Viewing entries tagged
Susan Sontag

Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal

Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal

Reviewed by Louis Klee

As if speaking from between these parentheses, transforming their constraint into a site of liberation, “I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature”—that is, the “she-dandy” narrator Lisa Robertson’s remarkable, sultry, cerebral, and finally original novel The Baudelaire Fractal—defiantly assumes this tradition. “When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?” The answer, as this novel makes vividly apparent, is yes, and yet self-appearance is no easy task. It may be a difficult and radical act. “I had to destroy art,” declares Hazel, “in order to speak my monstrous life.” Monster, according to one tradition, has its etymological roots in the Latin monstrare and French montrer: to show or make apparent. It could be that simply to manifest the she-dandy’s life or “a female thinking” without making concessions to realism—for Hazel, “another name for capital”—is to simultaneously write one’s life and a manifesto, to manifest oneself in a poise of simultaneous luxuriance and insurgency.

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Stephen Piccarella

Moser delights in delivering the dirty details of Sontag’s personal life for the same reason he attempts to correct her politics: to draw attention to himself. One might expect a writer after this kind of recognition to prefer fiction or poetry, but a biography is a perfect project for a writer with more ambition than good ideas. Susan Sontag was narcissistic herself, and capable at times of manipulations even more objectionable than Moser’s. These Moser catalogues dutifully and with a combination of empathy and angst, as does someone who needs to reconcile the misdeeds of the person he reveres. Sontag was also an exceptional and peerless artist; Moser attempts to improve on Sontag so that he can improve on himself. By inhabiting––with success and to good effect––a figure whose flaws reflect but whose strengths and achievements outpace his own, Moser has managed to place himself at the center of the moving and inspiring story of a literary icon. In many ways, Moser’s biography is a great book. What’s debatable is whether it’s really about Susan Sontag.