As I read Susan Sontag's journals, I thought, as is I think kind of inevitable, where I was in my late teens and early 20s, when Sontag was off cavorting with geniuses in Paris and reading dense German romantic epic poems in the original. Let's face it, I was probably ripping a bong in an attic.Sontag's journals, fractured as they are, are a remarkably portrait of the inner thoughts of one of the 20th Century's big name intellectuals, as she went through book after book and a couple of what were...

had never underlined that many sentences in a book before

Ironically, nearly my favorite part of Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, edited by her son, David Rieff, is his painfully straightforward preface to the book. The NYTimes review captures the tone of it perfectly in this quote:"All but visibly wincing, he states that he would rather have left them unpublished. They are raw and unvarnished and perhaps that is a virtue; still, they contain “much that I would have preferred not to know and not to have others know.” Reading her entries, he writ...

Reborn is a collection of the diaries of the American author Susan Sontag covering her earlier years – starting from when she was 13. If only I could write like teenager Susan does! Honestly, her writing is superb. The diaries are rather interesting, full of notes and scraps, the occasional literary fragment or longer entry about her life, plenty of reading lists, etc.While the talk of sex bores me, I loved everything else: when she repeats to herself “do something”, when she talks about the “he...

The twin poles of Sontag’s intellectual vigour and vulnerability make these early journals both deeply thought-provoking and compelling.This is an intimate portrait of precocious intellectualism and tireless soul-searching, in which Sontag reinforces the idea of self as one’s severest critic.

The first of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s diary, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 charts the development of a sharp intellect. The volume follows the famous writer from her beginnings at the University of California Berkeley as a precocious sixteen-year-old undergraduate student to the time of her first novel’s publication. Reading lists, story ideas, and aesthetic judgments on film, literature, and art intermix with fast-paced descriptive passages, lengthy accounts of affairs with f...

I can't imagine Susan Sontag as a young person because I've always encountered her as the staggering, cultured-to-the-umpteenth-degree uber-cosmopolitan critic that she is in her essays. It's hard to imagine someone like that ever being a kid. The journals in Reborn start when she's fourteen and she's already more complicated, moody, and painfully self-conscious than most people four times her age. You don't really see a development here as much as you get these brief, staccato flashes of intens...

What an important book to read when your life is a mess.

Early in these notebooks, Susan Sontag confesses to having read her lover's journal secretly and feeling extremely agitated, hurt and anxious on discovering that her lover didn't really like her. She also confesses that she didn't feel guilty about reading the journal without her lover's consent because she thinks that one of the main social functions of a journal or a diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people. However, I don't think a journal is supposed to have any social functio...

This is the first of three planned volumes of Sontag's journals, edited by her son David Rieff. This volume covers the young and precocious Sontag from age 14 to 30. It's a period of learning for her though she already appears learned.The early entries are about 2 primary awakenings. First is a blossoming intellectual strength through studies at Berkeley, Oxford and the Sorbonne followed by a return to the U. S. and a professorship at Columbia. The early 60s also saw her writing her first novel,...

Three years ago The Guardian ran some excerpts from an upcoming edition of Susan Sontag's journals, and despite being at that time little more to me than a massive literary reputation, I was dazzled by her penetrating, often brutal self-dissection of her own personality and intellect. I even dared think I recognized a sensibility shockingly similar to my own. Fast-forward through several years and the journals, a compilation of her earliest, are here, and yes, my suspicions have been borne out.

susan how DARE you read my mind like this — the diary of a growing woman, exploring both her Judaism and lesbianism while documenting her numerous cultural discoveries, from movies to books to pieces of classical music. composed of both intimate thoughts about repressed feelings and destructive relationships and more general ones about literature, philosophy, art or even love, this book is as rich as Sontag’s mind and lively life in NYC, Paris, and other places where she meets other great figure...

"I am not myself with people [...] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too."When reflecting on Kafka's diaries, Sontag rightly writes that "Kafka has that magic of actuality in even the most dislocated phrase that no other modern has, a kind of shiver and grinding blue ache in your teeth." Sontag also praises the "clarity and precision" of Gide's diaries, remarking that she feels herself rapidly 'growing' through reading them. The charm of Sontag's diaries lies elsewhere - I think,

This is the first thing I've read by Sontag, and perhaps a strange place to start. As reading enjoyment the beginning was the most compelling as Sontag undergoes swift changes in her intellectual landscape and social life. Her endless list of books to read are all inspiring and act as doorways to other people to check out (Kafka's diaries, Gide). The latter part is a little more scattered, but still filled with interesting and often pretty dark views into her psyche while leaving her family behi...

I read The Volcano Lover: A Romance a while back and seem to remember enjoying it, or at least not hating it. I meant to read more Sontag at that time, but then as typical I got distracted by something else. But then I came across this in the store, flipped through it, and fell in love.I love journals. My own, artist's journals, writer's journals, your journal, whatever. If I'm given permission, I'll read it. But it's sort of a touchy thing with me, one that causes a lot of internal conflict. On...

Can't score her lower, wrote this at a such young age, mostly about her bisexual life in NY Chicago SF and Paris, should be more real if David didnt delete so many words! No wonder she was buried in Paris, Paris for her is the city where inspirited all her thoughts. Gedanke! All things about her relationship, early marriage, David's childhood are so attractive. And I knew it's something about me! Irene is one of the most important girl in the journal, and philip Rieff as well, but actually you c...

1. One must bear in mind, reading this selection from Susan Sontag's diaries, why they were edited and published in the first place: Sontag sold her diaries, along with all her writings, to the UCLA library, and since there was no clause limiting rights to access or publication of these materials, her son, journalist David Rieff, decided to order and publish the diaries as a form of preemptive strike (feeling/phrasing mine). 2. Three planned volumes are to represent nearly 100 notebooks.3. The d...

A few passages from Reborn:*I am not myself with people […] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too. *The world is cluttered with dead institutions. *Life is suicide, mediated.*There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow th...

First, I think it doesn’t make sense to rate someone’s private thoughts. Thoughts that weren’t meant to be read. Although, Sontag wouldn’t be Sontag if she didn’t twist that logic and states the opposite somewhere in this collection. Her journals were meant to be read. Just before she died, she even reminded her son of the whereabouts of them.This is the first in a collection of three volumes containing Sontag’s journal entries, selected and edited by her son David Rieff. This first volume spans...

A lovely gift from Libby, and a very immediate and intense read. Did not underline, but read aloud sentences and some concepts-- on the whole very enjoyable. And can't wait to read the next two. She was very obviously brilliant.