Product Description

First published in 1967, "Death Kit" is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience. The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life, including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind does not always bear close scrutiny.

From Library Journal

Released in 1963 and 1967, respectively, these are Sontag's first and second novels. In The Benefactor, protagonist Hippolyte "depends on his dreams to direct the course of his life" (LJ 9/1/63). The story, which unfolds over a 60-year period, might itself be a dream. Death Kit is no less cerebral.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

From the Publisher

First published in 1967, Sontag's second novel is a classic of modern fiction as well as brilliant exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.

From the Inside Flap

First published in 1967, Sontag's second novel is a classic of modern fiction as well as brilliant exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.

Review

'In Death Kit Susan Sontag has written a terrifying black novel with the fierce unsettling thrust of a Kafka-esque fable. It is a truly awesome book, forged from a stark form in which staccato sentences and near-documentary observations are fused into a brilliantly sustained style.' Boston Globe