Moser Benjamin: Sontag - život i djelo

Benjamin Moser: Sontag - life and work

This extremely demanding publishing venture, with over seven hundred pages and two blocks of photographs in a hardcover, translated by Senada Kreso, brings an indelible portrait of one of the greatest intellectuals of the modern world. Benjamin Moser won the Pulitzer Prize for this unparalleled biography, the first major presentation of an incomparable literary greatness after her death. The 2020 Pulitzer Prize committee in the biography category described the book with the words: An authoritatively constructed work told with poise and grace, which, in addition to addiction, sexual doubts and unstable enthusiasm, records the writer's genius and humanity. No writer symbolizes the American twentieth century as much as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, praised and hated, a suburban girl who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of how to write about art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, fame and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and fascism, as well as Freudianism and communism and Americanism, which is an irreplaceable key to understanding modern culture. She was present when the Cuban Revolution began, when the Berlin Wall fell; it was present in Vietnam when the American bombs were falling, in Israel in the middle of the war, in Sarajevo under siege. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the seductive call of money - and when many succumbed to it. No writer has known so many worlds; no serious writer has had so many glamorous loves. The book Sontag brings exactly these stories, while analyzing the engagement and work on which Sontag's reputation is based. She explores the painful insecurities behind a strong public face—a failed relationship, a struggle with her own sexuality—that fueled and undermined her writing. It also shows her attempts to respond to the cruelty and absurdities of a misguided country, as well as her conviction that devotion to high culture is in itself activism. With hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo - along with almost a hundred photographs - Sontag is the first book based on the author's archival materials not available to the public, as well as on conversations with many people who have never spoken about Sontag before, including Annie Leibovitz. This is the final portrait – a great American novel in the form of a biography.