3.0
Swimming in a Sea of Death
ByPublisher Description
Both a memoir and an investigation, Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate, and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity.
Rieff offers no easy answers. Instead, his intensely personal book is a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. In his most profound work, this brilliant writer confronts the blunt feelings of the survivor -- the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough.
And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, to try almost anything in order to go on living.
Drawing on his mother's heroic struggle, paying tribute to her doctors' ingenuity and faithfulness, and determined to tell what happened to them all, Swimming in a Sea of Death subtly draws wider lessons that will be of value to others when they find themselves in the same situation.
Rieff offers no easy answers. Instead, his intensely personal book is a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. In his most profound work, this brilliant writer confronts the blunt feelings of the survivor -- the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough.
And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, to try almost anything in order to go on living.
Drawing on his mother's heroic struggle, paying tribute to her doctors' ingenuity and faithfulness, and determined to tell what happened to them all, Swimming in a Sea of Death subtly draws wider lessons that will be of value to others when they find themselves in the same situation.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSwimming in a Sea of Death Reviews
3.0
Lewis Fisher
Created about 2 years agoShare
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“weird book to be so candid but also not candid at the same time about death. hello quarter life crisis, welcome back.”
Annika
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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“susan sontag stays young, in my head she will never be a frail elderly woman - it’s partly because of her sharp mind, i will never comprehend how such a woman was born at the same time as my grandmother and was so widely different from her.
therefore, her death - although so long a ago - still never ceases to shock. how can such a woman die?
it was a great book, not a chronology which is good because otherwise it would’ve been way too fake - it reminds me of didion “the year of magical thinking. and yet it is so accomplished. in this chaos the book really shines.
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update (18.02.2023):
after reading the biography from moser on sontag i recognize that this was a hard book to write not only because rieff was the son but also because their relationship seemed to be rather rocky.
now i understand that he didn’t come to her when she asked for him, that he shifted the narrative in his favour as he seems to be a devoted son (though nobody couldn’t do it any differently because he didn’t keep notes of the time).
i don’t know what i can think about this book now, it is still good, but … and this is the issue i now face when trying to rate and understand this book.”
Nami
Created over 4 years agoShare
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Carmen
Created almost 5 years agoShare
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Fatmaa 📚🌙
Created over 8 years agoShare
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About David Rieff
David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.
Other books by David Rieff
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