The Atlas

Rating:
Summary: Great Ideas in Books
Review: I have heard for many long months in 1995 that "the book event" of the year was coming my way. I was sent many pretentious postcards. The real event as far as I'm concerned was by a familiar name: The Atlas by William Vollmann may have been the book those people were talking about all along. Let the idiots who never read equate length with importance, as they flounder in their non-experiential innerspace, there is not a writer out there who can write as luscious sentences as Vollmann can! This can not be denied. The Atlas, his tenth book, takes us all over the world. Vollmann concentrates this time on the form of the prose poem. And you know what? He is definitely a master of the genre. I have dipped into this book many times in my red velvet smoking jacket while drinking a bourbon.

These characters are so real and Vollmann's sentences vibrate with a sort of uncanny brilliance, that I am changed every time I read these lines. Some of the characters appear in previous books: Brandi the whore still lurks in the Mission, the journalist and the photographer from Butterfly Stories, while other stories take place in Canada, Sarajevo, and Burma. These stories are sad and funny, and continue to provoke and disturb. In "No Reason To Cry" Vollmann offers this jewel: "A case can be made that if a girl is going to get AIDS there is no reason to cry while she is getting it."

Vollmann is a major American writer.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment--self-consciously avant-garde
Review: I'd been looking forward to reading Vollman since I have enjoyed writers he's often compared with, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Powers. I still think the early American cycle sounds interesting and challenging, and I won't give up on him.

But there is nothing in this book to justify the praise being heaped on him. The stories cover a territory which few of us, even the very well-travelled, ever see. Likewise the characters are people few of us will meet and most of us would prefer not to meet. Even the narrator of the stories often seems hopelessly lost and debased. It begins with a forward clearly intended to be self-deprecating but ludicrously pretentious nonetheless. This is an appropriate introduction to the book since the prose throughout is some of the most self-consciously avant-garde clumsy prose this side of an undergraduate creative writing class.

Some reviewers seem to have the impression that all 51 pieces were carefully crafted and arranged for maximum effect--I hope if that were true he would have done a better job. ... This book shows none of the amazing control of language demonstrated by the authors Vollman is compared to. It's just a bunch of adjectives, mostly primary colors, strung together in long stream-of-consciousness sentences.

Pynchon and Powers and Wallace often seem to be saying "Look how much smarter I am than you" and while reading them I often think "OK Already, I get it, you're smarter...". With Vollman you just want to say "OK, I get it, you're better travelled than I am.

Reading the Atlas is like reading a book-length series of Granta travel articles, with the fascinating subject matter buried under frequently ham-handed self-consciously arty prose. Vollman may be a genius, but the evidence isn't here. If this is a smart and rigorous writer, he hasn't demonstrated it in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty in ugliness
Review: The prose of this novel is stark, as is the view of the world presented though the eyes of characters who all seem to be lost travellers--in both a physical and a spiritual sense. The observations of the grim and unpleasant aspects of the physical conditions of life as well as the un-human ways that people treat each other risks total alienation of the reader. But if you're willing to step outside of your ordinary expectations as to the representation of emotion in a novel, then these strange tales come alive. The book presents a dark surface and shows much of what is worst in life, but manages to be an affirmation of our attempts to strive for beauty rather than a condemnation of our failures.