Moments of brilliance followed by long, meandering passages in which I lost interest. The book is long - so long that it took me over a year to get through this. Certain passages of this book are absolute must-reads, my favorite being the description of Vollmann hiring a river guide to paddle him...
"One Must Do Abnormal Things"The whole of Vollmann’s novel is conveyed by an omniscient narrator. It’s tempting to assume that it’s Vollmann himself. However, as usual that would probably be a mistake, even if we learn a lot about the author by what he writes in the guise of others.The key protag...
William Vollman's Europe Central was, for me, a very slow burn. I spent the first two hundred pages of this sprawling, kaleidescopic epic on the emotional sidelines, wryly observant, interested but not overly engaged. Vollman's characters, I thought, were intriguing, but also annoying. His pro...
The Royal Family is so richly enigmatic, one thinks they're unraveling the mysteries of the universe when they read it. This is a book of immense sadness, where loneliness knows no bounds. One can imagine its author, possibly the greatest writer alive, William T. Vollmann, sitting at his desk ski...
THE ATLAS SHRUGGEDWays of Gazing"He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune." But evidently this is the nature of the world in which the author/narrator construct attempts to find himself, while gazing at first world lakes and mountains and grass, freebasing with ...
The subtitle of Dirty Snow should have been, Take That Camus! While not a specific counter-punch to Camus’ L’Étranger, Simenon’s dark story of a murderer with no regrets shares a similar bent, neither pulling any punches with the reader. Maybe that is why the book, along with Simenon’s The Widow,...
Gloria, Gloria, GloriaBill rang me and said do you want to come and meet Jimmy, so I said yes, I’d heard so much about him from Bill, he was going to write a piece, an article or a story about him for some magazine, he was infatuated with some whore, an ex-girlfriend, Gloria, who’d just up and di...
[A]nd the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason I came; I don't want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly bel...
I collected a number; they are much the same in the one quality that causes journalists to seek them out, just as are the grimacing, often swollen, frequently forehead-bruised corpses whose images face us on the fluttering blue tarp-wall of that temporary morgue at Ishinomaki; their expression mu...
She was his wife, and she was dying! -He took a vial from his pocket, and began to feed her pills of pure Arctic ice. He held her hand, which weighed nothing. He could feel it cooling down as the red fever-flush went away from her face. - I wuff you, she said. - The nurse detached the intravenous...