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Sontag, Susan In America ISBN 13: 9780224040914

In America - Hardcover

 
9780224040914: In America
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In 1876, a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travels to California to found a "utopian" commune. The commune fails, and most of the group go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage.

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Review:
As an essayist, Susan Sontag has tended to stick pretty rigorously to the modern age, whether she's anatomizing the wild world of camp or roasting Leni Riefenstahl over the coals. But in her fiction--particularly in such fin-de-siècle productions as The Volcano Lover--she's clearly felt the allure of the past. And In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-traveling form. What's more, it illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past", she notes in a first-person prologue, "perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past". There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.

It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in (you've guessed it) California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become". And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child, and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose:

They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else.
Like every utopia in human history, Maryna's is a failure. Following its collapse, she is moved to return to the theatre--but as an American, now, plugged securely into the middlebrow culture of her adopted land. The rest of the novel charts her brilliant career among the philistines, along with a number of heated erotic detours.

Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total"). And she includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus

Review:
'A tour de force...A magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth.' - Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun '[In America] has an invigorating spaciousness...packed with characters, incidents, and colour, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence.' - Walter Kirn, New York magazine

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  • PublisherJonathan Cape Ltd
  • Publication date2000
  • ISBN 10 022404091X
  • ISBN 13 9780224040914
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages400
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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780312273200: In America: A Novel

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Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL, 2001
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  • 9780141190105: In America (Penguin Modern Classics)

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  • 9780099473213: In America

    Vintage, 2001
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  • 9781568958989: In America (Wheeler Large Print Compass Series)

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