This work is a selection from Susan Sontag's early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. First published in 1966, the book quickly became a modern classic and has had enormous influence here and abroad. As well as the title essay, 'On Style' and the famous 'Notes on Camp', the book includes discussion of such figures as Satre, Simone Weil, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Artaud, and Goddard.
I think I like Sontag's writing more than I like her ideas. Reading "Notes on 'Camp'" for the second time in about a year, I found even less in it that I agreed with. I sort of find her obsession with the art of European men irritating, but then her critiques are so blistering that I think... yes, this was worth it. I think Sontag was an incredible writer and an innovative thinker, and she has some essays that I love. ("Illness as Metaphor"/"AIDS and its Metaphors"! So good!) I think she does better when writing a bit more generally than when reviewing things, but maybe that's just because her reviews seem quite dated by this point. (I mean, they're 50+ years old.)
Anyway, here are some times where she killed men with words in this collection of essays:
"... a few of the films of Bergman - though crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit... - still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence, the beauty and visual sophistication of the images subvert before our eyes the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and some of the dialogue."
"Neither art nor thought of the highest quality is to be found in Camus."
"What is one to make of a view at once so lofty and so banal? As if this were not enough, Ionesco's essays are laden with superfluous self-explication and unctuous vanity."
