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Title: In America by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0-374-17540-3 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: March, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.73 (37 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Listless Tale That Glides On A Sparkling Smooth Surface
Comment: The plot of "In America", Susan Sontag's National Book Award-winning novel, is adumbrated in her introductory note, where she describes the real historical life that inspired the fictional work. In Sontag's words, the novel was "inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, and the young journalist and future author of 'Quo Vadis' Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name of Helen Modjeska." While Sontag strongly emphasizes that the characters and actions depicted in her novel are purely invented (and there is no reason to believe the contrary), the plot largely follows the biography that inspired it.
"In America" begins in a post-modernist fashion, the book's "Chapter Zero" being the first person narrative of a contemporary authorial voice who finds herself coming out of the cold winter of an unidentified Eastern European city, shivering, into a party in the private dining room of a hotel more than a hundred years earlier. There is seemingly a disjunction of time and place. The narrator does not understand the language the people are speaking, "but somehow, I didn't question how, their words reached me as sense." From this point, the authorial voice, the imagination, begins naming the people in the room-in effect, begins creating the characters that will populate the tale to follow-and begins probing the animated conversation she overhears, the snippets of enigmatic dialogue that will gradually accrete into the novel. As the narrator suggests at the end of this Chapter Zero, in words resonant of a theme by Virginia Woolf, "each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head." Thus, in typical Sontag fashion, the novel itself begins with a self-conscious intrusion of theory and authorial presence.
From this interesting and auspicious beginning, "In America" seamlessly glides into the narrative proper, the story of Maryna Zalezowska, a much beloved Polish actress who, together with her husband Bogdan, her son Piotr, her paramour Ryszard, and an entourage of friends and followers, emigrates to America in 1876. Landing in New York, the group spends a brief period living in Hoboken, visiting the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and exploring New York City before embarking on a voyage to the West. After a brief sojourn in San Francisco, they move down the coast to Southern California, where they establish a small settlement in Anaheim. Maryna, the leader of her band of ardent disciples, sees their vineyard and farm in Anaheim as a kind of acting out of Fourieristic ideals, a little Brook Farm of Polish emigrants in the Wild West. Life is hard, however, and the utopian dream soon becomes a dystopic unraveling as Maryna goes back to San Francisco, has a brief affair with Ryzsard and returns to the theater. Her husband, Bogan, remains at the Anaheim settlement until it can be sold and then rejoins Maryna in San Francisco, where she has become an overnight theatrical sensation, her Polish stardom now burning brightly in America.
From this point, the novel becomes almost exclusively the story of Maryna. She changes her name to Marina Zalenska, travels to Virginia City and, eventually, New York City (and even, briefly, London), and attracts fans and admirers wherever she goes. Her life becomes a self-centered, exhaustive tour of America, performing with her own repertory company and making stage appearances with the Edwin Booth, the most renowned actor of the time. Pushing the narrative's other characters into the shadows, Marina Zalenska makes America her own, "In America" being not so much the story of what it was like for a group of Eastern Europeans to emigrate to America, but, rather, the story of Marina Zalenska's personal triumph in America.
Susan Sontag is a brilliant writer, her prose supple and lithe. Reading this book is effortless. Sontag also uses a range of stylistic devices-journal entries, letters, theatrical dialogue, monologue-which make "In America" a fascinating literary construction. However, the quality of the writing does not redeem the listless tenor of the tale or the shallowness of the characters and ideas which Sontag propogates. At one point, Maryna says, "an actor doesn't need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask." Unfortunately, Maryna's view of acting seemingly permeates this novel, the view of the character becoming the practice of the author: the characters and the ideas of "In America" are not essential, but only superficial. Like the post-modernist beginnings of Chapter Zero, the reader only gets a shallow tale, a tale that glides on a sparkling smooth surface with trivial and uninteresting characters; while the writing is easy, the story fails to hold the reader's interest and, hence, the reading becomes difficult and soporific. "In America" is perhaps worth reading, but it is not deserving of the National Book Award.
Rating: 1
Summary: a great essayist, but as a novelist....
Comment: I have enjoyed the depth of Susan Sontag's lucid, witty essays in the New Yorker magazine, and recently we saw her on Cspan Book -TV. A caller asked what would be the best introduction to her writings, and she suggested her novel "In America."
This book was surprisingly disappointing to me. I kept waiting to get swept up into it, but came to the last page with only a sense of duty for finishing. The characters are drawn well enough ,the time frame (post-Civil War America) is interesting, but the book failed to engage me somehow. Sontag has an affinity for the movies and for actors;she has created as the lead character a Polish actress who finds stellar success on the American stage.
I will continue to enjoy Sontag's essays but doubt I will read another of her novels.
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting Narative
Comment: The best feature of Sontag's novel was the narative style which did not fail to change from Chapter to Chapter. Sometimes it was in an omniscient voice, and other times in the character's own first person narative, in writing and speech, which brought us into the minds and thoughts of the various fascinating Poles in the story. The plot of the story is ineresting in itself to a certain degree, but the idea of leaving Europe and forging a new life in America must have been re-done many times over esp. in the original immigrant literature. The irony of how the Europeans went to America to leave what they were used to behind, to escape the fetters, but seem to pursue the exact same fetters in America is present in Sontag's novel. It also brings out the other ironic element of wanting to do something different and unexpected, but falling into the mold in wanting to form an utopian community which was fashionable at the time. I enjoyed the flow of the storyline and the characterisation of Ryszard as the writer and Maryna as an actress, artists who without art will lose their self, and their use. The first Chapter of the book also leaves one wondering -- was that the author as a persona -- Sontag imagining her characters into play? As a writer would? To see their world, enter it, and develop it? Or was it a neutral observer preparing is for Maryna's plan to leave for America? Sontag's novel of immigration, America, Europe, art, religion and relationships is thought-provoking and a fascinating study. Highly enjoyable.
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Title: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0374248583 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Volcano Lover : A Romance by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0385267134 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 19 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0374289174 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 21 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Against Interpretation : And Other Essays by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312280866 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: On Photography by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312420099 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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