Book: The volcano lover
Oct. 19th, 2012 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Susan Sontag
Details: (c) 1992 Susan Sontag; Pub 2009 Penguin Classics; ISBN 978-0-141-19011-2
Verdict: The volcano lover is both intellectual and readable.
Reasons for reading it: I'd vaguely heard of Sontag, though mainly as a critic rather than a novelist. And the blurb seemed somewhat intriguing.
How it came into my hands: Library serendipity.
The volcano lover is, slightly oddly, a fictionalized biography of the man cuckolded by Nelson. It's a very vivid portrait of Hamilton and his relationships with his first wife, her best friend, his medium (!) and her disabled son, and later on with Emma herself and Nelson. By coincidence, it's in the same Napoleonic era Naples setting as The Black Opera, the historical fantasy I read recently, and which I otherwise knew nothing at all about. Sontag's view of Naples is much more grim (even though it lacks zombies), and in particular she describes in detail the effects of the various European wars of the time and the post-Revolution Terror spreading to Naples from France.
Sontag certainly expects a lot from the reader. tVL is a highly erudite book, and slow going at times. The narrator is very much a character, and a rather didactic one. This is certainly not just a "romance" as per the subtitle, it's full of allegories and allusions and is definitely expressing philosophical and political ideas. Sometimes the narrator explicitly lectures the reader about the differences between attitudes at the turn of the nineteenth century compared to now, which for me broke the immersion to a much greater extent than more standard narration which either comes from or mimics writing of that era.
In many ways Sontag reminds me of AS Byatt, similarly lyrical writing with strong characters, similarly dense layers of meaning, and a similar tendency to display her extensive scholarship to the reader. I didn't love the book as much as I do Byatt's best stuff, partly I think because Sontag seems to feel rather superior to her characters in a way that put me off a bit. Although it's called a romance, tVL is almost anti-romantic; there's a kind of sneering at people who get let their lives be ruled by their passionate feelings. It's not even a moral condemnation of Emma for cheating on her husband with Nelson, it's sort of ridiculing them for thinking that being in love makes them special. There's even a depiction of Hamilton's first wife's intense friendship with a young relative of his. It's a rare treat for me to have any examples at all in literature of that kind of friendship between an opposite (or at least compatible) gender pair who are very insistent that their connection isn't romantic and who write a lot of passionate letters about how important they are to eachother, but Sontag rather mocks this relationship as well, treating it as childish and self-centred while still portraying it very vividly. In spite of this, though, she did make me care about the characters who are plausible and relatable even though they are seen to give too much importance to their Feelings.
There are a bunch of very weird epilogues in the first person. There is Hamilton himself, we get his stream of consciousness as he's dying. A bit for his first wife, which doesn't seem to add anything to what we already knew about her from the omniscient pov stuff earlier on. And then Emma, recounting her life after Nelson's death and how she was abandoned by society. Those make some amount of sense and round off the book, but then there's a few pages of the viewpoint of Emma's mother, essentially a monologue about how the only true love is between a mother and her daughter, which I'm not sure if the reader is supposed to accept or if she's being mocked as well. And the final pages are from the point of view of an entirely random poet, executed by the revolutionaries during the Terror, who had previously only been mentioned as an aside in a couple of sentences and has basically nothing to do with the characters the rest of the book is about. She rails against Hamilton, Emma and Nelson for being so selfish that they only cared about their petty little personal relationships when Europe was undergoing huge political upheaval and people like her were going to the gallows for their beliefs.
Details: (c) 1992 Susan Sontag; Pub 2009 Penguin Classics; ISBN 978-0-141-19011-2
Verdict: The volcano lover is both intellectual and readable.
Reasons for reading it: I'd vaguely heard of Sontag, though mainly as a critic rather than a novelist. And the blurb seemed somewhat intriguing.
How it came into my hands: Library serendipity.
The volcano lover is, slightly oddly, a fictionalized biography of the man cuckolded by Nelson. It's a very vivid portrait of Hamilton and his relationships with his first wife, her best friend, his medium (!) and her disabled son, and later on with Emma herself and Nelson. By coincidence, it's in the same Napoleonic era Naples setting as The Black Opera, the historical fantasy I read recently, and which I otherwise knew nothing at all about. Sontag's view of Naples is much more grim (even though it lacks zombies), and in particular she describes in detail the effects of the various European wars of the time and the post-Revolution Terror spreading to Naples from France.
Sontag certainly expects a lot from the reader. tVL is a highly erudite book, and slow going at times. The narrator is very much a character, and a rather didactic one. This is certainly not just a "romance" as per the subtitle, it's full of allegories and allusions and is definitely expressing philosophical and political ideas. Sometimes the narrator explicitly lectures the reader about the differences between attitudes at the turn of the nineteenth century compared to now, which for me broke the immersion to a much greater extent than more standard narration which either comes from or mimics writing of that era.
In many ways Sontag reminds me of AS Byatt, similarly lyrical writing with strong characters, similarly dense layers of meaning, and a similar tendency to display her extensive scholarship to the reader. I didn't love the book as much as I do Byatt's best stuff, partly I think because Sontag seems to feel rather superior to her characters in a way that put me off a bit. Although it's called a romance, tVL is almost anti-romantic; there's a kind of sneering at people who get let their lives be ruled by their passionate feelings. It's not even a moral condemnation of Emma for cheating on her husband with Nelson, it's sort of ridiculing them for thinking that being in love makes them special. There's even a depiction of Hamilton's first wife's intense friendship with a young relative of his. It's a rare treat for me to have any examples at all in literature of that kind of friendship between an opposite (or at least compatible) gender pair who are very insistent that their connection isn't romantic and who write a lot of passionate letters about how important they are to eachother, but Sontag rather mocks this relationship as well, treating it as childish and self-centred while still portraying it very vividly. In spite of this, though, she did make me care about the characters who are plausible and relatable even though they are seen to give too much importance to their Feelings.
There are a bunch of very weird epilogues in the first person. There is Hamilton himself, we get his stream of consciousness as he's dying. A bit for his first wife, which doesn't seem to add anything to what we already knew about her from the omniscient pov stuff earlier on. And then Emma, recounting her life after Nelson's death and how she was abandoned by society. Those make some amount of sense and round off the book, but then there's a few pages of the viewpoint of Emma's mother, essentially a monologue about how the only true love is between a mother and her daughter, which I'm not sure if the reader is supposed to accept or if she's being mocked as well. And the final pages are from the point of view of an entirely random poet, executed by the revolutionaries during the Terror, who had previously only been mentioned as an aside in a couple of sentences and has basically nothing to do with the characters the rest of the book is about. She rails against Hamilton, Emma and Nelson for being so selfish that they only cared about their petty little personal relationships when Europe was undergoing huge political upheaval and people like her were going to the gallows for their beliefs.
