Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir

I could echo what Stephen Nimer or Jerome Groopman or Fred Appelbaum said, though I certainly must have gotten a good bit wrong.

A fairly random sentence from Swimming in a sea of death. A son's memoir, the book in which David Rieff describes the final nine months of Susan Sontag's, his mother, suffering and death from cancer.

Very little is said about Susan Sontag. She is the object of this journalistic report about her death. Instead of a throng of anonymous doctors around the bed, the author names them, all. The result is a dry and dull description, full of people who do not really matter.

Susan Sontag's journals, which are now being published, with the first of three volumes having appeared, is very careful about disclosing personal show more details about herself. It is very unlikely she would have approved of this type of memoir.

Swimming in a sea of death brings Susan Sontag down to the level of mortals. It shows that in death, we are all equal. The memoir is a gruesome read, that shows us that doctors are, in fact, still powerless in the face of many forms of cancer. show less

He needed more distance before trying to write about this. He's still too close, too devastated, too guilty. While it may have been therapeutic for him, I can't imagine Susan Sontag wanting these images of her suffering and intransigent clinging to the last shards of her life to define her now. It was well-written, but too perseverative and ruminative to be truly good literature. Harsh, but true for me.

Una disperazione totale: non ho retto.

Fehlkauf, sagt mir nichts. Hab's wieder verkauft