The Restless Mind

You'd expect a compilation of essays and speeches put together after Susan Sontag's death to have its dreary moments. Of course, she won her share of prizes and addressed plenty of audiences. She was also a restless figure who liked to keep signaling her position, wherever it happened to be. Yet her approach was fiercely economical, and this collection, which she was working on at the time of her death, is as succinct and absorbing as any of her books, even if a lot of its content is familiar.

At the Same Time consists of five published essays, five prefaces and introductions, five addresses and one interview. Among the writers whose work Sontag introduced are Leonid Tsypkin, the Russian author of Summer in Baden-Baden; Halldór Laxness, the Icelandic Nobel winner; and Victor Serge, the heroic revolutionary born in Belgium. All three are revisited here. The stand-alone essays include "An Argument About Beauty," first published in Daedalus, and her controversial reaction to 9/11, published in The New Yorker. The lectures and speeches, the most discursive and in many ways the most rewarding of these pieces, give a strong sense of Sontag the celebrity, bedecked with ribbons and rosettes, on the hoof from one county fair to the next. Jerusalem, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Cape Town. They also show how well she rose to public occasions and how insistently she felt those occasions should rise to her.

The title of the collection was taken from an address she gave in South Africa and chosen "as a tribute to the polyphonic quality of this book." Perhaps the editors, Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, were worried that the choice of material is all over the place, or eager to assure us that Sontag doesn't drone on. It isn't and she doesn't. David Rieff, her son, is more confident.

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