Craig Seligman
Adam Thirlwell loves to write about sex. It’s is the central activity in The Escape, upholstered—like everything else in this allusive, philosophical, melancholy comedy—in mock-heroic chutzpah. Thirlwell’s word choices are showy, his phrasing bravura: “They had sat in the rose garden, in the pale sunshine, a police siren tumescing and detumescing in the background. . . . A tree was leafing through itself, anxiously.” The work of António Lobo Antunes is held in such high regard that when José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1998, there was grumbling that it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. Only about half of Lobo Antunes’s sixteen novels have made it into English, though. Now, Gregory Rabassa has translated his 2001 What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? in a version so (predictably) elegant that at times I wondered whether the lowlife drag queens and junkies who people it sound so immaculate in the original. This is it?” I asked myself several times as I made my way through Susan Sontag’s diaries. By the end, I’d stopped carping; in fact, I had the feeling they had exploded in my hands. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, edited by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, is the first in a three-volume selection from the writer’s private papers, covering her prefame years, up to the age of thirty. The entries are generally short and frequently trivial (though not uninteresting)—movies seen, books to buy, lists of words and terms to learn, not all of them recondite: