Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
Archives of Horror
By Charles Simic
Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 131 pp., $20.00
I still have a memory of a stack of old magazines I used to thumb through at my grandmother's house almost sixty years ago. They must have dated from the early years of the century. There were no photographs in them, just engravings and drawings. I was especially enthralled by scenes of battles that were most likely depictions of past Balkan wars and rebellions. They were done in the heroic manner. The soldiers charged with grim determination through smoke and carnage; the wounded hero lay with his chest bared in the arms of his comrades seemingly happy as to how things turned out. It was the kind of stuff that made me want to play war immediately. I'd run around the house shooting an imaginary rifle, crashing down on the floor mortally wounded, then immediately jumping up again to fire at the enemy until my grandmother ordered me to stop. Her nerves were frayed enough already since there was plenty of real shooting to be heard all around us.
Review, 3418 words
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