The Volcano Lover: A Romance

What a wonderful book, I had never read anything written by the author, so I decided to give it a try and was not disappointed. The first 20 pages I had my doubts as her style was a bit odd as some of the conversations of the characters are mingled with the prose, which on third person describes the surrounding circumstances. However the book takes a rhythm quite unique that takes into account the slow passage of time in Napoli during the XVIII century while simultaneously crafts the peculiarities of each one of the persons involved in the drama. Eventhough the books lacks that intensity that sometimes bind the reader to the pages of a novel, you want to stay with it an keep on reading. Its like having a great conversation with someone together with a pleasant cup of coffee in a wonderful setting. You don't want to rush, while you pay attention to everything that is going on around you. Besides for those who like to underline pages or makes comments on the side of them, the most likely event is that the book will end severely scratched.

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.

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.

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.

The first time I sat down to read The Volcano Lover, I closed the book and did not open it again for more than a year. Its opening did not grip me in the least. But luckily someone encouraged me to pick it up again, and I now rate it as one of my favorite reads. This novel has driven me to the Huntington Museum to observe the portrait of Emma Hamilton. The novel shows the truth of passion as it explores in depth those things that give our lives their meaning, and they are all--individuals, art, nature--that about which we feel an inexplicable fervor.