The Volcano Lover: A Romance (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
The book is so close to great. . . I was reading Sontag's Paris Review interview afterward, which is fascinating, obviously--at 13, she was apparently reading the journals of Gide--and I think it opened me up to the flaw in the book, which is structural. She had in mind this balletic structure modeled on the four temperaments--melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, although the last two are more like epilogues. First, Sontag gives us an oddly sad story about this quiet aristocrat living in Naples (melancholic) and then the action of the book, his whirlwind romance with a younger woman and the revolt in Naples and the British hero who saves the royal court(sanguine). While these parts aren't necessarily at odds, and both are honestly excellent, I'm not sure that they compliment each other.Let me put it another way. A review below says that the emotional heart of the story is Nelson's actions during the Revolution. But Nelson's not even present for most of this book, and the Revolution is eventually only a minor point in a much longer narrative. Or you could say that the focus is really the title character, but he's got little to do with the Revolution, and Sontag does become noticeably less interested in him when Nelson enters the picture. At the same time, the lens isn’t quite wide enough to give us a satisfying picture of life in Naples at the end of the 18th Century, or even of court life there. The Volcano Lover is about more than the Cavalier, but not quite about enough more to be satisfying. To quote the cliche, the whole is a little less than the sum of the parts.But those parts! I'll defend this thing from almost all of its detractors. A common criticism is that Sontag doesn’t have sympathy for any of her characters, which is bullshit. I respect the Cavalier, who is truly a gentle human being and a lover of knowledge, a rare and estimable quality. (Compare him to his nephew Charles, a character that Sontag really doesn’t respect.) Then there’s the Cavalier’s wives, both of whom we are asked to sympathize with, the second wife throughout and the first wife only at the novel’s end (a result of the novel’s opening focusing narrowly on the Cavalier). Even the Hero is seen as something of the ultimate romantic lover, putting his career at risk, continually, for this obese former prostitute. As for the narrative intrusions by Sontag, they’re not all that common, especially after the book’s first hundred pages or so, and they’re usually fascinating. Who could refuse a two-page digression on the nineteen year-old who shattered the Cavalier’s greatest treasure, the Portland Vase, in 1851, and what says about male desire and great art? Consider too that it contains paragraphs like this: “Torch a temple. Pulverize a vase. Slash a Venus. Smash a perfect ephebe’s toes.”The Volcano Lover has period pomp, gorgeous prose, a satirical edge, perhaps the most violent mob scene I’ve ever read and an under-recognized warmth. I can imagine literally everyone I know reading this thing and enjoying it. Which isn’t to say that they would. As the Cavalier would say, other individuals so often disappoint.
Perhaps I should start with a comment by Evelyn Toynton in COMMENTARY, Nov. 1992, right after the book was published. This is just a short section of a well written critique:"But in the end, apart from some vivid images of street scenes in Naples, of a rampaging mob, of Sir William’s pathetic pet monkey, and of Emma dancing, the strongest impression one takes away from this book is of the suffocatingly humorless presence of Susan Son-tag.She has become by now a virtual icon of Mind, the ultimate “glamorous intellectual,” as Vanity Fair puts it. Yet her chief strength may lie in nothing much more than the ability to assume a voice of authority at all times. In the case of The Volcano Lover, what this produces is a solemn rather than a serious novel, in which portentous observations are made in the tone of someone offering a glimpse of the Holy Grail."It is that cold, distant, "voice of authority" narrator that made this a very hard book for me to read. Strangely, that voice works best when describing the volcano itself--but the people in the book remain puppets and Sontag comes right out, at the very end of the book, and states how she despises them. In the last 4 pages of the book, the "voice" is that of Eleonora Pimentel as she is about to be hanged for her part in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Those 4 pages are simply amazing. Eleonora ends the book by saying:"But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all."So perhaps Sontag deliberately set up William and Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson to be self-indulgent puppets--but I have little patience with authors who detest their own characters. If Sontag had written a diatribe against wealth and aristocats, she should have used her famous essay form. And if she IS an advocate for the poor, why write this novel without bringing them into the picture at all?I have to admit I skimmed this book rapidly--but those last 4 pages stopped me in my tracks. Those pages brought the book from one star to two for me.
What do You think about The Volcano Lover: A Romance (2004)?
Well I give up. I'm on page 172 and I can feel the lava hardening around my ankles as I read this book. Sontag's style is so thick she makes Iris Murdoch feel like a waltz in the park.I was so looking forward to learning more about this unusual relationship between Hamilton, his wife and Nelson but it is almost like she's avoiding the subject (which is perhaps how Hamilton handled it). Anyways with thousands of other books waiting on my shelves I can't get bogged down in something that so politely avoids its main topic. At the same time I have to say that there were many musings within this book that were well worth the effort.
—Catherine
While reading, i intended on giving it 4 starts but after turning the last page all I wanted to do was go back to the beginning and start all over. That feeling doesn't happen often for me and so I think it merits to enter the 5-star realm. Reading the Volcano Lover makes you travel way back, into the lives, minds and emotions of its main characters. A journey not only in time but space and age. I don't know how accurate it was to the "historical truth" portrayed and frankly I don't really care: it is a novel, after all, so it is entitled to its own vision of events. Aren't stories, however real, fictionalized in some form or another?Susan Sontag has slowly entered my favourite authors/thinkers list and this book simply cemented that position. I was a bit afraid of finding the writing too high-minded and intellectualized, as some say, but maybe because I'm used to her way of phrasing and thinking, it didn't seem one bit like that. I thoroughly enjoyed it, from first page to last. And I just might read it again, sometime soon.
—Sara
This is an exhilarating read more for its encyclopedic if kaleidoscopically shifting views of a passionately intelligent and acquisitive Cavaliere. It matters little that the novel is based on the real-life triangle of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Lord Nelson. What counts is the formal yet lyrical beauty of the writing, the ever-changing impressions of a man in love with not just a woman but the world of objects and art. Almost mystical in the revelry of its cataloguing of things and experience, it is at once a contradictory celebration of the primacy of empiricism and the transcendence from the mundane that only an elevated mind can realize in the accumulation of life. This is one book that epitomizes the philosophy of gestalt aesthetics: that a thing of beauty is greater than the sum of all its parts.
—Antonmyles
