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Books like Death Kit

Death Kit

2002Susan Sontag

4.5/5

synopsis: a man in the midst of a meltdown. his broken mind encounters two paths: a subway to death and a tunnel of love. which will he choose? are both paths the same? poor Diddy! the man has led a hollow life. following a divorce and the recognition of said hollowness comes a suicide attempt. and then comes murder and passion. and then comes... what exactly? the answers are all there, sadly. Sontag is sad herself, writing about this sad man. sad about the holes people dig for themselves, for the glossy veneers and brittle surfaces that pretend to be identities, purposes. but a sadness of the sort that a doctor can display. a clinical, professional sort of sadness. an understanding but removed sort of sad. but sad nonetheless! Sontag's sorrow is there, invisible footnotes within this assessment of what has made and continues to make Diddy and his so-called life so sad.the author is of course famous for being the preeminent intellectual of her day. not admired for her fiction but adulated for her nonfiction essays. this feels unfair to me. Sontag is a writer of the first order and this book is brilliantly written. there are some set pieces in Death Kit that rank among the best I've read in any book: Diddy pretending to be an insurance investigator while visiting the crass widow of a man he thinks he's murdered; a meeting slash dick-measuring contest between corporate honchos and their yes-men; a sweet and real encounter between Diddy and a prostitute he picks up; the many scenes of Diddy and his new love, a preturnaturally self-assured blind woman; and my favorite of all, an exceedingly strange yet endearing dream that Diddy recounts (based on a novel he wrote and lost), all about the life story of a poor lonely outcast werewolf. a story about all humans.as noted above, this is a clinical book and so it is with the prose. the writing has an emotionless and very dry quality to it, despite its brilliance. and yet, somehow, this quality only made the book more fascinating to read. this is a mesmerizing book. its hypnotic quality comes directly from the cold, purely interior way that the visceral narrative is presented. the prose does not parallel the often heated, often surreal sequences. (as I mention in the comments below,) I was reminded of the callous quality of Duras writing on love and emptiness and even more of Cronenberg's icy style in his films portraying various extremes of feeling and action, or non-action. there's just something about a distanced, weirdly "objective" voice describing scenes of intense emotion and/or bizarre hallucination that I respond to. and so I was fascinated from beginning to end.in sum, the writing is as alienated from the subject as the subject is alienated from himself. soulfulness does come through, much to my relief. but parsed out, between the lines, implicit, almost hidden from view. in the end, Sontag does Sontag: she evaluates, she analyzes, she posits a thesis.

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