SUSAN SONTAG died in a New York hospital on December 28th a year ago, the day when a cataclysmic tidal wave wiped out whole coastal areas in Indonesia, drowning thousands and thousands of people, cattle and wild fauna.
The announcement of her death was muted by the sensational news of the Tsunami which struck the imagination of and terrorized people the world over.
But for those who were close to Susan Sontag or had had the opportunity to know her, her untimely death announced the end of an era in America, when an intellectual could still speak out and denounce national and international policies. Her death marked the end of a certain America, the one so many of us had turned to, because it was the best ‘ open society’ we knew, because it stood for freedom and creativity. It was, after all, the Land “de tous les possibles.”
True, in recent history, America had shown a different face but, alone and courageously, Susan Sontag had spoken out, stood up for her universal ideas and values, giving us all a ray of hope for America. The day I heard the news of her death, I wrote down in my notebook:’ With Susan Sontag gone, the America I used to love is also gone. She was a dissenter, a rebel, she had passion: passion for literature, for people, for the world and, even more important, she had no fear.’
I remember the first time she entered the Village Voice, our bookshop in Saint Germain des Prés. It was around Christmas time. She was dressed in the type of clothes I would always see her in the following years: dark loose pants, a black sky jacket, and walking boots — a tall radiating figure which was all presence. She was with a friend and, later, she would always come with a friend, a different one each time, taking him or her to the shelves where we stocked European literatures in translation. She would discuss each book with her friend, and then buy them. One could feel that one of her great pleasures in life was to share with others what she loved. Her regular Christmas visits became a ritual.
And then, one day, she said to me: Odile, I would love to read at the Village Voice. I hardly could believe my ears. I immediately knew that it was her generous self who was speaking. It was her way of supporting our “eccentric” bookshop as she called it. A date was set:  March 28th 2002. That evening, back from a day trip to Burgundy where she had visited villages perched on hills and medieval monasteries, she entered the bookshop packed with people, mostly English speaking, who had come because she was a celebrity, no doubt, but also because she was a rare voice, the voice of conscience in America. They had come to pay homage to her.
She was at ease and beaming with happiness. For two hours she kept her audience of more than a hundred people captive, under the spell of her clear, deep and warm voice. Her talk touched upon topics dear to her: ideas, her writings and American politics.
 She stressed how fiction had been her first call. She had “drifted into essays,” she said, “because of the seduction of intense debates in the 60’s and the 70’s.” She felt that her novels, The Volcano Lover and In America were “her best works.” Critics had called them historical novels but she preferred to describe them as “novels about foreigners.” “To be displaced” in the world was certainly one of the human situations that interested her the most: “It is what stretches you, enriches you, transforms you.”
And it turns out that her life was definitely built around travelling and many of her essays are about writers and artists who lived in exile, including in their own country: Thomas Bernhard, Danilo Kis, Brodsky, Sebald etc . . .
She saw herself not so much as a story-teller (although she had told stories in her novels) as what she called “a meditative, associative, ruminative writer” and there was a long tradition of such writers, she said: Laurence Sterne, Diderot, Thomas Bernhard and others who were interested in rendering “the dramas of consciousness.”
The last time we saw her was exactly two years ago this January. She was finishing a piece on Victor Serge for the New York Review of Books and what I remember is her laughter. My colleague Michael was cracking jokes with her about some rumours involving her subject. She looked strong and happy.
On January 17th of last year, she was buried in the Cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris, a city she called “the alternative capital of my imagination.” It was a typical Parisian winter day, with low and dark grey skies and drizzling rain. Her coffin was placed in one of the central alleys of the cemetery, with family and friends standing around. Fiona Shaw and Isabelle Huppert read excerpts from The Volcano Lover, from Regarding the Pain of Others, Rimbaud’s L’Eternité, C’est Quoi? Baudelaire (a poem about Paris), from Barthes (Camera Lucida) who had played such an important role in the development of her thinking and writing, and Beckett (four short poems). Fate would have it that she was buried just a few feet away from the writer she had honoured by staging and directing Waiting For Godot in war-torn Sarajevo.
At the end of The Volcano Lover, her heroine, now dead in the novel, sums up who she was:
 ‘I will not allow that I was moved by justice rather than love, for justice is also a form of love.
I did know about power, I did see how this world was ruled, but I did not accept it. I wanted to set an example. I wanted not to disappoint myself. But I was afraid as well as angry, in ways I felt too powerless to admit. So I did not speak of my fears but rather of my hopes. I was afraid my anger would offend others, and they would destroy me. For all my certitude, I feared I would never be strong enough to understand what would allow me to protect myself. Sometimes I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable.
Or I would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book. But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory and well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.’
This is Susan Sontag speaking.
This is the Susan Sontag we knew and whom we crucially miss.
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