The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag

The Volcano Lover Reviews

• 
  mark monday

  Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson: war hero and butcher, the toast of London and the scourge of Naples. Lady Emma Hamilton: model and muse and wife and mistress, the toast of Naples and the scandal of London. Lord William Hamilton: English ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, collector of vases, lover of volcanoes, husband to Emma and friend to Horatio, a power in Naples and a joke in London. A famous love triangle: brave, tragic hero falls in love with the young, enchantingly beautiful wife of an elderly collector and civil servant who is all too happy to turn his head the other way and let things proceed as they may. And who does Susan Sontag decide to focus on in this historical saga of famous events and powerful people and troubled times? The elderly intellectual, the cuckold who wags mocked in the London papers. But of course that would be her focus. She was herself an intellectual above all things, supreme in her field. I love that "the romance" in The Volcano Lover's title is between elderly collector Lord Hamilton and the volcano Vesuvius. I'm glad he's the focus, the titular character. There have been enough tales told already about the little war hero and his larger-than-life paramour.
  
  This is my kind of historical saga. It is precise, disinterested in generalizations, steeped in irony, has the occasional meta flourish, always avoids sentiment, and comes complete with a chilly, vaguely disinterested narrator who may as well be Sontag herself. Other readers appear to dislike this sort of story, the way it is told, the careful distance from its subjects, its ability to empathize in its own way while never forgetting to chart all of its characters' traits - including their flaws. And not the heroic flaws. The small, mean ones, the petty ones, the traits that make a person human rather than a larger-than-life hero.
  
  If you are a film lover, and beyond that, a person who loves historical sagas, then ask yourself: which do you prefer, the sweepingly emotional films of David Lean or the icy anti-saga that is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon? If it is the former, stay clear of this book! If it is the latter, then this is your Barry Lyndon, on the page.
  
  Unlike the films of David Lean (who I also love), this book does not want you to cheer the heroes and heroines, to cry and laugh and swoon at the terrible tragedies and awesome majesty of life's rich pageant, to have a cinematic experience. This book wants you to understand what makes people tick, whether they are famous or not. This book wants you to understand its characters within their personal and historical context, every bit of them especially their weak points, their various villainies and heroics small and large but always human, it wants you to know them as you (supposedly) know yourself. This book doesn't even particularly care if you like it. It does not want to be liked, it wants to be contemplated, discussed, and considered as a probing dissection of how humans think of themselves and how the image of themselves rarely matches what is seen by others. Others who are not in automatic sympathy with you, no matter your title or standing or lineage.
  
  Unless those others actually love you, of course! A person who loves you will love you despite or even because of your flaws. One of the delights of this novel is how much its three players actually like each other. They understand each other and they are fine with what they see.
  
  Just as poor Lord Hamilton loved his dangerous monster, Vesuvius. It was the true love of his life. The poor man should never have left Naples.
  
  Sontag has a reputation as a cold intellectual, and she certainly was one. That's a big part of why I love her. But this novel is also a humane one. And often funny, in its sardonic and at times sneaky-cheeky way. A humor that does not call attention to itself; an author who is amusing herself. My favorite amusement: Sontag's inclusion of characters from the opera Tosca as if they were real people, a real part of this history. The fact that they are straight from an opera and never existed goes unremarked. A snobby sort of in-joke, I suppose. Which I love.
  
  This odd, brilliant novel would have been a 5 star experience for me, except for its very last sequence. The end of the book is as brilliant as everything that preceded it, but it goes a different direction in style. Gone is the omniscient narrator, in her place is a series of first person narratives from various characters' perspectives. Starting with Lord Hamilton's dying thoughts (incredibly moving to me), then on to those of Lord Hamilton's deceased and very loving first wife Catherine (quite a sympathetic character), then to Lady Hamilton's silent mother Mrs. Cadigan (quite full of opinions, despite her silence), next the scandalous Emma Hamilton herself, and finally ending with a very minor character, the revolutionary Eleonora Pimentel on her way to the guillotine. All of these parts are beautifully written, including the sequence of Eleonara's last thoughts.
  
  But my God, don't end a book that is literally all about a bunch of entitled rich people by sharing the understandably contemptuous thoughts of a progressive revolutionary about to die. You can't pretend you are down with the revolution and despise the entitled after you've written a whole book that completely humanizes those wealthy, tragic twits. That's like making a big, fancy cake and then throwing it out with a sneer because you want to prove some kind of point about cakes being bourgeois. That last sequence certainly doesn't ruin the book, but it does completely betray it. Tsk tsk, Susan Sontag! Don't front, it's not a good look.
• 
  David

  The book is so close to great. . . I was reading Sontag's Paris Review interview afterward, which is fascinating, obviously--at 13, she was apparently reading the journals of Gide--and I think it opened me up to the flaw in the book, which is structural. She had in mind this balletic structure modeled on the four temperaments--melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, although the last two are more like epilogues. First, Sontag gives us an oddly sad story about this quiet aristocrat living in Naples (melancholic) and then the action of the book, his whirlwind romance with a younger woman and the revolt in Naples and the British hero who saves the royal court(sanguine). While these parts aren't necessarily at odds, and both are honestly excellent, I'm not sure that they compliment each other.
  
  Let me put it another way. A review below says that the emotional heart of the story is Nelson's actions during the Revolution. But Nelson's not even present for most of this book, and the Revolution is eventually only a minor point in a much longer narrative. Or you could say that the focus is really the title character, but he's got little to do with the Revolution, and Sontag does become noticeably less interested in him when Nelson enters the picture. At the same time, the lens isn’t quite wide enough to give us a satisfying picture of life in Naples at the end of the 18th Century, or even of court life there. The Volcano Lover is about more than the Cavalier, but not quite about enough more to be satisfying. To quote the cliche, the whole is a little less than the sum of the parts.
  
  But those parts! I'll defend this thing from almost all of its detractors. A common criticism is that Sontag doesn’t have sympathy for any of her characters, which is bullshit. I respect the Cavalier, who is truly a gentle human being and a lover of knowledge, a rare and estimable quality. (Compare him to his nephew Charles, a character that Sontag really doesn’t respect.) Then there’s the Cavalier’s wives, both of whom we are asked to sympathize with, the second wife throughout and the first wife only at the novel’s end (a result of the novel’s opening focusing narrowly on the Cavalier). Even the Hero is seen as something of the ultimate romantic lover, putting his career at risk, continually, for this obese former prostitute.
  
  As for the narrative intrusions by Sontag, they’re not all that common, especially after the book’s first hundred pages or so, and they’re usually fascinating. Who could refuse a two-page digression on the nineteen year-old who shattered the Cavalier’s greatest treasure, the Portland Vase, in 1851, and what says about male desire and great art? Consider too that it contains paragraphs like this: “Torch a temple. Pulverize a vase. Slash a Venus. Smash a perfect ephebe’s toes.”
  
  The Volcano Lover has period pomp, gorgeous prose, a satirical edge, perhaps the most violent mob scene I’ve ever read and an under-recognized warmth. I can imagine literally everyone I know reading this thing and enjoying it. Which isn’t to say that they would. As the Cavalier would say, other individuals so often disappoint.
• 
  Matt

  
  
  I love Sontag the writer, provocateur, thinker, etc...and I love her essays and criticism. And her life. I always think twice about what she says and recommends and the attitudes she takes.
  
  But this book didn't really live up to my expectations. I love some of it- the aphoristic insights and the subdued delineations of places and objects, especially. Her characterization can be pretty strong and sometimes the evocative feel of time and place is really there.
  
  Unfortunately the writing is a little too self-conscious, a little too jagged and angular. There's this rather irritating tic she seems to have where her sentences. have to be like five or six words long. and end abruptly. It's almost as if she's willfully capping herself off once the idea or sensation is just starting to breathe. I think it stems from the ever-present ultra-intellectual quality of her writing and (at least, it seems to me) her general being. I understand this kind of thing, intimately, because when I try to write creatively I often start hacking up my sentences or spiking the rhythm because it seems too...derivative? Felicitous? Easy? "Stream of consciousness-y"? Simple? Cliched?
  
  So I sympathize but for extended reading it's a little bludgeoning. One can feel (or at least I could) the massive intelligence and critical rigor of the mind that wrote this, but that same brain sort of weighs the whole thing down too often, nearly reaching the point, on many occasions, of being pedantic or turgid. I hate to say it because I have such deep respect for her but I can't ignore it.
  
  Towards the end she starts to pick up speed- the free indirect discourse passing through the different characters starts to really pack an emotional and sensory punch. This happened throughout the novel when she cut loose a little bit and started to let the language do the talking (!). At times, things hum along pretty smoothly but there's always this leaden density (huge paragraphs, esoteric slightly interesting references, over-written psychological descriptions, chopped melody) just around the corner. I started to lose interest and do that page-flipping thing one does when a book starts to lose its pull.
  
  It's not a bad book, it's just not a great one. Two stars is the perfect score. It's ok.
  
  I'll read her other fiction, certainly, and I'll definitely dig in to more of her essays and nonfiction, etc. But as for now I'll hold off on the former and look forward to the latter.....
• 
  Luís

  The Volcano Lover is a powerful, intricate novel of ideas: frequently inflected with Sontag's feminism, it applies a modern lens to the Enlightenment's moral, social and aesthetic concerns. Yet it is also a tender inventory of desire: intricately mapping the modulation from the cold mania of the collector to the lover's passion.
  
  I don't know if it's the author's fault, but it's the second book I read, and I didn't like it. So many people around here say they wanted her essays more than her novels. Let's see how her next book goes.
  
  Source:
  The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag – review - the Guardian.
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• 
  Rosemary Atwell

  In ‘The Volcano Lover,’ the High Priestess of Cool has delivered an extended fictional essay on aesthetics, desire, feminist politics and revolution. There are certainly some risks taken in structure and narration but overall, this is a wonderful blend of the romance of history and ideas in its broadest form.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Eve Kay

  I did a lot of yawning while reading this, it was honestly very boring. I also did a lot of that sound that I would imagine myself making if there was a hairball forming at the back of my throat. All these rich people problems, swimming in luxury and opulence and all these immaterial things surrounding them, the need to collect, to have, to own. Yak. Art is talked as if it's only something appreciated by the wealthy and some of the art pieces mentioned went right over my head, so I have no understanding what is being said. Clearly a book for the "better folk".
• 
  Julia

  Perhaps I should start with a comment by Evelyn Toynton in COMMENTARY, Nov. 1992, right after the book was published. This is just a short section of a well written critique:
  
  "But in the end, apart from some vivid images of street scenes in Naples, of a rampaging mob, of Sir William’s pathetic pet monkey, and of Emma dancing, the strongest impression one takes away from this book is of the suffocatingly humorless presence of Susan Son-tag.
  
  She has become by now a virtual icon of Mind, the ultimate “glamorous intellectual,” as Vanity Fair puts it. Yet her chief strength may lie in nothing much more than the ability to assume a voice of authority at all times. In the case of The Volcano Lover, what this produces is a solemn rather than a serious novel, in which portentous observations are made in the tone of someone offering a glimpse of the Holy Grail."
  
  It is that cold, distant, "voice of authority" narrator that made this a very hard book for me to read. Strangely, that voice works best when describing the volcano itself--but the people in the book remain puppets and Sontag comes right out, at the very end of the book, and states how she despises them. In the last 4 pages of the book, the "voice" is that of Eleonora Pimentel as she is about to be hanged for her part in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Those 4 pages are simply amazing. Eleonora ends the book by saying:
  
  "But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all."
  
  So perhaps Sontag deliberately set up William and Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson to be self-indulgent puppets--but I have little patience with authors who detest their own characters. If Sontag had written a diatribe against wealth and aristocats, she should have used her famous essay form. And if she IS an advocate for the poor, why write this novel without bringing them into the picture at all?
  
  I have to admit I skimmed this book rapidly--but those last 4 pages stopped me in my tracks. Those pages brought the book from one star to two for me.
  
• 
  Suzanne Stroh

  Annie Liebovitz has called this Susan Sontag's best book, and she should know, and I agree. It's a book wearing many disguises. A roman à clef disguised as a gorgeous, lyrical novel of ideas... disguised as an 18th century romance... about a love triangle... between the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, the concubine he marries and the Naval hero she worships. This book has it all: pretty girls, virile noblemen, erupting volcanoes, priceless paintings, science and seduction, sex and war crimes, houses and gardens, gallows and guillotines.
  
  As with everything I've ever read by the great-lesbian-intellectual-who-came-before-me, I started out hating the book for being too clever by half. As with most of Sontag's books, I felt I could barely get through it the first time.
  
  But nobody is ever compelled to re-read a book (twice!) if disdain is the deepest emotion. So, what ran deeper than my disdain for Sontag's European grammatical constructions? My admiration for her powerful intellect. I even came to like things about the book I loathed on first reading. What's the opposite of a coup de foudre,? What do you call it when it leads to love?
  
  It is perhaps for this reason--the full range of my mixed emotions--that I give the book three stars, in much the same way as I give Joan Schenkar's Dolly Wilde only three stars and Sybille Bedford's novel A Legacy merely four. And I have mixed emotions about that. Guilty feelings. But mixed emotions cost you stars, as Mercedes de Acosta well knew.
  
  So much for stars. Now back to the book.
  
  In form, The Volcano Lover stands the roman galant on its head while setting the stage, historically and literarily, for the flowering of gay culture that led generations of queers to establish colonies in southern Italy.
  
  (Another rock star, gay travel writer William Beckford, who went on the first Grand Tour, makes a cameo appearance as a houseguest in The Volcano Lover. I only realized on the second reading that in dining with Beckford I was dining with Sontag.)
  
  Over time I slowly became aware of how sexy it feels to be in the hands of an author in full command of her literary, cultural, linguistic and historical material.
  
  In function, the book subverts the contemporary art world, satirizing its denizens--collectors in particular--better than The Bonfire of the Vanities. The prose impresses you with its humanity. Here is a world-weary author, you can't help but notice, with true understanding of the affectations and vanities in every character you hate to love. The final scenes read as testimonials that have left a deep imprint.
  
  And in its poetry, this book makes you weep. The tenderest scenes are that affecting.
  
  Sontag came a generation before me. They say you never get along with your mother. But if you fail to learn her lessons, that's your problem. And my life of books would not be the same if I hadn't tried one more time--and learned at last--to appreciate seeing the world through the eyes of Susan Sontag.
  
  This book lives inside me now. It haunts me. My own characters agree. It haunts them, too. That is why The Volcano Lover makes a cameo appearance in Book Three of my own novel cycle, Tabou, very much in homage to the literary contributions of Susan Sontag, that butch intellectual boulevardier who never asked me out.
• 
  Susan

  Deep research on scandals and art works of aristocratic late 18th-century Naples around the time of the French Revolution made into good story/character study of English aesthete and collector William Hamilton, his two wives, and Admiral Nelson. Hamilton profited from the excavations at Pompeii, had an intimate view of the scatalogical excesses and executions perpetrated by the Neapolitan court, and participated in a few menages a trois. His second wife Emma progresses as a Barry Lyndon-type rake, and Admiral Nelson is revealed as a fool. With first-person narratives of the death of each major character in the final chapters, Sontag tears away masks, depriving collecting and the desire for social betterment of moral value. Sontag's constant need to provide a 20th-century perspective weighs down the novel with her own narcissistic reflections. After all, she herself was a collector of facts and perceptions as much as an actor in the intellectual drama of the second half of the 20th-century.
• 
  Lee Foust

  Critic Lettie Ransley of The Guardian calls Susan Sontag’s self-proclaimed romance The Volcano Lover “A novel of ideas.” According to the blurbs on the back of the Picador paperback, the New York Times critic does the same. Seems like the literary establishment wanted to praise Sontag’s historical fiction of Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, his remarkable wife Emma, and Emma’s scandalous affair with English war hero admiral Nelson, but they were puzzled enough by the book’s form to feel obliged to give it that deadly post-modern stamp, to categorize it as a tad European, a bit intellectual, perhaps subtly off-putting to readers of Gresham, King, and Brown, to brand it “a novel of ideas.”
  
  The Volcano Lover, published in 1992, is, in retrospect, not a novel of ideas so much as a romance of passions. It begins with Hamilton’s passion for collecting—first for art, then objects, and finally his late acquisition of the inimitable Emma—and flows seamlessly into Emma and Nelson’s unexpected and ill-timed love affair—back-dropped by the political passion of the short-lived Republic of Naples. Lady Hamilton’s assumed passing of the royal outrage of the deposed queen to Lord Nelson, and the admiral’s ruthless putting down of the high-minded Jacobins when he restores the monarchy (historically the biggest blot on the hero’s military career), finishes the etymological exploration of the word passion (from Latin “patire” to suffer), when the romance recounts the sad martyrdom of the short-lived democratic governors of the city. It makes a good read in these days in which democracy seems again teetering on the brink, as the USA, for the second time in the last 5 elections, has saddled the nation with a president not elected by the people but by the electoral college.
  
  I had to read Sontag’s conversation with Edward Hirsh in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction #143—available online) in order to understand the book’s form, its division into four unequal parts with a prologue. In the interview Sontag explains her inspiration for the structure: “I took it from a piece of music, Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments... (It) starts with a triple prologue, three very short pieces. Then come four movements—melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, choleric. In that order. I knew I was going to have a triple prologue and then four sections or parts corresponding to the four temperaments—though I saw no reason to belabor the idea by actually labeling Parts I to IV “melancholic,” “sanguinic,” etcetera.”
  
  Oh, Ms. Sontag, please belabor! Once I had understood this structure, The Volcano Lover became a considerably more enjoyable read. For it is a text libel to be off-putting for those accustomed to the easy, pretend-omniscient narrative of standard historical fiction—as well as those avid readers of history. For The Volcano Lover alternates freely between these two styles of discourse. It never quite throws historical detail or its opinionated commenting authorial voice out the window for that pretend fictional narrator. Nor does it fail to digress on its themes or to recount events out of order for dramatic effect, or to descend wholly into the voices and opinions of its characters, letting them have their say—particularly in the stunning “choleric” conclusion, in which 4 angry women clear the air from beyond the grave. Focused as I was on the traditions of the historical novel, I read on ignorant of what this post-modern romance was actually achieving.
  
  All things considered, I understand why critics wanted to praise The Volcano Lover—it does all of the enjoyable things that a traditional historical novel does: it informs, instructs, and entertains. But it does these things in a new and unfamiliar form—one so thoughtful and systematic it could only be labeled postmodern, a narrative experiment, alas, a novel of ideas. Ah, but the idea is volcanic.
  
• 
  Tom Lee

  Who knew a volcano could give birth to such a wealth of conflicting symbolism? In Sontag’s gripping piece of historical fiction, it appears as a metaphor for destruction and preservation, the artistic and the scientific, the penis and the vagina – and a whole lot more.
  
  I personally love historical fiction and The Volcano Lover is an enjoyable and thought-provoking example of the genre. It takes as its basis a very famous, real-life love affair from the Napoleonic Wars, but avoids directly naming its key characters until the very last page. The protagonist is not only a volcanologist, but also a collector of assorted objets d’art and British ambassador in 18th-century Italy. His residence in Naples overlooks the smoldering Mount Vesuvius, which he regularly clambers up either to collect samples or to entertain visiting dignitaries – one of the most famous of whom (and certainly the most amusingly acerbic) is Goethe.
  
  This visit by Goethe, like the general framework of the novel, is largely faithful to history and certain events that took place in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies leading up to and during the Napoleonic Wars. There are also, however, several occurrences described that never really took place, blurring the lines between fact and fiction – for instance, the plot from the opera Tosca is insouciantly inserted into the very real persecution of anti-monarchists.
  
  Sontag clearly doesn’t want the reader to dwell too much on the historical elements, but more on the universal themes. The Volcano Lover employs several narrative devices to force us back from becoming completely enveloped by the world it evokes, e.g. not naming its central couple until the end, starting the book with a scene set more than 200 years after the events described, having dead characters reflect on their lives. This is a novel that entertains, but also very obviously wants you to think what the plot and characters say about war, women and the nature of art.
  
• 
  Johan Thilander

  Det känns som att Susan hände mig. Tidigare har jag bara läst hennes On Photography, och hennes essäistiska bakgrund är tydlig här.
  Denna bok är väldigt, väldigt bra. Väldigt bra, alltså.
• 
  Heidi McIntyre

  As a writer, I greatly admire Susan Sontag's writing in this book. (I have not read her other work.) She is brilliant, there is no other word to describe her voice, style and ability to dig deep into her characters' psyche. She unapologetically breaks rules and it doesn't matter because she's that talented. She opened up a style of writing that was unfamiliar to me, one that I came to really applaud especially her very short descriptive (list-like) sentences that set the tone and pulled me into her domain.
  
  She goes very deep into the mind of her characters, not only revealing their egotistical nature but detailing their flaws and obsessions especially the Cavalier's love of beauty and collecting and the Hero's need to be admired. But Susan Sontag is not a romantic, just the opposite. And her point of view was sobering, heart-wrenching and beautifully painful at times. Like holding up a mirror and seeing the shadow within. But the book is worth reading and this one will stay with me for a very long time.
• 
  Antonmyles

  This is an exhilarating read more for its encyclopedic if kaleidoscopically shifting views of a passionately intelligent and acquisitive Cavaliere. It matters little that the novel is based on the real-life triangle of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Lord Nelson. What counts is the formal yet lyrical beauty of the writing, the ever-changing impressions of a man in love with not just a woman but the world of objects and art. Almost mystical in the revelry of its cataloguing of things and experience, it is at once a contradictory celebration of the primacy of empiricism and the transcendence from the mundane that only an elevated mind can realize in the accumulation of life. This is one book that epitomizes the philosophy of gestalt aesthetics: that a thing of beauty is greater than the sum of all its parts.
• 
  Edita

  Every pleasure […] becomes an experience of anticipated loss.
  *
  They belong to different generations, have had such different lives. Yet they have so many of the same tastes, the same disappointments. From stories they passed to confidences, each unwrapping a package of grief and yearning.
  *
  To be unaccompanied. To be alone. To lower yourself into your own feelings.
  There to find mists and vapors. Then little protuberances of old angers and longings. Then a large emptiness. You think of what you have done, done with brio—great slabs of actions, enterprises. All that energy has drained away. Everything becomes an effort.
  Surfeited, his appetite for surfeit. Now it’s enough.
• 
  Wordsmith

  I love this book, having first read it back in '92-'93. It's still sitting right there on my shelf, despite having been pulled off several times for a re-read. Complex? Uhmmm, not really. Big words? No bigger, certainly, than McCarthy. Ha! Not even close. No, just top of the line, grade A, "historical romance." If that. I'd call it much more myself. Susan Sontag is a writers writer. 5 Star caliber all the way.
• 
  Agatha

  მაშრიყიდან მაღრიბამდე რომ არ იყოს გადაჭიმული ტექსტი, უფრო გამიხარდებოდა.
• 
  مِستر کثافت درونگرا

  درود بر خانم سانتاک دوست عزیزم
  
  من عاشق نقد‌ها و کتاب‌های ادبی خانم سانتاک هستم نمونه بارز و درجه یکش کتاب علیه تفسیر که واقعا محشر و درجه یک
  
  ولی متاسفانه نتونستم بیشتر از 400صفحشو بخونم و خواننده‌رو خیلی پَس میزنه عقب
  
  نمیدونم چی بگم، امیدوارم عذرخواهی منو بپذیری سوزان مهربان و عزیزم
• 
  El

  The dramatic love triangle between Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and her lover, Lord Nelson, of the late 18th-century Naples is the basis of Sontag's historical "romance". The Cavaliere is an obsessive collector and fascinated with Mount Vesuvius which becomes symbolic of each characters' emotions at one point or another. When his beloved Catherine dies he falls in love with his nephew's lover, Emma, who ultimately finds true love not in the Cavaliere, but in "the hero", Lord Nelson. The volcano demonstrates the malcontent of the characters in their endless search for satisfaction.
  
  I have not read any other fiction by Sontag, but found the writing style she implemented in this book different than what I had expected after the one or two essays I have read by her. The lack of quotation marks in dialogue is something I am not particularly a fan of (if James Joyce couldn't win me over, I'm not likely to lap it up by someone else), but I managed to make it through. The connection between the volcano and the characters and the mirror images of nature and society was fascinating to me and managed to keep me enthralled.
  
  In typical fashion I wound up being more interested in the shadowy sideline characters, such as the fortune teller, Efrosina. While I wanted to know more about her, her time in the story was short. Character development left something to be desired; while I can understand why Joyce made some of the ridiculous choices he had made (whether I agree with them or not), I can appreciate his efforts. Sontag's choices left me questioning more than I would have liked. Maybe I just need to read more of her fiction to get a better grasp on her work.
• 
  Tony Hightower

  I wasn't able to finish this. It wasn't that she's bad at this -- her prose flows nicely, and the flourishes and characters move in three dimensions -- but man, is she in love with her own ability to string phrases and words together.
  
  The remembrance-as-recollection plot device only works if you're crystal clear about how many layers deep into the onion of memory you've currently burrowed. That was a problem in this book, and while it might be forgivable for those who read scholarly texts and have more of a Pompeii fetish than I do, well, I don't.
  
  I like Sontag as a thinker, and I think she deserves her place in the pantheon of 20th century philosophical thinkers. And it's highly possible that she's created works of fiction that might be less self absorbed and circular than this one. If such an animal exists, let me know, as I'd love to read it.
• 
  Alex Ankarr

  It's a long time since I read it and hard to remember details. Barring Emma's mum's disgusted aside of "Men are bad!", which is hard to argue. Also clear is the memory of how loving and devoted the mother/daughter relationship is - a filial ideal, a beautiful sororal dream that I can't believe in any more. It's not like that really with women, kids, it don't really exist! It's Middleton that got it right: 'Women Beware Women'. And how.
• 
  Lisa Fluet

  
  I read this book while in Naples (it's set in Naples, late-18th-early 19th century). I think it's probably Susan Sontag's best novel. But then I don't really like her novels normally...[random trivia]--Susan Sontag's novels come up in the movie "Bull Durham" (Kevin Costner--or "Crash"--doesn't like them, either...)
• 
  Burcu

  I didn't realise Sontag had novels; this is my first one and I think it's a slow, long-winded novel that is trying to do too many things at the same time. It has moments but I found it on the weak side.
• 
  Velvetink

  Loved it!
• 
  Nicholas

  Historical fiction seems like a terribly difficult genre to write in. Make one mistake and you've written a history. Lean too far in the other direction and you end up with a Mills & Boon. Maintain anything less than a tight focus and you end up with something that is alternately disinterested history, feminist critique, and, yes, romance, but which fails to come together satisfyingly.
  
  Not that The Volcano Lover isn't an interesting book. Sontag manages to turn a set of fairly unlikeable characters and a story that plays out on the sidelines of a great historical event (rather than being one itself) into something compelling and, occasionally, thought-provoking.
  
  The novel describes the life of Sir William Hamilton ("The Cavaliere"), Emma Hamilton, and Lord Nelson ("The Hero"), when Sir William was stationed in Naples as the English ambassador. It follows their lives through the romance between Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson, their flight from Naples, and Emma's ultimate abandonment and death.
  
  The novel is divided into two sections. The first part, occupying a good hundred pages or so, introduces us to the Cavaliere and his passions: volcanology and collecting. This part contains some stunning historical writing, but lacks the sarcastic authorial intrusions that undermine, and then rescue, the book as a whole. The Cavaliere is, simply, a bland person. Although Sontag is at pains to describe his "passions", she cannot do much with the material she has to work with, and the Cavaliere is not a passionate man. He is described as a dilettante twice, first by Goethe ("What a simple-minded epicurean this Englishman was. [...:] A mere dilettante, he would have called him, had dilettante not then been a term of praise.") and then at the end of the novel by Eleonora Pimentel ("Who was the esteemed Sir William Hamilton but an upper-class dilettante enjoying the many opportunities afforded in a poor and corupt and interesting country to pilfer the art and make a living out of it and to get himself known as a connoisseur.") With these statements Sontag seems to self-consciously acknowledge the difficulty of weaving a story around a character who begins passively and becomes only more passive as his life progresses.
  
  The second part of the novel describes the story involving the Cavaliere, his new wife Emma Hamilton, and the Hero (Lord Nelson) -- the famous love triangle, and their joint involvement in the retaliation against key figures in the French revolution. This portion should have been a more interesting study. Emma Hamilton is undoubtedly an interesting character, far more full of life than the Cavaliere, and with an actual story arc. Unfortunately the novel doesn't really do her justice. Her transition from romantic idealist to broken mercenary is jumpy, and mostly told through indifferent eyes. When she finally dies ignominiously, in dire poverty, it is hard to empathise with her, or, in fact, to feel anything at all.
  
  A major theme in this novel is the role of women. This is quite understandable given the author, but it comes up unexpectedly in the story. For women in this novel, for example, sex is only positive as far as it benefits them--and sex can only benefit women by pleasing the men whose approval they seek. For the Queen of Naples it is a way to keep the eternally-childish king content so that she may run the court without interference. For Emma Hamilton's mother it is the way through which Emma will ensure their livelihood in Naples. Sontag can't resist some direct authorial commentary on this issue, and it is always jarring. For example, the blame for much of the scandalous behaviour of the trio after the Revolution is attributed to Emma Hamilton: "Letting the woman, or women, in the story take the rap is a resourceful way of occluding the full coherence as politics of what was decreed from the hero's flagship. (This is often part of misogyny's usefulness.)" The is a powerful sentence, and would be fantastic if the story were, say, an essay on attitudes towards women in the 18th century, but instead it's delivered as an addendum, not more than a couple of pages long, following a graphic description of the hangings of various nobles--a graphic description which does not include Emma Hamilton in any way at all--not even in a positive light. If you're going to make a point about sexism in the 18th century, why not tie it into the story?
  
  The best parts of the story, though, are Sontag's acerbic, narrative-breaking interjections. These are delicious and historically well-informed. On the role of women in the new French republic: "The new model of rule, which revoked whatever legitimate claim women had to governance, was the assembly--composed only of men, since it derived its legitimacy from a hypothetical contract among equals. Women, defined as neither fully rational nor free, could not be a party to this contract". On Galatea and golems: "Rarely does a female statue come to life in order to take revenge. But when the statue is a man, his purpose is almost always to do or to avenge a wrong. " On irony: "Irony is the staple response of the English gentleman expatriate to the weirdness, the uncouthness of the locals among whom he finds himself obliged (even if it be by his own choice) to live. Being ironical is a way of showing one's superiority without actually being so ill-bred as to be indignant."
  
  Back in Naples, Sontag remains slavishly historically accurate, and this dedication affects the story in curious ways. Aware that she has no macroscopic control over her character's actions, she doesn't seem to attempt to understand them properly in order to explain what they do. As a result, the characters sometimes feel like puppets, doing things without any real justification. The characters in the book aren't named, but are instead referred to as The Cavaliere, The Cavaliere's Wife, The Hero -- Sontag seems to take her own self-consciousness at working with stereotypes, rather than fully-fledged human beings, and manages to make the reader feel self-conscious, too.
  
  Susan Sontag once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history". Only much later did she offer a partial apology -- to cancer victims. This is not the book I expected from someone capable of making such a statement, especially in a novel about forbidden romance, revolution, and volcanoes. I expected less caution, and more fire.
  
• 
  Natia Morbedadze

  სერ უილიამ ჰამილტონის, ემა ჰამილტონისა და ჰორაციო ნელსონის სასიყვარულო სამკუთხედი... ეს ისტორიული ფაქტია, რომელიც მრავალ წიგნს, ფილმს დაედო საფუძვლად, თუმცა სუზან ზონტაგი სულ სხვა კუთხით წარმოაჩენს ემას - აქ ის საერთოდ არ ჰგავს ვივიენ ლის და არც გმირი ადმირალია ლორენს ო���ივიე... არც ვულკანზე შეყვარებული "კავალერია" უბრალოდ მოტყუებული ქმარი. სამივე იმ სპექტაკლის ნაწილია, რომელიც ისტორიამ მე-18 საუკუნის მიწურულსა და მე-19 საუკუნის დასაწყისში გაათამაშა ევროპაში... სწორედ ეს მგონია ამ წიგნის ღირსება - განსხვავებულად წარმოჩენილი ისტორია, რომელშიც მთავარი როლები შეასრულეს ქალმა, მისმა ორმა (ორივე გამორჩეულად საინტერესოა, განსაკუთრებით დიპლომატი ჰამილტონი) მამაკაცმა და სხვებმა... და არა უბრალოდ ბანალური ამბავი სიყვარულზე...
• 
  Abby S.

  Susan Sontag’s “𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓥𝓸𝓵𝓬𝓪𝓷𝓸 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓻” is one of the best books novels I’ve read in a long time. Sontag’s writing feels so intimate and up close, I hang on all she has to say.
  
  “To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one.“