Reborn (Early Diaries 1947-1964) by Susan Sontag, Ed. by David Rieff

I simply cannot talk about it at this point. 

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag

It's been so long since I first fell in love with the first sentences of Illness as Metaphor that I almost can't believe that I actually managed to finish this masterpiece today. 

I suppose more strange things have happened. After all, my word for 2009 was base (makes a little more sense in SWE). And I did finish some other long lasting projects in the past year (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) so, if I can just hurry up and wrap my head around Duras' Moderato Cantabile, Barnes' Nightwood and Martinson's Aniara before December, 31... Yeah, well - then what?

I'll be better equipped for the next decade? Sort of like wearing David Shrigley's Battle Dress? I don't dare to even start hoping for something that great.

I, etcetera by Susan Sontag

Colonialists collect.

(From Project for a Trip to China)

8 shorts by Sontag, most of them deconstructive in some way. Personally, I enjoyed Project for a Trip to China, a sort of collection of lists, quotes and tables all on the subject of traveling to China / whether or not the protagonist could have been conceived in China; and Debriefing, a restless portrayal of the relationship of two friends, ending with death.

In the future I will try to get hold of this book (on the page quoted, Sontag talks about Debriefing).

Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

[...] You don't just die, as Simone de Beauvoir points out in her beautiful memoir, "from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something."

The particular something that David Rieff writes about in this beautiful memoir is Myelodysplastic Syndrome, the illness that in less than a year took his mother Susan Sontag's life in 2004. In her journal, she wrote:

"While I was busy zapping the world with my mind, my body fell down"

Rieff explains the guilt of the survivor, the unanswerable questions one poses to oneself, even long after the loved one is gone. The thought that it would have been easier to die oneself, which of course would be less about making the ultimate sacrifice than it would be about making it easier for oneself.

In Sontag's workbook for the essay Illness as Metaphor that came out in 1978, Rieff later found a notation that read:

"leukemia: the ony clean death from cancer, the only death that can be romanticized"

The truth had been far from it.

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Listen to NPR's program about the book and read the first chapter or so.

Read an excerpt from Sontag's diaries 1947-1963 here.

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UPDATE: I found this great talk held by Rieff over at Fora.tv!

Min röst skall nu komma från en annan plats i rummet by Lotta Lotass

I've been waiting for the right moment to read this novel since probably 2006 when it came out. Even though it's been standing in my book shelf the whole time. Perhaps it's the same thing as with Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, the first page striking a brilliant chord that makes for a quite attentive read that I might not be up to at the time.

Där bakom gestaltlös, utan skapnad, väntar med famlande, väntar med skakande ännu oformade händer det som snart skall komma.
Står med sluttande och oformlig gestalt och framåtböjd och lyssnar.

And on page 2:

Nu i formlöshet som blundar,
vänder sig om på sin andra sida,
samlar sig till något som är likt en skepnad,
andas ut, reser sig upp och i sin fulla längd och tar ett första steg och börjar gå.

I cannot recall a more poetic and vivid description of the birth of evil. And the way Lotass takes the reader inside 5 serial killers' minds is extraordinary. How she can describe the environments in and around Las Vegas; the dams, the fair grounds, without using any names or English words, even, is quite unique.

I'm very glad that Lotass will become a member of the Swedish Academy on December, 20.

Currently Reading: Sontag

Susan Sontag by Annie Leibovitz.

Reading Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, as I've been meaning to do since I read the first sentences a few years back:

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

I'm looking forward to finishing it.