– Customer review on 27/01/2011

For me, Under the Sign of Saturn (Sontag's third collection of essays) is one of her most enthralling books. The collection is a series of portraits of various saturnine authors, intellectuals, artists and film makers (of the likes of Barthes, Artaud, Paul Goodman, Elias Canetti and the infamous Leni Riefenstahl). Most are models of the sort of mind Sontag admires; which is to say, they are thinkers she regards as her heroes (except for Riefenstahl who is for her an anti-hero, an example of what she does not admire, which amounts to the same thing). What she may be said to be offering us is a phenomenology of thought, a romance of the mind, a case study of their style of thinking and sensibility or way of looking at the world. By following the labours of their thought, and the way they shape ideas, Sontag is tracing the way they gave birth to a revolution in thinking, and to new modes of thought (like the death of the author and the theatre of cruelty, for instance). For Sontag the exemplary modern artist and thinker is a solitary or saturnine personality--a temperament she admires while also being disturbed by it. The best example of such a temperament would be Walter Benjamin--himself given to melancholy, to being too analytic, serious and solitary (parts of his personality which mirror Sontag's). Thus the portraits are at the same time a picture of who Susan Sontag is too. She shares with Canetti his hatred of cruelty, with Barthes his aesthetic sensibility, with Benjamin his poetics of melancholy. If you want to be intellectually stimulated then this is the book for you.