Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0-14-200150-3 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss)
Comment: It helps if you're a little bit compulsive about reading Vollmann. Oh, he doesn't need the help, but as a reader, you do.
It's easy to compare him with Pynchon, since they both attempt a similar feat of matching subject with style in an expansive format that contains much humor peppered within the story. But Vollmann isn't a humorist at heart, he's part historian and part seer. He brings you the characters that you'd love to believe really are; he worms his insistent way into their hopes and imaginings so that he can present you with their characters.
You learn a lot of history reading the Seven Dreams series, of which "Argall" is a part. You learn more about how Vollmann regards history. But what makes the author so necessary and integral to my reading is that way of making me see how his characters regard themselves.
So throw your reading schedule out the window. Pick up "The Ice Shirt" and start in on this yet-to-be completed chronicle of how the Europeans came to the Americas and what that meant for both the Europeans and the people who were already here. Catch up soon, because you'll want to starting wishing for the next book in the series to appear... compulsively so.
Rating: 5
Summary: Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd
Comment: William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.
Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.
The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.
There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.
Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion.
Rating: 2
Summary: Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage
Comment: Ok, Vollmann is brilliant, a genius. One has to give it to him with this and his other huge tomes in which he goes full-tilt in an attempt at literary greatness, and his passages are often riveting.
The book tries to out-do ULYSSES. It does. But finally, around the 400th page, who cares?
 |
Title: The Rifles: A Book of North American Landscapes (Seven Dreams) by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140176233 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
 |
Title: Fathers and Crows (Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, Vol 2) by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 014016717X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
 |
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 |
 |
Title: The Atlas by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140254498 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann ISBN: 0140231579 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
