The volcano lover : a romance

by Susan Sontag

Paper Book, 1992

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, c1992.

Description

Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.

User reviews

LibraryThing member countrylife
I must not be a sophisticated enough reader. I just hated this book. With apologies to my young teenage daughter, who has a habit of opening her mouth to let everything in her mind spill out haphazardly, that’s how this book felt.

“The Cavaliere in his sitting room on the third floor. He
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watched the column of grey smoke rise, swell, and balance against the sky. Night fell. He watched the reddened mass thrusting upward. Catherine playing the spinet in a nearby room. The thick stream of lava widened. . The Cavalier on the slopes of the mountain, with Bartolomeo Pumo. Alone with him; just a human pair.”

And beyond the scattered sentences is a mocking undertone of ‘see how stupid you are; see how much I know that you don’t; you must admire my superior intellectuality’.

“Collecting, like telling jokes, implies belonging to the world in which already-made objects circulate, are competed for, are transmitted. It presumes confident, full membership in such a world. Women are trained to be marginal or supporting players in that world, as in many others.” And, “The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.”

Throughout the whole book, I didn’t know who I was reading about, as the main characters were always just ‘the cavaliere’ and ‘the hero’. After the fact, though, when I started typing up my notes, I find on the ISBN page, under subjects: Nelson, Horatio Nelson – Viscount, 1758-1805 fiction, Hamilton, William, Sir 1730-1803 fiction, Hamilton, Emma, Lady 1765-1815 fiction. But, on that same page, the author goes on to say, “My Cavaliere is Sir William Hamilton’s double, a fictional character on whose behalf I have taken what liberties suited his nature, as I have with the other historical persons given their proper names.“ Was the ‘young lady’ ever named? I don’t remember and I don’t even care.

I’m just glad it’s behind me.
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LibraryThing member robertg69
A rather surprising view about Sir Wm Hamilton, his intriguing second wife, Emma H, their connection with Lord Nelson, their relations with the court of Naples and Two Sicilies, especially with Queen Caroline, the natural sister of Marie Antoinette. My source for the original story that the opera
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Tosca was fashioned from.
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LibraryThing member thorold
Teenage servant girl goes to work for dodgy sex therapist then becomes model for fashionable painter. First Aristocratic Lover dumps her when she becomes pregnant; Second Lover is kinder, but also dumps her when the chance of a wealthy heiress comes up - he gets rid of her by shipping her off as a
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gift to his recently-widowed uncle, the ambassador in Naples. The uncle likes her, gives her the Eliza Doolittle treatment and marries her after a decent interval. She becomes a confidant of the Queen (Marie-Antoinette's sister!) and they are all set to live happily ever after, but then there's a Revolution in France, and a Wounded British Admiral arrives in town and has to be nursed back to health...

The real Emma, Lady Hamilton, is a character that only the most brazen writer of historical romance would have dared to invent - her whole life reads like a plot-summary in Name that Book. So maybe it's not surprising that Susan Sontag chooses to write about her from a slightly oblique point of view, taking as her central character Sir William Hamilton, whom we now remember only as a famous cuckold, but who in his own time was known as an art collector, archaeologist, and avid student of the moods of Vesuvius. And who seems to have done a pretty good job representing British interests at the notoriously raffish and corrupt Neapolitan court.

Sontag also messes about quite freely with the conventions of historical fiction - she keeps period authenticity to the necessary minimum and is quite happy to step into frame from time to time and explain something from the point of view of the modern New Yorker. Although the narrative mostly sticks very closely to recorded history, at one point we suddenly realise that we've drifted seamlessly into a story from another medium that we know to be fictional. And as well as inserting her own caustic comments on the actions of her characters and the presumed reactions of her readers, Sontag doesn't mind bringing dead people in as auxiliary narrators (the last word in the book, unexpectedly, goes to the poet and revolutionary journalist Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel).

I won't say that this was better than I expected, because I expected a lot from Sontag anyway, but it is a book that managed to surprise me and keep my interest, despite being based on a set of events I thought I was pretty familiar with to start with.
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LibraryThing member pjpjx
i can't read her philosophy, but i found this stunning
LibraryThing member Katong
A book that shows the seams - looks and feels constructed. In a historical novel that's not a bad thing, or so seems to be Sontag's theory. With the characters addressing the readers from "the beyond" at the end, it has a feel of the Spoon River Anthology... Some powerful stuff - this is sticking
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with me in a way I hadn't expected...
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LibraryThing member mrminjares
I've never read anything by Susan Sontag and was curious, so I bought this book for a few dollars in a thrift store. I was pleasantly surprised. Going into it I expected something very intellectual and philosophical. To some extent I got the philosophical elements, but this book was mostly an
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homage to the romance novel and to the romantic life of an 18th century wealthy English intellectual. Sontag demonstrates in this book her power with words and an extreme attention to detail that paints beautiful portraits of life among kings and queens on the mediterranean.

The main character is a fellow referred to as the Caveliere, an English aristocrat serving in Naples as the British Ambassador. He is a man of discovery fascinated by the collection of objects. Sontag explores here and there what it means to be a collector, and what the act of collecting says about a person. In her book, the Caveliere is an outwardly cold man with an inner fire for art and science. He demonstrates this through his extensive collection of ancient roman vases and contemporary portraiture. But he also demonstrates this through his very active exploration of the nearby volcano, Vesuvius. He tests his will and the will of others by scaling the volcano multiple times, sometimes just after a volcanic event. He becomes known through Naples for his expertise in volcanoes and for his collection of volcanic specimens.

At least half way through the book, the story lacked a plot. Instead, what we have is a portrait of this Caveliere and the interesting life he leads. But he faces few challenges and there are few redeemable qualities about him. He was cold and unloving to his wife, and he had little for the reader to identify with. This made the book a difficult read initially. But then a plot line developed after the death of his wife and the introduction of a new charming woman. At least initially he thought little of her, then fell in love. She at least initially was not in love with him either since she was deeply in love with his nephew. But his nephew spurns her for a woman of wealth, and she is left to hang on to his uncle. They bond, and he begins to make her into a woman of class and style. She learns French and Italian; she learns to play music and to sing; she performs monologues for guests. She becomes in the end a real charmer and a very popular woman in Naples. You get an interesting sense of what it was like to be popular and rich in the 18th century, and what kinds of things were found entertaining at their parties.

But then war comes with the French Revolution and lots of troubles begin. The Caveliere is tragically forced to abandon his palazzo in Naples, along with a good share of his valuable art collection. Most of this is transferred to a ship for transport to England, but this ship sinks in a storm and he loses all of it. He and his wife join the King and Queen of Naples aboard a ship just off the coast while the French take the city. They expect the French to have troubles staying popular, and this is borne out. They lose their popularity and ultimately are forced out by popular will. The King remains popular with the people and is called back. But at this point, the Caveliere is forced to resign his post and return to England.

The book is a rich one filled initially with descriptions of art and the passions of an art collector. It transitions to a solid storyline of the French revolution and its impacts on Naples and relations between the English government and the government of Naples. The Caveliere remains a sad character until the end. His passion for collecting is a fascinating quality, but his personality is a dull one. It leaves the reader wondering who the protagonist in this story is after all.

But despite all of this, I give this book four stars because of the elegant and beautiful writing of Susan Sontag. This made the book a real pleasure to read. It is rich with detail and full of intimate understanding of what it is like to love art. Clearly Susan Sontag is the right person to give such detail. I look very much forward to discovering more of her beautiful writing in other books.
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LibraryThing member charlie68
Pretty good book, fairly well-written but with a tendency to be wordy. The story is disjointed, with the first part of the book about the Volcano- lover and his wife, and second part more focused on Lady Hamilton and Admiral Nelson and ends a little flat.
LibraryThing member ljhliesl
I didn't love it but it wasn't a waste of time. I liked the prose when it was deliberate, but sometimes it was ponderous. I liked all the bits about the Cavaliere's duties and collecting and obsessing about volcanos. I liked when the penny dropped about who these characters were, what their names
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were.

But it would have taken me much longer if I had not had enforcedly empty hours to pass.
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LibraryThing member ted_newell
Series of three mini biographies in which the main characters are (even literally) entwined with each other. First profile of three is most convincing. Sontag's detail is so rich that she seems to have captured the Napoleonic revolutionary era.
LibraryThing member ivanfranko
Excellent historical fiction; and an entertaining examination of the period of the royalist revolt of the Kingdom of Naples against republican France. The three principals in this novel are drawn out slowly as characters for whom we can sympathize. The final chapter allows each to speak for
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her/himself, as though each is beyond the story.
Susan Sontag saves her commendation for the learned and brave Eleanora Pimentel Fonseca, who edited the principal newspaper of the short-lived Parthenopian Republic in Naples. She compares her with the three main characters, Sir William Hamilton, Lady Emma Hamilton and Admiral Lord Nelson who sought glory or well-being and who did not care to consider the injustices that their pursuit of wealth and refinement inflicted on so many.
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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
The Cavalier, an art dealer and British ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is obsessed with three things: collecting beautiful and rare pieces of art, watching Vesuvius breathe and rumble, and having a relationship with his nephew's former lover. I know, it's an odd beginning. When the
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Cavalier's nephew, Charles, grows tired of his mistress he simply sends her to live with his uncle once the Cavalier became a lonely widower. How do you learn to love a stranger? What do you do when that love matures into devotion and passion falls by the wayside? Beyond being a story about relationships and circumstances, The Volcano Lover is also the love story of art, war, and devotion to a life well lived with passion.
There is a cleverness to Sontag's writing. Most of the story is told in the third person with touches of first person narrative sprinkled in. Is that Sontag offering personal tidbits about herself? Who is this off-camera speaker? In the very last section of Volcano Lover the Cavalier, his wife, his mother-in-law, and the Queen all offer first person perspectives on their lives with one another. Both the Cavalier and his mother-in-law are careful to never reveal the Cavalier's wife real name (modeled after Emma Hamilton). No one mentions the hero's name (Lord Nelson in real life), either.
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