'At the same time' by Sontag: suitable for the uninitiated?

March 16, 2008 12:42 PM

Has anyone read 'At the same time' by Susan Sontag yet? If so, would they recommend it? I've never read anything by her and I suppose I'm looking for a way in, as it were, to her work.

Nothing judgmental please, I don't really want to hear strong feelings either way, just some advice, thanks.

posted by Claypole to writing & language (5 comments total)

my favorite Sontag book is The Benefactor, I always tell people to check it out. And I'm so not a fan of hers.
posted by matteo at 1:48 PM on March 16, 2008

I started with "Against Interpretation, and Other Essays", which is her first collection of essays. I found it to be a good introduction to her ideas.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2008

I love Sontag, and I think she is at her deepest and most brilliant-- and only incidentally her most excoriating-- in a review of Leni Riefenstahl, Fascinating Fascism, published originally in 1975 in the New York Review, and provided to us online for free by Kinbote.
posted by jamjam at 2:08 PM on March 16, 2008

I read "Illness as Metaphor" while working in a hospital almost 30 years ago. Sontag wrote it in response to receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer. She attempts to remove the romance from certain ailments such as T.B. (think of Chopin coughing blood into his handkerchief) and cancer (think of Norman Mailer arguing that he had to stab his wife in the breast, lest his anger build into cancer).
posted by doncoyote at 5:02 PM on March 16, 2008

Against Interpretation is sort of the default starting point.

I disagree with her often, but her style is spare and engaging.
posted by rokusan at 6:34 PM on March 16, 2008