“To all library patrons…”
I was at the Brooklyn Library (central branch) earlier, when walking through the fiction section, I saw Vollmann’s books. I picked up You Bright and Risen Angels, opened it up, and found the following inscription. Unfamiliar with Vollmann’s signature, I looked it up just now using Google images. It’s a match. Pretty sure it’s real. You’d have to be a pretty huge Vollmann fan to know the man’s signature offhand, and then if you were that kind of fan it’s doubtful this would be the inscription used.
“But what if, as in our case, it is winter, so that the Sun has gone away and the grass lies deep beneath the ice?” – William T. Vollmann
The first paragraph of “Fox Hunters” by Breece D’J Pancake
The passing of an autumn night left no mark on the patchwork blacktop of the secondary road that led to Parkins. A gray ooze of light began to crest the eastern hills above the hollow and sift a blue haze through the black bowels of linking oak branches. A small wind shivered, and sycamore leaves chattered across the pavement but were stopped by the fighting-green orchard grass on the berm.
More Vollmann.
'Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them.'
Now this is how you start a review:
I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)
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July 29th, 2009 / 7:00 pm
July 29th, 2009 / 7:00 pm