This is an interesting collection of essays, interviews, and commentaries, which has been well put together by Susan Sontag. The advice to young writers section is particularly amusing as are Kis's thoughts on his self-chosen exile. I recommend reading the Tomb of Boris Davidovitch before hand because much of the book deals with the controversy Kis faced over that novel, as well as his break from the Belgrade literati.

Kis was a brilliant writer, but as these essays show, completely apolitical. He did not have time for nationalists, internationalists, communists, capitalists any of it, which is why perhaps he went to France to live the quiet life of a University Professor.

Considering that she claims to be a friend of Kis and actually put this work together, it is shameful that Sontag insists on putting a political spin on this collection. She actually claims that the 'gingerbread heart of nationalism' section ranks along with, she claims, Andric's Letter from 1920 as early warnings against Serbian Nationalism. As someone who has translated Andric's story, I can tell you that Ms. Sontag should consider re-reading. The Andric story makes the case that Bosnia is a land of ethnic hatred, ready to explode at anytime, which it obviously did. There is no mention of Serbian aggression or nationalism. Nor does Kis ever pay tribute to any idealized multi-cultural Bosnia, Sontag's cause celebre throughtout the early 90's and repeated in the introduction. Enough politics, however.

Read this work because it tells us a great deal about a wonderful literary stylist, who knew and loved literature. The fact that others would try to co-opt Kis to champion their political philosophies is embarrassing. The book speaks for itself.

Kis is a giant of world literature. This book of biographical pieces, interviews, and essays by Kis allow the reader to see some of the inner workings of that fine mind. His early death was a great loss to literature. What he has achieved, however, will live on forever. I've read A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH perhaps five times, and I'm looking forward to reading it again, and again.

I read Danilo Kis' books " Tomb for Boris Davidovich", "Hourglass" and "Encyclopedia of the Dead". The glory and greatness of this eastern European writer can be comprehended fully only after understanding Kis on the personal level. ""Homo Poeticus" does just that: writer pours his soul to the world by revealing his influences (literary and personal), - and brings reader closer to the great writers of this century such as: Nabokov, Flaubert, Borges, Marquis de Sade...Kis even wrote an essay on the Serbian painter Velickovic. I always respected Danilo Kis' fictional works. Collection of Danilo Kis' essays and interviews made me even more fond of him as a person - and his work. Book's editor, Ms. Susan Sontag, wrote emotionally powerful introduction. Her selection of the work published on this non-fiction masterpiece is absolutely wonderful.

Summer in Baden-Baden is a beautiful and almost too brief masterpiece which tells two intertwined stories seamlessly. The first tells the story of the nameless narrator and Dostoyevsky admirer as he retraces the steps Dostoyevsky and his new wife took in the 1860s--the second story. The narrator's admiration for Dostoyevsky is not strong enough to enable him to conceal the underside of Dostoyevsky's personality--the obsessive gambling, the cruelty to his wife, the anti-Semitism. The narration itself is beautful--the light, almost humorous tone is wonderful and manages to carry off multi-page paragraphs without losing the reader. This is a rich little treasure. Enjoy.

Almost claustrophobic in its intensity, Tsypkin's recreation of the frustration, and even paranoia, of Dostoevsky during one summer in Baden-Baden, in which he attempts to gamble his way out of debt, is a masterpiece, newly published twenty years after its author's death. With sensitivity and a feeling for suffering which may have come from similar frustration, Tsypkin reveals Dostoevsky's inner life, showing us a sensitive but driven man who is also insecure, rude, and arrogant, a man who dominates his wife, a man who suffers from the aftereffects of his imprisonment and his epilepsy, a man virulently anti-Jewish and anti-German and in the grip of compulsive gambling--and a man with whom every reader will ultimately feel empathy, if not complete sympathy.

The story line is deceptively simple. An unidentified narrator, a great admirer of Dostoevsky, is traveling by train to various sites associated with Dostoevsky. As he travels, he reads a Dostoevsky novel, musing about characters in Dostoevsky's novels and events in his life, his honeymoon and marriage, his remarkably supportive second wife, and his associations or wished-for associations with other Russian authors, such as Turgenev. The narrator's additional musings on the forces which eventually impel some later authors, like Solzhenitsyn, to seek exile, while other authors remain behind, bring Russian literary history up to date, expanding the novel's scope beyond that of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries and giving some historical context to Tsypkin's own writing.

Contributing to the dark and intense moodiness of the novel is its style. Single sentences, full of unique images but sometimes two pages long, drive the narrative and the reader along, with the insistence of the train ride which opens the novel. Because each of these sentences is often a single, extended paragraph, there are almost no visual breaks to provide respite from solid type, which completely fills each page and compels the reader to read every word. The writing is so strong, so energetic, and so fresh, however, that most readers will find themselves speeding to keep up with the narrative, the grayness of the text disappearing as Tsypkin's lively images emerge and his characters come to life. This is a challenging and utterly fascinating novel, a startling new work which has earned a place in Russian literary history.

"Summer in Baden-Baden" is a wonderful book revolving around a single summer in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Only one theme lies at the core of this book: love. The book tells of Dostoyevsky's 1867 summer in Baden-Baden with his bride, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. As such, the book revolves around conjugal love and carnal love, obsessive love and artistic love, a love of words, a love of games and a love of lazy days in the sunshine.

Dostoyevsky made this trip to Baden-Baden prior to his spectacular literary successes; "The Idiot," "The Possessed," and "The Brothers Karamazov" all had yet to be published. Dostoyevsky was giving himself up to his vices: drinking, gambling, obsessing and, inbetween, suffering from the epilepsy that would plague him until the end of his life. Like all Russians, Dostoyevsky was "extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." Seduced by anguish and despair, he gambled away his young, pregnant wife's jewels and finally was himself reduced to wandering the streets of the German resort town in beggar's rags.

Besides being an account of Dostoyevsky's summer in Baden-Baden, this book is also a memoir of Tsypkin's journey to St. Petersburg to visit the apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. Supposedly, Tsypkin's aunt, a literary critic, gave Tsypkin an old volume of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky's "Reminiscences," in which Anna details the intimate moments of her honeymoon in Baden-Baden. As Tsypkin travels farther and farther north, he weaves his own narrative into the narrative of Dostoyevsky.

Although Tsypkin adores Dostoyevsky's work and, on some level, has come to worship and revere the man, his reverence does have its reservations. Tsypkin, we learn, is a Jew and, as anyone at all familiar with Dostoyevsky knows, the great writer hated Jews. All Jews. Thus, despite Tsypkin's adoration, Dostoyevsky would have hated Tsypkin.

Tsypkin writes beautiful prose that is a combination of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Saramago and Sebald, though any comparison is ultimately unfair to all of the authors involved. Tsypkin's prose is...Tsypkin's prose, though like Saramago and Sebald, one sentence can go one for four or five pages, one paragraph for forty or more. And, again reminiscent of Sebald, Tsypkin is seduced by memory and its connections; one thing leads him to another, which leads him to another, which leads him to yet another. If this puts you off, don't let it. Tsypkin is a wonderfully hypnotic writer and it doesn't take many pages of the book until the reader is drawn into both Tsypkin's world and the world of Baden-Baden during the summer of 1867. If anything, I wish the book would have gone on and on.

Although Tsypkin and the Dostoyevsky's take center stage in this novel, it is peopled with many other fascinating characters as well, some real, some fictional: Turgenev, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin, Trusotsky, Fyodor Karamazov and Stinking Lizaveta.

This book should be read, first and foremost, because it is a beautiful literary achievement. But it should also be noted that Tsypkin, like Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and so many others before him did not let oppression keep him from seeing the beauty in life or from discerning the truth from the lies. And, most of all, nothing kept him from passing that beauty on.

In this insightful essay, Sontag springboards from an analysis of "Three Guineas" by Virginia Woolf into a discussion about the effects of photography and televised imagery on modern culture and ideas about war and violence. Weaving excerpts from works by Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Wordsworth, and others, including her own previous work "On Photography", she leads readers on a journey into our own psyches and ways of thinking and viewing the world, and pushes us to examine with conscious knowledge the usage of images. I was especially taken with the idea that it is entirely human to turn away from these pictures of suffering, which are often used as a form of entertainment in the modern world. Sontag rightfully doesn't offer answers or platitudes, but instead indicates a welcoming of our own humanity's foibles as a way to deal with the obligations of conscience and the limits of sympathy.

I couldn't help but wonder what Susan Sontag would have to say about a friend of mine, and the manner in which he gets his daily news. First thing, each day, when he gets to work, he logs into his computer, surfs to Yahoo, and looks at a slide show of all the top news photos for the day. He never reads any articles. At most he reads a caption or two, but mainly he looks at the pictures. How many others perceive the world through Yahoo slideshows? It's a bit scary. I think Sontag would agree that many people view the world primarily through the images they receive through the media.

In her revealing book, Regarding The Pain of Others, Susan Sontag examines the many issues associated with the photography of warfare, genocide, and atrocity. She discusses the history of such images, why they are produced, the importance of the viewer's perspective, censorship, and many other related topics. In presenting her ideas, Sontag moves through a wide variety of history and literature ( Plato's Republic, the Crimean War, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi concentration camps, Bosnia). Oddly enough, there are no photos in the book. Many photographs that are referred to are described enough to understand what is being said, but the actual photos would have been a much better addition. (Most of the photos referenced are well known and can easily be located online.) It would have been revealing to know why no photos were included.

Many insights regarding war and photography are put forth. Some seemed like just well explained common sense, others were revealing. As a photographer, one concept that was mentioned, I found very profound. I've often wondered why photography hasn't been replaced by video in the manner in which photography displaced painting. Although video certainly dominates the entertainment industry, photos haven't disappeared and they continue to thrive. Sontag asserts that a photograph is the basic visual unit of memory. We remember in terms of photos much easier that entire video sequences. Certain events in our life, for example, the Apollo 11 moon landing, are recalled through the photographs we saw of those events. Although you will probably want a video of your wedding, it is certain there will be photos. For that reason, there will always be a place for photographs. In fact, you might have noticed during the recent coverage of the war in Iraq, many of the television news channels would play sequences of still photos. That is how we remember visually, in still images.

My only complaint is the book's size, 126 pages, seemed small compared to the cost. Also the font and spacing are a bit large (remember that trick when writing school papers?). I had the feeling that some greedy marketing person was in the loop somewhere. Once I began to read though, my disappointment with book's size went away. I recommend this thoughtful work and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

When Susan Sontag prepared and wrote her newest book REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS, she probably did not know that at the time of its release to the public the world would once again be at war. Sontag remains one of our more inportant American philosphers and commentators and this book addresses the representaton of pain, war, agony, and injustice as captured by painters from Velasquez, Goya, Callot and others to photographers Matthew Brady, Capa, Bourke-White et al. While she sees it as the responsibility for these people to capture the horrors of war in order that 'we' as observors will be informed and thus never allow such things to continue, she also now addresses how important it is for us to not have these images edited from public consumption - a very current feature that we are now seeing (or not seeing) in the TV and newspaper versions of the Iraqi war. Sontag gives evidence that some of the more sensational photographs from the Civil War and the Vietnam War were actually staged; corpses were added or altered or assasinations were set for the photojournalist much as the paintings of the 19th century were modified to gain impact. She shows that the horrors if the Nazi concentration camps were best captured by the untrained camera rather than the images made famous by Bourke-White et al, manipulating the light and position of vantage to play on the message instead of simply reporting it.

She stimulates our anger when she reports such incidences during the Gulf War as "American television viewers weren't allowed to see footage acquired by NBC (which the network then declined to run) of what superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi conscripts who, having fled Kuwait City at the end of the war, on February 27, were carpet bombed with explosives, napalm, radioactive DU (depleted uranium)rounds, and cluster bombs as they headed north, in convoys and on foot, on the road to Basra, Iraq - a slaughter notoriously described by one American oficer as a 'turkey shoot'". She shows that atrocities in foreign places are 'more acceptable' to view than cloistered photographic documents of our own history of the abuse of slaves, the poor, AIDS victims here in this country. We can construct Museums for the reminders of the German atrocities of genocide, crematoriums, starvation etc, but we do not have a single Museum to remind us of the American abuse of African American slaves (lynchings, beatings, prisons etc).

There are many quotes to highlight; "It is because a war, any war, doesn't seem as if it can be stopped that people become less responsive to the horrors. Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do - but who is that 'we'? - and nothing 'they' can do either - and who are 'they'? - then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic."

Sontag urges us to be more in tune, more involved, more sensitive to the visual images that report the pain of others. "We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right." This is the powerful last paragraph in this intensely moving book. It is a shame that some of the photographs and paintings to which she refers could not have been inserted in this book, but even without the visuals, this is a book that reveals myriad secrets and truths. Highly recommended reading.

The idea of "the best of the Oxford American" brings out a lot of expectations. This magazine has been the home for a lot of special writing. This book provides some of those moments. I especially enjoyed the narrative of the small town photographer burdened by the unwelcome insights of his coworkers and the blank misunderstandings of his Disney World roadtripping friends. I think that the criticism by Tony Earley would have made just as good an introduction to this book as did Rick Bragg's more metaphorical observation that this writing is "heavy on the salt."
I would recommend this book for anyone that wants to read about the South as it actually is -- unique, history-addled, and genuinely "salty".

This collection of works--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reportage--by the biggest names writing in or about the South is a real treasure. For those already familiar with "the New Yorker of the South" it will remind those what have made the magazine so special for so many years, and for those who have not discovered the magazine, BOA will be a great introduction to the best in Southern belles lettres. The book, like the magazine itself, is a little trad and not good on commenting on the lives of blacks, gays/lesbians, and immigrants to the South, but there is much for everyone to enjoy here.

Beautiful book. Love the sketches coupled with the selected quotes and excerpts. Makes you feel like you're there, through the ages. A nice, before bed or coffee table book.

When does a city lose its "realness" and start to become a Disneyland-type attraction? Could we say that when the number of visitors or tourists exceeds its regular number of inhabitants, then it risks this demise ? This book allows us to see through the eyes of some of this and last century's greats; Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus etc. It's the best guide book around if you want to discover why Paris became great before crass commercialism invaded to meet the demands of the perinneal waves of tourists.....

in this book of short essays, cioran uses irony and paradox to achieve an absolute black humor. life is described as mind looking at itself and finding no significant content. death, the final exit, is a betrayer in that contemplating it leads one to wish to affirm life once more, yet without knowledge of what in life can be affirmed. many key words in the book begin with "a": abulia, aporia, askesis, ataraxia, and acedia define cioran's mood. perhaps the most brilliant essay, "beyond the novel," informs us that the novel is either dead or dying, in any case in agony, since both "character" and "meaning" no longer signify anything. here art mirrors life, where certitudes are merely functioning lies and the only goal is a futility achieved by severing oneself from those lies. the curious thing is that humor shines through all this, and while i don't find this book as funny as others of cioran's, particulary his books of very short aphorisms, there were still some laughs: "...at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace," for example.

Contorted at the end of a struggle, like a slovenly cat no longer able to fight her revolutions, it is an indication of Cioran's aspiration to diffuse sound upon silence, that a philosophy where existence disgruntles consciousness into submission is its most prevailing feature. What must be done? Cioran, that final seer unable to dislodge his lucidity: knowing indeed that lucidity is a gift available to those whose lives have already ended, and like Diogenes in his tub, he winces at the absent sky above him. Desertion, the epigram of self-consciousness and the incipient dawn that is reason: Cioran is symptomatic of a resignation in regard to reason's vacuity - a distant light in the façade of reasonable progress. What must be done? Furrowing the fortunes for ruin, we owe him our spirits. But apocalypse that is breathing, perhaps we have not done enough to oblige Cioran's task - is there not a sediment of reason still left in your goblet human! Exile, the fortune of the vagabond, for him reason is trace of nostalgia. No, it is all together too clear: it will be the task of our present generation to dissolve gradually until the sediment of spurious aspirations has been exhausted. We are no longer engaged in a struggle with reason, for such ends are absent. To regard reason as an anathema, to scorn it as an obsolete tradition adhered to by either servile conservatives or pious harlequins, and to embrace decline as an antidote to such retrospective tendencies - that will be our progression. Decline and its organic counterpart decay are virtues into which we ought to submit. Nietzsche is right about the ruinous: like an orchestra at the edge of a precipice, we need to finally be pushed into the void. But you wince, unable to sacrifice yourself for a future generation founded in the hallucinogenics of the nocturnal reverie. Very well! But know in advance that existence, the trace of sulphur in an otherwise familiar metropolis, is a tincture only available to those who have gargled on their own negation - had Cioran tasted it? Unable to answer this question, we perform an exegesis on the text, hoping the hermeneutics of hopelessness will exhume gold, hoping the allusions written in sand will reveal a hidden hieroglyphic. But such elusive ideals, such pewter-encased goblets, are only to be found in dissolution and to that we must revere before timidity beckons.

I'll put this simply: if you are what we in the art world call "artsy-fartsy," you will enjoy this book, as the writing is poetic and full of descriptive emotion. But if you're just looking for a good read, pass this one on by. It will confuse the living daylights out of you. But if you must, do some back ground work on the author and maybe a little on the subject herself. Good luck!

Atemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1598, is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of art, though very little is known about her life. The daughter of a painter herself, Artemisia painted beautiful scenes of the women of Roman and biblical history even though she could neither read nor write.

Artemisia had, to put it mildly, a turbulent personal life. She was discredited in a rape trial, betrayed by her own father and abandoned by her husband. Her professional life, however, was far different. She was the first woman admitted to the prestigious Florentine Academy; she established a successful art school in Naples; she raised her daughter on her own and supported herself financially during a time when a woman's life was defined only by home, husband, children and the Church.

Although the above is about the sum total of all that's known about Artemisia Gentileschi's life, writer, Anna Banti, managed to flesh out these bare bones facts into one of the triumphs of 20th century Italian literature.

"Artemisia" is definitely not a biography or even a fictionalized one. It is not a historical work; in fact, the setting of this book is definitely ahistorical. It consists of an amazing dialogue between the author and Artemisia. There are, as way I see it, three levels in this book: the experiences of Artemisia, the experiences of the author and a blending of the two, to make a very fascinating third.

The very essence of this book consists of Artemisia's travels, all made for the sake of her art. Included are the young Artemisia's traumatic experiences in Rome, her marriage, her years of success in Naples, her long and undoubtedly arduous journey to England and back again to her native Italy.

One of the things that makes this book so powerful is Banti's constant authorial intrusion, a device that would weaken (or destroy) more conventional novels. Moving back and forth from the thrid to the first person, Banti holds fascinating conversations with Artemisia. This leads to a captivating, but very complex, narrative. As the dialogue between author and subject intensifies, Banti complicates matters even further.

In 1944, when the first version of "Artemisia" was nearly complete, events of the war caused it to be destroyed. The "Artemisia" of the first version constantly intrudes on the "Artemisia" of the second version, however. Confusing? No, not really. Banti is far too good a writer for that. Complex? Yes. And lyrical and skillful and fragile.

Despite the fact that this is not a historical novel, it is highly atmospheric. There are no detailed descriptions to weigh down the weightless quality of Banti's lyricism, but there are many vivid images of 17th century Rome, Naples, Florence, France.

No matter how fast you usually read, "Artemisia" is a novel that should be read slowly. This is a demanding book that requires much concentration on the part of the reader, but this concentration will be richly rewarded.

There is a vague, circular quality about this book and, in a sense, it ends where it began. In reality, however, nothing is known about Artemisia Gentileschi's life after her return to Italy from England.

This book is complex, intricate, self-reflective and extremely lyrical. Although it has an ephemeral, gossamer quality, it succeeds wonderfully in bringing Artemisia Gentileschi to life in a vivid and wonderful manner.

This is an extremely well-written and moving account of Artemisia. It is a modernist novel and is a dialogue between the the narrator and Artemisia. I highly recomend it.

I was browsing through a bookstore, waiting for my kids to get done with Boy Scouts, not looking for anything in particular, when I spied "Women" on a shelf near an easy chair. The plain cover of this large book intrigued me so I started to skim through the book. After about a minute, I sat down and spent 45 more minutes going through the book, page by page. I had never heard of the book and only vaguely know the authors from popular culture, but I'm hooked now. As a busy working mother I don't usually have the time to spend enjoying fine art, photography, or coffee table books. I have to say that this is an inspiring piece of work that had me so engaged in some of the photos that I conjured up my own life stories for these women in my mind and thought about what their real life is like, how to meet them, etc. Annie's photographs really spoke to me.

I heartily recommend this book -- it's food for the soul. I only regret that I paid so much for the book that night (I had to give it to my best friend the next day).

I'd give Leibovitz four stars for the sole reason that she tackled "WOMEN" as a concept.

How does one portray "WOMEN" completely? It's as daunting and impossible as stating that one can portray "ETERNITY" or "LIFE" or "TRUTH" in their fullest senses.

There are those that have argued that Leibovitz's book gives preferential treatment to some subjects, while demeaning or diminishing others. For example, the photos of famous women are often glossy, flattering, and classically "pretty," while the photos of non-famous women are more often stark, harsh, and jolting to the senses.

I do not disagree.

What comes into question, however, is our definition of beauty. Society tells us that Drew Barrymore sprawled on the ground is beautiful. A group of coal-blackened female miners is not. That's society talking, not Annie Leibovitz - and certainly not the individual reader/viewer.

Instead, I choose to think that what Leibovitz was trying to do with "WOMEN" was to challenge these stereotypes and expectations. On every page, she attempts to portray the essence of the women she is photographing. For a Hollywood actress, that may very well mean a glamorous, "pretty" setting. For Helene Grimaud, it's a piano. For Wendy Suzuki, it's a scientific laboratory, and for Lenda Murray, it's a Ms. Olympia costume. Instead of labeling and sorting these images, (as society is often apt to do), Leibovitz presents them one after another in a colossal photographic accomplishment she calls "WOMEN."

No, she doesn't manage to express the concept completely. I doubt if anyone could. But she does manage to challenge, enlighten, and empower her readers/viewers with her portrayal of the diverse women she selected to photograph.

For me, that in itself is beautiful.

WOMEN makes a powerful statement on many levels. On the most obvious level these are great photographs taken by a master that are beautifully displayed in full-page and two-page formats. 63 black and white and 59 color photographs from Annie Leibovitz, who is one of our most famous and popular portrait photographers, are a visual treat.

Each picture is accompanied by a simple caption: the subject's name, profession, and where the picture was taken. All seem to have been taken in 1999, the year the book was published. The captions define the subjects while the pictures open a window into their world.

Leibovitz makes a statement on the status and condition of women in our society in this collection of photographs. This Leibovitz does well. She is a photographer of the rich and famous and these women are well represented in this collection. There are 12 actresses, 7 artists, 6 musicians, 6 writers, 4 performance artists, 3 First Ladies, 3 CEOs, 2 poets, 2 dancers, 2 Supreme Court justices, 2 comedians, 2 models, a general, a Secretary of State, a Cherokee chief, an opera singer, and an astronaut represented in the book. But everyday working women are also well represented. A waitress, a maid, a dragster driver, a police woman, a sewing machine operator, 2 teachers, soldiers, coal miners, farmers, restaurant customers, debutantes, cheerleaders, doctors, scientists, and activists also share these pages. Athletes are also well represented. Young women (students, a choir, and all-girl gang members) share the pages with older women. Sisters are photographed together and mothers with their children. What is revealed is the diversity and richness of women.

A set of photographs at the end of the book shows two views of each of four Las Vegas showgirls. Each is pictured in color in their stage costumes opposite a black and white photo of them out of costume. The theme of these seems to be the comparison of the natural vs. the adorned or crafted image of woman. All the other women in the book are represented by one image.

At the end of the book there are six pages where a brief biography of each subject is given. These are valuable background for each picture giving us a better look into the lives of the subjects.

The essay by Susan Sontag discusses the meaning of photographing women and the messages received by viewing pictures of women. She devotes a lot of her discussion to the role of female beauty in society. Its a wonderful essay to read and to accompany these photographs. These images of the beauty, dignity, and grace of modern women captured by one of our master photographers are inspiring and thought provoking. Indulge yourself and spend some time with this great book.

I can understand the first reviewer's comment about not being able to get past the beginning of this book. I could not tolerate the dialog without quotation marks and the jumping from place to place and person to person. It was difficult to follow the time line and characters from the start. I will not give this book another attempt.

I read this book three times and each time it seemed like a new novel. After my first read, I thought I'd read a love story, after the other two, I was captivated by history and technique. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the Queen of Naples is none other than the sister of the recently guillotined, Marie Antoinette. Both Austrian women were sent to foreign lands to reign as queens. The contempt of the people, actually displaced subversion toward their inept spouses, was mismanaged by both sisters. Both, failed to transcend the 'foreign' cloak. They had none of the scheming, political savy of their mother, Maria Theresa. The Royal Court of Napels is impossibly crude. We are introduced to the maloderous, strainings and grunts of the sovereign's daily bowel movements, to which Ambassador, Lord Hamilton, bestower of the title of the book, is honored by a position closest to the specially constructed raised,'throne.' The dull-witted, physicaly repulsive monarch, besides keeping his wife chronically pregnant, with offspring numbering in the teens, has one other passion, which he indulges with equal lust. That is his daily 'hunting' of hundreds of animals, which are dragged and thrown in the streets and there left to rot. A self-indulgent glutton; those many hungry subjects receive nothing from the daily slaughter.
Lord and Lady Hamilton are the sole intimates of the monarchs, despite her Ladyship's low origins, evening performances and love for spirits. In the glorious Naples, these two British subjects live in marked splendor surrounded by Hamilton's obsession with 'treasures' he unearths from his obsession with Vesuvious.
The love affair that is ignited when Nelson's fleet comes to rest in the bay is one of the great passions of history and the details are satisfying to romantic readers. The years pass and Emma grows fat and more frequently drunk. Nelson loses his sight in one eye and an arm, but continues to be victorious on the sea. Love is blind, the two are consumed with the perfection of the other. Lady Hamilton continues to sing and 'pose' but she is fat and bloated, her voice lost. The British hero does not follow orders, stays too long, and returns to transport his friends and the royal family when outbreaks of violence threaten their lives.
Human and volcanic, the lava flow of war and destruction, the end of a kind of civilization flows into the equally bloody sea. Vesuvious is the only lord, he issues warnings and humanity at play must reckon with their ultimate mortality. Love and civilizations die, and who among us are equally dormant, in our fear, in our passions? The Volcano Lover is an intensely vital and artistically flawless work. It is a cautionary and thereby completely modern tale of the fate of nations and individuals who fail to honor the Gods.

Susan Sontag's THE VOLCANO LOVER (1992) is about Sir William Hamiliton, for decades British Embassador to the Court of Naples, his young wife Emma (who clearly was not of our class) and her lover, the Great Hero, Horatio Nelson. The three of them were bound together in a very odd relationship. The kind, elderly Hamilton had a brilliant aesthetic eye and was a connoisseur of beautiful antiquities. He assembled a great collection, much of which is now in the British Museum, including the sublime 1st century Roman cameo glass vessel, the PORTLAND VASE. THE VOLCANO LOVER is also about Vesuvius, a still active volcano which periodically puts on a show, and about passion, acquisitiveness, beauty, romance, corruption and lots more. The first three-quarters of this dense novel is rendered mostly in the present tense: the style is quite formal and slightly archaic: the voice is cool, uninflected, detached - but not unfeeling. For the attentive reader, the effect is hypnotic. Sontag is an admirably careful, spare writer. Her distinctive, emphatic rhythms are always evident, but never obtrusive.

"Epitaph of a Small Winner" is NOT the title of this book. The original title, "Memorias Posthumas de Bras Cubas," can only be accurately translated as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." Why did they give this edition of the book such a weird title? I don't know--probably for the same reason that they didn't translate it well! I read this translation of the book, because the foreward by Susan Sontag led me to believe it would be the best. But though it wasn't awful, it was sufficiently awkward that I had to force my way through it. Granted, I enjoyed the book, because Machado de Assis is a superb master of comic narrative, inverting into parody just about every literary convention of his nineteenth century. But think how much MORE I would have enjoyed it if I had known that there was another translation of the book, which, far from awkward, was masterful and elegant, by the acclaimed translator Gregory Rabassa (of One Hundred Years of Solitude fame). Also to its credit, that other translation correctly renders the title as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." So don't make the mistake I made: don't waste your time with any other editions, like the lame-ass one on this page. (I make due apologies to Susan Sontag.) Move your buns over to the page for "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." And relax! Machado de Assis was an ingenious author, prefiguring such diverse talents as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, John Barth, and even Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. If you like them, you're going to like him.

Quoting D.H. Lawrence is his review of "Moby Dick", "this is one of the strangest and most wonderful books I've ever read"

Well, maybe not that wonderful.

"Epitaph of a Small Winner" was the second book of Machado de Assis' collection that I read, the first being "Dom Casmurro."

This novel innaugurated Realism in Brazil, at a time when most writers were trying to break away from Romanticism. It is a strange book, narrated in first person by the deceased himself, Bras Cubas. I would not consider it easy to read. Some of its passages are pretty hard on the reader, specially if you read it in Portuguese (as I did). I recall having to go back in the chapter to understand what Machado was trying to say.

"Epitaph of A Small Winner" is required reading in most Brazilian schools. I believe it shouldn't be, since some of its language and style is a bit incomprehensive for teenagers. I read it for the first time when I was 29, so that might give you a picture of what I am trying to say.

Machado de Assis is regarded as "Brazil's finest writer." I do not agree with this point of view, since the country has many fantastic writers, such as Jose de Alencar and Aluizio Azevedo. Rating Assis as "the greatest" would be, at least, overrating him

The bottom line is that if you want to get acquainted with early 20th Century Brazilian literature, this book is a good start. Maybe you might want to investigate this South American country's writers further, and make your own mind if Machado is really the finest

Brazil has produced a number of wonderful novels. I can name "Rebellion in the Backlands" by Euclides da Cunha, "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" by João Guimaraes Rosa, "The Tent of Miracles" and "Gabriela; Clove and Cinnamon" by Jorge Amado, and "The Three Marias" by Rachel de Queiroz, but these are only a few. You have to add to this list at least a couple novels by J. M. Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest writer of the 19th century, (he died in 1908) and one of the greatest writing anywhere at that time. EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER would be on that list for sure. I can hear you say, "Can you really compare this fellow to writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola, Melville, Austen, or Eliot ?" My answer would be "yes" and "no". That's because I like definite answers. Sorry, just kidding. I would say "no" because Machado de Assis doesn't write like any of the others. His style is unique and his choice of perspective also. He is the opposite of a realist. He never hits you over the head with any serious descriptive narrative. His characters speak throughout. So, how could you compare him effectively with the others ? But, I would say "yes" because he is a master of subtle story telling, of wit, satire, and irony. This novel, like his others, does not resemble any other work. He is certainly among the greats.

Braz Cubas, the narrator of the novel, is already dead when we meet him. So he has plenty of time to tell about his life. As he notes, "death does not age one"; he can afford to ramble a bit. What we receive, through his life story, is a satirized view of the indolence and lack of intellectual rigor of the Brazilian upper class of the time. We read the life of a man who did nothing at all in 64 years. Or almost nothing. He didn't study, he didn't work, he didn't marry, and he didn't have any direction. He became a parliamentary deputy through connections and did absolutely nothing while there. He enjoyed the physical pleasures of life, he envied others, he had ambitions that he did next to nothing to fulfill. He failed at nearly everything, then at last he croaked. The reason why he feels (from beyond the grave) that he wasn't such a loser after all is the author's final bit of irony. Machado de Assis employs his usual style---160 short chapters in 223 pages---with the title of each chapter used to spice up the progress of the novel, which in turn is full of irony, with, whimsy, and very clever writing, full of ingenious metaphors. You cannot say that this is a "page turner" in any conventional sense. It is rather philosophical, but as the author says, "a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful...." To quote from chapter 124, which is all of 9 lines long---"To hop from a character study to an epitaph may be realistic and even commonplace, but the reader probably would not have taken refuge in this book if he had not wished to escape the realistic and the commonplace." That is my recommendation to you. Escape both the realistic and the commonplace and read this book. You won't regret it.