Susan Sontag is best known as a critic who has insistently reminded American readers that a vast contemporary world of thought and imagination continues to evolve on the other side of the Atlantic. Whether she is discussing books or movies or philosophical concepts. Sontag finds her apt illustrations, if not her central theme, in the European tradition, especially in France. In this she bears a resemblance to Matthew Arnold whose love affair with Europe gave to his literary and cultural criticism a breadth of reference otherwise lacking in early Victorian England. Like Arnold, too, Sontag holds firmly to her belief in the saving power of reason …, but she never blinds herself to the sometimes dazzling light cast by the experience of the absurd. And so her collections of critical essays map the modern terrain from Camus to Camp, from Simone Weil's tormented life to Bergman's tortured and torturing...