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Title: The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0-14-100200-X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 31 July, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.06 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Worthy of a thesis papers...
Comment: I've just finished my 1st of reading this book, and I'm still recovering. It is a harrowing journey, but one well worth taking. It is difficult to write a concise review of such a towering work. It is worthy of being examined on many levels: Bibilical Allegory, Economic Manifesto, Psychological Case Study... whatever. It's also an immensely readable book with a fascinating plot. What I gravtitated toward in my first reading is the way the author depicts the razor-thin margin between the working class and society's outcasts: pimps, whores, pushers. The use of a private eye as a vehicle to explore the ways in which repeated contact with the swarming underworld can eventually overwhelm the observer and draw him into its oblivion is quite well done. What makes the book remarkable is the fact that the author is able to keep everything in focus and maintain the humanity of all his characters. Although it is a deeply allegorical novel of ideas, noting is left as purely "symbolic"... each element is also carefull rendered "real" as well... which may explain why he needed nearly 800 pages! To work with the book's photography references, the depth-of-field is enormous!
These a just some basic thoughts. This novel will continue to occupy and trouble my mind for years to come. Henry Tyler is a caharcter who will not only become lodged in your brain, but become part of your immagination. Brilliant.
Rating: 4
Summary: City as Metaphor
Comment: This book may well sicken and horrify you -- in fact if it doesn't you might be dangerously stoic, but the unforgivingly visceral assault of Vollmann's juicy chewy prose is inarguably a part of this graphic examination of the seedy Hobbesian underworld of drug addicts and sexual 'deviants.' As Vollmann fans know, he loves San Francisco, but this novel more than any other is his desperate howling lovesong to that city. It will help you a lot if you've been there; if you haven't, you'll have to take his word for all the streets and neighborhoods and stores and coffee shops and hotels and parking garages that his characters visit. San Francisco is a deceptively small city, with its cultures and districts piled cheek-by-jowl one atop the other like a cracked and tiled mosaic: Stand in the financial district and turn around and you're in North Beach, turn around again and you're in Chinatown, turn around again and you're in the Tenderloin. This uncomfortable yet functional forced familiarity is reflected in Vollmann's cast of characters: The ethereally tender and matronly but [drug]-addicted Queen of the [...]; slacker private-eye Henry Tyler who unceasingly hunts her along the liminal edge of poverty and despair; and his brother John Tyler, the crisp professional junior partner at a prestigious law firm in $300 neckties whose girlfriend lives in Pacific Heights, of all places. The fact that John is eternally right around the corner, both literally and figuratively, from the kind of squalor and desperation that most of us can't even imagine -- a squalor into which Henry dives deliberately seeking salvation or penance or simply death -- is the source of this novel's nightmare fascination.
Rating: 2
Summary: An Interesting Waste of Time
Comment: I admire Vollman's ambition in this novel. He is a thinker who seems to be attempting to tie together aspects of religion (Buddhism, Christianity, and Paganism . . . ); commentary on the differences / similarities of love, lust, and addiction; Capitalism versus Marxism; racism between all colors of all people; classicism; reality and fantasy; misogyny; unions; child-love or child-molestation depending how you look at it . . . the list goes on. And this is exactly the problem with it. The connections are vague--not subtle. Fragments connected by tiny threads that fray as the book continues leave us suspended in a kind of weird sickness--ready to fall. If I were Vollman, I would have let this book sit for a while and then returned to it in an attempt to clarify and condense . . . maybe map out this Royal Family to make it worth his while and worth our while as readers. His characterizations and insight about human fraily are immaculate. I don't advise giving up on him yet. He has potential. But I don't think spending days reading this will get you anywhere but depressed and tired.
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Title: Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140231579 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Atlas by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140254498 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Rainbow Stories (Contemporary American Fiction) by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140171541 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1992 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140110879 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Ice-Shirt (A Book of North American Landscape, Vol 1) by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140131965 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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