Joanna Biggs writes:

Paris let Sontag say no to academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafés, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries. Sontag hedged: she made more lists of French words (bidule was ‘thingumabob’, discuter was ‘to expound’) and signed up for lectures at the Sorbonne, where she heard Beauvoir speak: ‘She is lean and tense and black-haired and very good-looking for her age, but her voice is unpleasant, something about the high pitch + the nervous speed with which she talks.’ She spent most of her time with Harriet, the ‘finest flower of American bohemia’, who worked for the Herald Tribune, and who some say was the inspiration for the Jean Seberg role in A bout de souffle. By comparison, life in an Ivy League college with her husband was unthinkably dull: ‘Everything urging me to decide, to act, to leave him when I go back.’

(LRB 2 August 2012)

Hamish Hamilton | Hardback 544 pp. |ISBN: 9780241145173