The Cavalier, an art dealer and British ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is obsessed with three things: collecting beautiful and rare pieces of art, watching Vesuvius breathe and rumble, and having a relationship with his nephew's former lover. I know, it's an odd beginning. When the Cavalier's nephew, Charles, grows tired of his mistress he simply sends her to live with his uncle once the Cavalier became a lonely widower. How do you learn to love a stranger? What do you do when that love matures into devotion and passion falls by the wayside? Beyond being a story about relationships and circumstances, The Volcano Lover is also the love story of art, war, and devotion to a life well lived with passion.
There is a cleverness to Sontag's writing. Most of the story is told in the third person with touches of first person narrative sprinkled in. Is that Sontag offering personal tidbits about herself? Who is this off-camera speaker? In the very last section of Volcano Lover the Cavalier, his wife, his mother-in-law, and the Queen all offer first person perspectives on their lives with one another. Both the Cavalier and his mother-in-law are careful to never reveal the Cavalier's wife real name (modeled after Emma Hamilton). No one mentions the hero's name (Lord Nelson in real life), either. ( )

O amante do vulcão, terceiro romance de Susan Sontag, incorpora contradições no mínimo instigantes. Trata-se de uma história realista, moderna em sua polifonia de vozes narrativas. Nela se agitam personagens históricos desentranhados da fase heróica do período romântico: o final do século XVIII. Sir William Hamilton, embaixador britânico no Reino das Duas Sicílias, sua segunda mulher, Emma, humilde porém belíssima cortesã inglesa guindada à posição de confidente e conselheira de uma rainha, e o maior herói marítimo da Inglaterra, lord Nelson, são os míticos protagonistas desta narrativa histórico-ficcional. A compulsão de redesenhá-los em escala humana, imperativo tipicamente ensaístico, só fez aumentar a voltagem dramática das peripécias em que se vêem envolvidos. Sem dúvida, temos aqui uma história apaixonante sobre pessoas apaixonadas. "É um livro de mestre, um belo espetáculo: vasto, colorido, interessante, e que faz pensar."Roberto Schwarz"Um romance de idéias passional e muitas vezes radical que proporciona todos os antigos prazeres do romance histórico tradicional."New York Times

Teenage servant girl goes to work for dodgy sex therapist then becomes model for fashionable painter. First Aristocratic Lover dumps her when she becomes pregnant; Second Lover is kinder, but also dumps her when the chance of a wealthy heiress comes up - he gets rid of her by shipping her off as a gift to his recently-widowed uncle, the ambassador in Naples. The uncle likes her, gives her the Eliza Doolittle treatment and marries her after a decent interval. She becomes a confidant of the Queen (Marie-Antoinette's sister!) and they are all set to live happily ever after, but then there's a Revolution in France, and a Wounded British Admiral arrives in town and has to be nursed back to health...

The real Emma, Lady Hamilton, is a character that only the most brazen writer of historical romance would have dared to invent - her whole life reads like a plot-summary in Name that Book. So maybe it's not surprising that Susan Sontag chooses to write about her from a slightly oblique point of view, taking as her central character Sir William Hamilton, whom we now remember only as a famous cuckold, but who in his own time was known as an art collector, archaeologist, and avid student of the moods of Vesuvius. And who seems to have done a pretty good job representing British interests at the notoriously raffish and corrupt Neapolitan court.

Sontag also messes about quite freely with the conventions of historical fiction - she keeps period authenticity to the necessary minimum and is quite happy to step into frame from time to time and explain something from the point of view of the modern New Yorker. Although the narrative mostly sticks very closely to recorded history, at one point we suddenly realise that we've drifted seamlessly into a story from another medium that we know to be fictional. And as well as inserting her own caustic comments on the actions of her characters and the presumed reactions of her readers, Sontag doesn't mind bringing dead people in as auxiliary narrators (the last word in the book, unexpectedly, goes to the poet and revolutionary journalist Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel).

I won't say that this was better than I expected, because I expected a lot from Sontag anyway, but it is a book that managed to surprise me and keep my interest, despite being based on a set of events I thought I was pretty familiar with to start with. ( )

Excellent historical fiction; and an entertaining examination of the period of the royalist revolt of the Kingdom of Naples against republican France. The three principals in this novel are drawn out slowly as characters for whom we can sympathize. The final chapter allows each to speak for her/himself, as though each is beyond the story.
Susan Sontag saves her commendation for the learned and brave Eleanora Pimentel Fonseca, who edited the principal newspaper of the short-lived Parthenopian Republic in Naples. She compares her with the three main characters, Sir William Hamilton, Lady Emma Hamilton and Admiral Lord Nelson who sought glory or well-being and who did not care to consider the injustices that their pursuit of wealth and refinement inflicted on so many.

Series of three mini biographies in which the main characters are (even literally) entwined with each other. First profile of three is most convincing. Sontag's detail is so rich that she seems to have captured the Napoleonic revolutionary era.