What need does such a presence and performance satisfy? What is intriguing about Sontag is less who she was than how we understand our desire for her, or someone like her, to occupy a rare position in American literary culture: that of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, apparently invulnerable woman capable of transforming intellectual seriousness into an erotic spectacle. (Mar.The fascination of Sontag lies in her endurance as a cultural icon, the model of how a woman should think and write in public, even though her thinking and writing weren’t very rigorous. While this book does not exert the passionate energy of The Volcano Lover, it is a provocative study of a woman's life and the historical setting in which she moves. There are few dramatic peaks and valleys in Maryna's story, but the historical backdrop-with pithy and evocative descriptions of American cities at the turn of the last century, cameo portraits of salty frontier types, and snippets of Western lore-supplies the vigor that the main plot often fails to engender. Exemplary at imagining an actor's needs, impulses and sources of inspiration, Sontag also conveys the theatrical world of the time (East Lynne was the most popular play Sarah Bernhardt reigned in Paris) almost palpably. She leads readers into the book via a long, breathless, one-paragraph prologue, narrated as if in a fever dream indeed, it is not until many pages into the novel that the date and the geographical setting are established. this dream of turning life into pure future'' that colored many immigrants' views of America. Meanwhile, Sontag makes meaningful associations between a woman's need for freedom and independence, a nation's suffering under a conqueror's heel and the common human quest for ''newness, emptiness, pastlessness. Predictably, the community fails to prosper and falls into debt idealism gives way to disillusionment Maryna decides to resume her career, achieving immediate acclaim and the romantic triangle moves to a new stage. She convinces her husband, Count Bogdan Demboski, her would-be lover, journalist Ryszard Kierul, and various other members of the Warsaw intelligentsia to emigrate to America, where, influenced by Fourier's social philosophy, they will establish an experimental farm commune in southern California. Beautiful, famous and restless at 35, Maryna decides to leave her native land, suffering under Russian occupation. in the late 19th century affected her heroine's life. If the story of renowned Polish actress Maryna Zalewska cannot compare in drama to that of Admiral Nelson and the Hamiltons (as a protagonist, Maryna remains somewhat shadowy and elusive), Sontag succeeds in conveying how the political and intellectual atmosphere of Poland and the U.S. Here again her signal achievement is to offer fresh and insightful commentary on the social and cultural currents of an age, with a distinctive understanding of how historical events forged character and destiny. As she did in The Volcano Lover, Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background.

Susan sontag