The Volcano Lover: A Romance by Susan Sontag
Published 1992 · 123,179 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Volcano Lover: A Romance to read?
The Volcano Lover: A Romance scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Sontag deploys an elevated, essayistic vocabulary drawn from art history, volcanology, classical antiquity, and eighteenth-century aristocratic culture. Words like 'calando,' 'Parthenopean,' 'intaglios,' 'proselytizing,' and 'chalybeate' appear without gloss. The novel intermixes Italian phrases, period diction, and the controlled technical language of a public intellectual, demanding active word-knowledge from readers.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- The prose alternates between lapidary aphorisms and long, subordinate-laden reflections. Sontag uses rhetorical questions in extended series, accumulative catalogue structures, and interpolated asides in parentheses. The second-person address in the Prologue, the free indirect discourse filtering through multiple consciousnesses, and the deliberate intrusion of the authorial 'I' create syntactic variety that demands flexible reading strategies.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The novel is saturated with philosophical meditation: on collecting as pathology, on the psychology of possessing and being possessed, on enthusiasm and detachment, on catastrophe and recovery. Sontag uses the historical narrative as a vehicle for sustained abstract argument. Whole chapters are structured as intellectual essays embedded in fiction, moving freely from the particular to the universal and back.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Each page compresses historical fact, aesthetic theory, psychological portrait, and ironic commentary. The reader must simultaneously track the plot of the Cavaliere–Emma–Nelson triangle, decode the extended metaphor of the volcano, absorb the eighteenth-century social world, and follow Sontag's running philosophical argument. Passages about collecting, for instance, function as intellectual set-pieces that reward re-reading.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Sontag refuses to render events directly. The Cavaliere is never named; Nelson is 'the hero'; Emma is 'the Cavaliere's wife.' The narrative repeatedly zooms out into generalizing reflection at the moment of maximum dramatic tension, delaying or entirely withholding emotional payoff. The epilogue gives voice to four women who speak past events in retrospect, recontextualizing the entire novel without resolving it.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- Vesuvius is the novel's central, inexhaustible symbol — simultaneously a figure for male enthusiasm, destructive passion, imperial violence, aesthetic sublimity, and historical catastrophe. Emma's Attitudes echo the volcano's performative eruptions. The Portland Vase functions as a symbol of possession and dispossession. Every object the Cavaliere collects doubles as an argument about culture, desire, and mortality.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- Sontag maintains a controlled, often acidic irony toward all her protagonists — most sharply toward the Cavaliere, whose aesthetic passion she both celebrates and indicts as complicity. The historical frame (we know what happens: Nelson dies, Emma dies in poverty, the Cavaliere is humiliated) allows a constant dramatic irony to operate beneath the surface. The novel's subtitle 'A Romance' is itself ironic, framing an anti-romantic critique of enthusiasm.
- Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
- The novel ends with four female voices — the women whose lives were destroyed by the passions of the Cavaliere, the hero, and history — speaking in retrospect. No synthesis is offered; Sontag refuses to redeem the suffering or tidy the tragedy. The epilogue's polyphony opens questions it does not answer. The volcano metaphor, finally, is left open: catastrophe continues.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- The novel moves between several structural modes: realist historical fiction, essayistic meditation, second-person address, extended apostrophe, and a four-part feminist epilogue. It contains numbered narrative chapters interspersed with digressive philosophical interludes. The Prologue establishes the flea market / volcano / auction triple frame that the novel sustains and elaborates across its structure.
How The Volcano Lover: A Romance is regarded
The Volcano Lover: A Romance holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.