Susan Sontag: Stories

In an interview to Paris Review, Susan Sontag had said that “writer is someone who pays attention to the world.” Writing, she said, demands “a going inward and reclusiveness, just plain reclusiveness.” This seemed to me like a contradiction. How could one be a reclusive and, at the same time, pay attention to the world?

It took me a while – and a lot of reading, therefore reclusiveness -  to understand that this, seemingly a contradiction, it was indeed a requisite not only to be aware and understand the world but also to be able to write about it, brilliantly and eloquently, as Susan Sontag did.

Sontag was one of the most interesting minds of the 20^th century. Provocative, intelligent, with strong beliefs and a deep interest in everything, from literature and photography to philosophy and psychiatry. Her writing, she wrote in her diaries, come from reading; it is incisive, sophisticated, expressive and interesting. She was a great essayist.

I’d been a demon reader from earliest childhood (to read was to drive a knife into their lives), and therefore a promiscuous one.

This book’s eleven stories were first published in Partisan Review, American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and others, and they are assembled here in their entirety for the first time. The most appealing element of this collection is the variety of themes and styles.  Pilgrimage, is an autobiographical account of Sontag’s visit with a boyfriend to the home of Thomas Mann in California when she was a young girl. Others, such as Project for a Trip to China, has the form of a memoir. I particularly liked The Dummy, the theme of which is the search of happiness and how the small things bring joy in life. It is a humorous allegory about someone who is sick of living his boring everyday life and creates a dummy to replace him and do all the things he is tired of doing.

Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I don’t even like talking to the dummy. I am tired, I would like to be a mountain, a tree, a stone. If I am to continue as a person, the life of solitary derelict is the only one tolerable.

In The Way We Live Now, Sontag recounts, very perceptively, the start of the aids epidemic in the gay community in New York City. Other stories, such as Debriefing is an experimental, challenging story with no boundaries.

After reading these short stories, I am eager to go back and explore once more Sontag’s serious, quiet and sophisticated world.