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The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
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A romance set in eighteenth-century Naples follows the fortunes of a British ambassador, the ravishing woman he marries, and the young British admiral with whom she falls in love. By the author of The Way We Live Now. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.
- Sales Rank: #1371955 in Books
- Published on: 1992-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 6.25" w x 1.25" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 419 pages
From Publishers Weekly
It should be no surprise that Sontag's (The Way We Live Now) excursion into the realm of historical/romance novels serves a more rigorous agenda than merely fictionalizing the lives of Sir William Hamilton; his wife, Emma; and her lover, Lord Nelson. The narrative illuminates larger themes: the venality and hypocrisy of many of the pillars of 18th-century society; the perennial status of women as an underclass; the subservience of ethics to political expediency; the greed that often fuels a patron of the arts. These and other issues are examined in cool, ironic prose that does not disguise the author's indignation. Sontag's unconventional look at one of history's most famous amorous triangles offers revisionist portraits of her three protagonists. Hamilton, known as the Cavaliere in his post as British envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, subverts his emotions into an obsessive urge to collect antiquities--until he becomes infatuated with Emma. Nelson is guilty of callously cruel and unprofessional behavior as a result of his infatuation with Lady Hamilton. Only she acquits herself relatively well; though she is vulgar and ostentatious, Emma has humanitarian instincts the others lack. The novel is a brilliant portrait of an age, the bloody epoch in which the Bourbon monarchs of the Kingdom of Naples--aided by the infamous Baron Scarpia of Tosca fame--took violent revenge on the revolutionaries and intellectuals who supported the insurrection of 1799. A master of descriptive detail, Sontag creates vivid pictures of an erupting Vesuvius; deadly storms at sea; the excesses of a pillaging, murderous mob. She also interjects herself into the narrative, a piquant but sometimes jarring technique. The ending, in which various characters summarize the novel's events, seems gratuitous, but it allows Sontag to drive her message home. The last line reads: "They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all." (Aug.) .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The astringently intellectual Sontag here turns to lush historical romance based on the real-life triangle of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Lord Nelson. The English ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the late 1700s, the Cavaliere is an exacting collector of antiquities and a frequent visitor to Mount Vesuvius. When his devoted wife Catherine dies, he becomes enamored of his nephew's beautiful if vulgar mistress. Emma gladly marries her benefactor but finds real love when heroic Lord Nelson visits Naples. The story starts slowly, and the Cavaliere's relation as collector to the collected Emma seems too obvious. But as Sontag warms to her subject, the novel becomes rich, expansive, and highly entertaining, right down to the slambang final chapters whose rapidly shifting voices suddenly provide new perspective. Hardly digressions, Sontag's many aesthetic speculations wonderfully enhance the plot. A fine novel of ideas, this is sure to please venturesome readers of historical romance as well. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/92.
-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The first novel in over 20 years by America's preeminent belletrist is a historical tour de force. This tale of 18th-century romance and revolution is certain to charm readers who enjoy the postmodern potboilers of Umberto Eco and A.S. Byatt. After a pretentious prologue about her role as author, Sontag dives into the grand drama of the English nobleman William Hamilton, ambassador to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, the Bourbon monarchy based in Naples. ``Il Cavaliere,'' as he's called by his hosts, fancies himself ``an envoy of decorum and reason'' to the grotesque King. Where Sir William delights in collecting art and artifacts, and exploring the great volcano at Vesuvius, the fat King devotes himself to gluttony and impregnating his ambitious wife. After the Cavaliere's frail wife dies at age 44, the melancholic ambassador returns to England, where he grows infatuated with his nephew's mistress, a stunning beauty from the lower classes who mixes charm with vulgarity. Seeking a wealthy wife, the nephew passes his mistress to his uncle, now back in Naples. And soon follows a scandalous marriage between the 56-year- old ambassador and the 20-year-old lady of dubious virtue. A quick study, as well as a much-painted subject, Lady Emma Hamilton becomes the toast of Naples and the Queen's confidante. Her fall into infamy begins when she meets the hero of the age, Lord Nelson, ``the saviour of the royalist cause.'' In outline, this seems little more than the Vivien Leigh melodrama That Hamilton Woman. But Sontag adds such historical texture to her saga of sexual intrigue that it all comes to sordid life, full of passion and politics. Her warts-and-all version of history relies on a profound imagining of each character's point of view. At once heady and heartfelt, this is Sontag's best bid for a popular audience. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
51 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
vindicating the enlightenment...one vain feeling at a time.
By E. G. Tolon
In The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag writes beautifully about people she eventually condemns. Not that they have done anything wrong, they are the privileged aristrocracy of the late 18th century. They are absorbed by love, art and by their professional duties. They live beautiful, active, somewhat intelligent lives. Page after page, we live and grow with them. But then there's the world around them. It appears in the form of the distant and then not so distant French Revolution, which swells in the background trying to break into a story that is fundamentally intimate and personal. Or is it really? As our heroes leisurely love, celebrate and keep busy, drawing us into their own self absorbtion, thousands get killed and butchered because they dreamt a better world. A real nuisance if you ask our characters. Lord Hamilton is in love with a volcano but completely bypasses,as we do, the much more relevant, violent and deadly force of the political upheaval. Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover is ultimately a beautiful story of people who don't care. How normal they are. How they fool us into thinking them deep and interesting. So much that by the end of the book, the realization comes as a shock. They were vain, reactionary, at best irrelevant like Emma. They missed the point. A wonderful tour de force.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Stylistically odd, with a confused timeline, jumping into ...
By Daniel Porter
Stylistically odd, with a confused timeline, jumping into the present with comments, not using the characters actual names although all are well known in history.
19 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Self-Portrait in a Concave Mirror
By Doug Anderson
For readers of Sontag's most celebrated essay collections it was obvious that the most intimate connection of her early writing life was with the ideas of the great European thinkers and film makers (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Luc Godard). She was more political than the decidedly apolitical Roland Barthes but her essays were never part of a larger political project either perhaps because like Walter Benjamin she wanted to believe but perhaps never really did believe that art and politics really made much of an impression on each other. The only place art and politics did seem to come into contact was when one of those rare individuals who were interested in both tried to understand what the nature of that connection might be. And when one of those rare individuals did try to describe the connection between these two apparently disparate realms what resulted was a melancholy realization that when it came to politics/history art really did not count for much. Only in the essay form itself does it seem that art and politics are mutually dependent realms and that individuals (and not impersonal forces like class or national interest) shape history.
What I suspect Sontag is doing in The Volcano Lovers is trying to negotiate that connection between art and politics/history in a form other than the essay, but the result is not particularly riveting, or, for that matter, in any way engaging either as a piece of cultural history or as a piece of cultural criticism as each of the characters come across as either curiously self-involved (Goethe, Lord Nelson) or self-detached (Sir William Hamilton). In fact few characters in the history of literature have been as detached from the events of their own life as Sontag's main character, Sir William Hamilton. Self-detachment could potentially make for an interesting topic for a novel but Sontag just doesn't make it interesting enough and most readers, I suspect, will put this novel down before they get very far. What is most disappointing about this novel is that in her essays Sontag is particularly good at giving quick biographical sketches of her favorite thinkers in which she sums up the connection between the life and the body of work, but in this novel it becomes clear from very early on that not one of the characters in The Volcano Lovers are really capable of holding her attention in the way that Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes held her attention in the essays and so the novel just feels like an exercise, an endurance challenge. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the first half of the novel is really a long meditation on the nature of collecting and Sontag's sentences sound like essay sentences. Granted Sontag understands the collector's impulse better than anyone (with the possible exception of Benjamin) and while this kind of meditation can be very exciting in a 15 page essay, this kind of meditation just gets tedious in a 400+ page novel. Unless you are a self-detached and sexless collector yourself, Sir William Hamilton just isn't a character you will want to spend 400 pages thinking about. At the end of the novel, when the female characters are finally allowed to speak for themselves, it would seem that (at least one of them) shares this sentiment as well--Sir William Hamilton in their eyes is a tedious bore--but it takes a long, long, long time before she is allowed to say so. For some this payoff might be enough to forgive the tedium of the first half but for me it wasn't.
The tone of the novel is one of melancholy. And the ultimate revelation, if the tedious accumulation of data that The Volcano Lovers affords can be called a revelation, is that we are all pawns of history but that some of us see this more clearly than others. In Sontag's eyes Goethe and Lord Nelson come across as egotists who see themselves in larger than life terms and next to them we might be more inclined to sympathize with the relatively humble William Hamilton who accepts the relatively small and inconsequential role that history has assigned him. At one time he may have wished for a larger role in history but really its obvious that he's living a life that suits his temperament pefectly. The mystery of the novel for me is whether Sontag's intention in writing it was to demystify the great man theory of history (and art) or to demystify the novel itself. Most novels, or at least most exciting novels, show characters caught up in historical changes and the exictement is following the characters as they negotiate those changes within society and within themselves but here Sontag chooses as her focus a man who because of his elite status is relatively immune from social and psychological change and thus the drama and conflict that usually pervades a novel is for the most part simply absent. Without that drama/conflict of character and context the novel just feels like a spent force. Like Sir William Hamilton this novel is curiously barren. The only thing in the external world that catches Sir William's attention or excites him is the volcano itself which puts all human action into perspective and is thus perhaps a great source of solace for this man who has never assigned much meaning to anything that takes place in the human world or even to his own life. To such a detached person as Sir William no merely historical change can really make that much difference anyway, but the volcano fascinates because of its potential to wipe out everything once and for all. And a death wish is really what seems to be the prime motivator here.
In short this is a novel about a man who is disappointed in the world and aware of the futility of human passions and as a result cultivates only one pastime: collecting (which is not so much a way of assembling an alternative/ideal world, as Sontag states, but of treating this one as if it were already dead). Most likely Sontag is examining her own life while examining this character but if that is so one wishes this were a more sympathetic self-portrait.
Note: In her last published essay Sontag wrote about another pair of novels that took place around a volcano: Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth & Laxness' Under the Glacier. It seems Sontag was examining her own mortality as well as her own fascination with art (and whether art is just some kind of solace for the eternally solitary & melancholy reader/writer). This essay can be found in the Sunday, February 20th 2005 edition of the New York Times.
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