Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 [Hardcover]

Susan Sontag (Author), David Rieff (Editor)

Book Description

Release date: December 9, 2008

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!"

 

So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.

 

Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America’s greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag’s voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag’s complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself—all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The first of three planned volumes of Sontag's private journals, this book is extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontags writing—extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance toward mediocrity; Sontags vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise the late critic and novelists fans and detractors. At 15, when these journals began, Sontag (1933–2004) already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is most remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century's leading minds. In these carefully selected excerpts (many passages are only a few lines), Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student at Berkeley discovering her sexuality (bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of 18, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love (physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me) and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of 30. Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic. (Dec.)
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From Booklist

Rieff sensitively portrayed revered critic and novelist Sontag during her last days in Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008) and now continues to navigate the great sea of her legacy as editor of her journals. He didn’t want to open his mother’s private life to public eyes, but because her papers are available to scholars, he does so preemptively, granting readers access to the innermost thoughts of a genuine prodigy. In 1948, at age 15, Sontag asks, “And what is it to be young in years and suddenly awakened to the anguish, the urgency of life?” After starting college at 16, she fills her journals with passionate analysis of books, her intellectual ambitions, her struggle to accept her homosexuality, and the ecstasy and torment of her first lesbian relationship. Then, suddenly, this ardent seeker becomes a wife and mother. She loves her son, but marriage does not suit her, and her battle to reclaim her true self is one of several dramatic rebirths punctuating this electrifying record of Sontag striving to become Sontag. Two more volumes are planned. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (December 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374100748
• ISBN-13: 978-0374100742
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #247,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating December 28, 2008

By Steiner VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars son of an author June 3, 2009

By M. Funsch

Format:Hardcover

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.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Words of Wisdom February 27, 2009

By N. Wong

Format:Hardcover

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.