Customer Reviews

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

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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.

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.

Journals and diaries are different from novels. There are no 'interesting' characters in this book apart from the diarist herself: that goes for (soon-to-be) famous people who make a brief appearance (Herbert Marcuse, for example), and it goes for Sontag's various lovers. Sontag was a famous intellectual so we read about her shopping lists for movies, books, plays - not laundry washing, packing the fridge, looking after children.
Some journals and diaries clearly have possible publication in mind. Sontag's are not among them. They are very private.
So what interests? Sontag is passionately interested in sex. Although not with her husband, the once relatively famous Philip Rieff, who is down wingeing most of the time, and son David, the editor, gets his boot in for a final kick: 'Freud - the mind of the moralist', was really jointly written with Susan.
Is David doing Susan a favour by publishing these fragmentary, private journals? A famous intellectual who had a sex life, too? Surprise, surprise. There are very few sustained passages of analysis or commentary that compares with the published stuff. What's the point?

Sontag's son has struck again, apparently intent on making his mark by violating her privacy. It is deplorable that such a private woman should be exposed to public scrutiny through her youthful journals, which I have serious doubt she ever intended her readers to see. David Reiff will never be the writer or thinker that his mother was, and I suppose this is his way of piggybacking on her fame, but shame is rather more what he deserves.

Be Careful. I gave this book to my girlfriend for Easter, and after she read it she was so inspired.. tried to break up with me!