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| View Larger Image | Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir
by David Rieff
| | List Price: | $21.00 | | Price: | $14.28 | | You Save: | $6.72 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 199481 | | Studio: | Simon & Schuster | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 192 | | Publication Date: | January 08, 2008 | | Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product 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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 12 reviews)
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Makes You Think 
A somewhat digressive but nonetheless penetrating essay dealing with the philosophy and reality of terminal illness. Namely--should a patient whose condition is almost certain to be fatal, be told diplomatically the "truth" about their prognosis, so that they can come to terms with their mortality and use their remaining time to deal with the unresolved issues in their lives. Or should they be encouraged to nuture the "hope" that they might survive or gain some extra time through some experimental treatment or perhaps an expensive procedure known to offer minimal success in most cases? The advantage of the latter aproach, of course, is that is offers some degree of peace of mind and makes one's last days more palatable. On the other hand, it involves deception--which is always a slippery slope. My own conclusion--it depends on the value system and psychological makeup of the patient and the family. In the author's case, his mother's will to live was so strong that the "truth" would have been torture.
August 01, 2008 | |
Tedious Repetition 
This book takes 180 pages to repeat the same theme over and over:his mother was dying of a blood cancer,and she was in denial about it being incurable.There is little in the way of inspiration or insight since almost the entire book consists of the author's thoughts as he trys to decide whether to foster his mothers unrealistic expectations.Since the book is essentially about the author's thoughts(we hear almost nothing from his mother),we feel more sympathy for him.To make matters worse,the sentences are long and complex,forcing the reader to read and reread them.This book would have been better as a nice short story in a magazine.
July 30, 2008 | |
There are no easy deaths
I can understand very well that Mr Rieff felt the need to write about his mother's death. That such a writing should take the form of a published book is a totally different matter.
With all due respect, and I have no doubt that David Rieff went through a terrible ordeal, his book adds nothing to what those who really care about their loved ones already know. Well, it is true that he elaborates
more cleverly than most of us would be able to but all the clichés are there: the guilt, I wish it had been me, was there somethong else I could have done...
Here I am obviously talking about the psychological side of being close to someone who is dying. One is very lucky if the practical difficulties which arise can be dealt with smoothly and for that you basically need money.
When I say that Mr Rieff's book is no contribution of great value I also want to say that it is not his fault (he could however chosen not to publish). In my opinion there is nothing to minimize the suffering caused by death. Especially if it takes place after a long period of time, which is usually the case with cancer. The fact that Ms Sontag was a very intelligent and intelectually rich person must have made things even more difficult.
To sum it up, there are no easy deaths (the expression is borrowed from the reply given to Simone de Beauvoir by a french nurse: "But, madam, it was a very easy death." about the death of the former's mother. It was sarcastically used by SB as the title of an account of her mother's death.)
You never forget, that is my experience. You just go on trying to learn how to live with absence.
PS Mr Rieff comments disapprovingly on the publication of some pictures of his dead mother by Annie Leibovitz. I compliment him on that.
May 22, 2008 | |
Rieff should get out of the water
This book is one of the most depressing and pessimistic books I have ever had the misfortune to read. Fortunately, I borrowed it from the library - having finished it, I wouldn't have it in my house.
This is not to say that, purely from the perspective of language and construction, it is not largely well-written, although the numerous rather self-conscious attributions to largely obscure personalities (intellectuals all, no doubt) interrupt the flow at times. Rather, it is the lack of insight into character - Rieff's and his mother's - that leaves me cold.
I have to emphasize that I am not a disciple of Susan Sontag - I think that is the appropriate word. In general, I tend to distrust people who claim, by dint of superior intelligence, education, or reasoning power, to have some special avenue to "the truth", particularly when they broadcast it as widely as she did. All she really provided was (usually) well-reasoned opinion.
I prefer evidence of wisdom. And I do not believe that she was wise.
She loved life? Well - in truth - most of us do. No. She was PASSIONATE about life. Well - many of us are, though we may express that passion differently than she did. We all fear death? Well - no, we don't. Not in the way she did. I don't accept that her overwhelming fear of death - and apparently her son's, for that matter - sprang solely from her putative passion for life.
The living always fail the dying? Well - no, they don't. Sometimes, the dying fail the living.
Where is the personal responsibility in all this rending of cloth?
Rieff maintains that to have told his mother that she was terminally ill would have sent her spiraling into an abyss of despair and madness. But where has she sent him? Most of us of a certain age have lost one or both parents and other loved ones, sometimes to protracted and painful illnesses. But almost four years after the event, Rieff is obviously still in his own pit of despair (if not madness). Is this an appropriate legacy for a mother to leave a son?
What I find most ironic about this book is that, although Rieff makes reference on a number of occasions to Jerome Groopman, M.D., calling him a family friend, he seems to be peculiarly ignorant of Groopman's own views. Groopman, himself a deeply religious man, has written several books based on his personal experience with illness, and experiences with patients who know themselves to be terminally ill. He has a unique idea of what constitutes "hope", and how "hopeful" dying patients can be - not about cure, or even remission, but about whatever they themselves define as hope when given the opportunity. Rieff should remember the source of the title of Groopman's first book, The Measure of Our Days: "So teach us the measure of our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom" (Psalm 90). Even better - he should read it.
April 14, 2008 | |
Drowning 
The New York Times review of this book concluded that Susan Sontag's death was the kind of death most people would want to avoid--a hard death. Yes, but that aside, this book by her son offers readers little other than the chronicle of one unreflective perspective on a series of difficult events.
To begin, the book is poorly edited, which is a great shame. (One brief example: "Remembering how my mother had behaved during her previous cancers, her close friends also began to search online, and were soon e-mailing to Anne the most informative or promising materials or links that they had found online.")
Also, it is highly repetitive in content. One entire chapter is almost exclusively focused on maligning a brochure put out by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Rieff devotes page after page to berating it for essentially adopting his own attitude toward his mother during her illness: "a refusal to write as if bad news were bad news and despair were despair." Additionally, he revisits in almost every chapter the main theme of the book--that he does not know whether giving her the answers that he thought she wanted to hear (that is, lying to her about her chances for survival) was what he should have done. Once, or maybe twice, would have been poignant. But one can surmise that a briefer treatment would not have given this volume the length to justify publication.
In addition, the narrative portrays Rieff's experiences in detail but with little insight. He attempts to present his mother's thoughts about death, but since he did not know her well, he could only do this through a conjectured reading of her diaries. Interestingly, he does write that during her illness she talked with others about her approaching death but not with him, which calls into even greater question his ability to generalize from the perspective of his admittedly strained relationship with her. He writes that he is still angry about her death, but he does not attribute this to the process of grief. For him, grief does not seem to be a process at all but rather an onslaught of emotions which he would much rather suppress. Why then did he write a book about grieving?
And, finally, Rieff insists that both his and his mother's reactions to her experience were universally applicable. He belabors the other choices they both could have made. He describes other paths his mother could have taken. But in the end, he presents the past as inevitable and his mother's decisions as largely correct. (Reacting other than with despair upon being given a terminal diagnosis would be "insane," according to Rieff.) In doing so, he does a severe injustice to the myriad of experiences possible under similar circumstances, and in the process he runs the risk of alienating readers whose choices were or will be different, whose reactions do not mirror his or his mother's own.
Susan Sontag was a justly famous person. This book sheds light on an aspect of her life that her writings may not have revealed: her myopic failure to accept an important part of her own humanity. Had her son been able to look beyond her limited perspective, this would have been a far better book.
April 06, 2008 | |
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