of the modern era. We read about the things she loved--reading and movie going and we read about her college days at Berkeley, her awakening sexuality and her marriage to Phillip Rieff and her only child, David, who edited this volume. We read how that marriage fell apart and her relationships with women--the relationships that caused Sontag to re-evaluate her ideas of sex. (Sontag was not, as some maintain, a lesbian. She considered herself as bisexual). We also learn how important physical beauty was to her. Sontag, even in her early years, was a staunch defender of the mind and the "necessity for reading and writing `as a way of being fully human'". She anticipated pleasure everywhere and she found it. When she became involved in something, she became completely and utterly involved. The book is a self-portrait of Sontag which lets us into her appetite for life and a complex self-awareness. The book is personal and penetrates Sontag's early life and we see her as an intellectual in progress as early as age 16. She collected art but she also collected ideas and she lived her life with a seriousness that became her passion. She wrote about so much because she had so much to say and we all benefit from the fact that she shared her life with us.

Aside from David Rieff's overly meddlesome editing, this collection of journals is a penetrating, deeply personal portrait of the late Susan Sontag. Perhaps what is most astonishing in this scattering of notes, commentaries, and lists, is Sontag's astonishing precociousness. Her entries at the age of 16 bear the mark of a burgeoning intellectual of the first order. We are granted access (perhaps for the first time)to Sontag's personal life, and given her reclusive nature I couldn't help feeling that I was reading something that should not have been published. Still, what is most interesting here is Sontag, the young collector of ideas and works of art, living life the only way she knew how-with intellectual and moral "seriousness" and undying passion. A fantastically entertaining read.