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The Atlas
Winner of the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction – a collection of fifty-three interconnected stories by the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central
Hailed by Newsday as "the most unconventional--and possibly the most exciting and imaginative--novelist at work today," William T. Vollmann has also established himself as an intrepid journalist willing to go to the hottest spots on the planet. Here he draws on these formidable talents to create a web of fifty-three interconnected tales, what he calls "a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in." Set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, Mogadishu to New York, and provocatively combining autobiography with invention, fantasy with reportage, these stories examine poverty, violence, and loss even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, the infinitely precious pain of love. The Atlas brings to life a fascinating array of human an old Inuit walrus-hunter, urban aborigines in Sydney, a crack-addicted prostitute, and even Vollmann himself.
Hailed by Newsday as "the most unconventional--and possibly the most exciting and imaginative--novelist at work today," William T. Vollmann has also established himself as an intrepid journalist willing to go to the hottest spots on the planet. Here he draws on these formidable talents to create a web of fifty-three interconnected tales, what he calls "a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in." Set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, Mogadishu to New York, and provocatively combining autobiography with invention, fantasy with reportage, these stories examine poverty, violence, and loss even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, the infinitely precious pain of love. The Atlas brings to life a fascinating array of human an old Inuit walrus-hunter, urban aborigines in Sydney, a crack-addicted prostitute, and even Vollmann himself.
496 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
82 people are currently reading
1946 people want to read
About the author
William T. Vollmann
99 books1,446 followersWilliam Tanner Vollmann is an American author, journalist, and essayist known for his ambitious and often unconventional literary works. Born on July 28, 1959, in Los Angeles, California, Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and daring writers of his generation.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 111 reviews
October 30, 2024
It's not often you'd come across a short story collection like this. It's like nothing else I've read before. Vollmann's Butterfly Stories & Whores for Gloria really impressed me but this one is on a completely different level. Where else would you find a biblical conflict in the Holy land featuring Jews and Romans, the soul of a murderer being woven into sacks in a factory in Cambodia, and cheap diseased crack whores shooting up in San Francisco. The title story itself, which runs for about 60 pages, making it the longest in the collection, has to be one of the most ambitious and creative stories in history, which starts as a train journey across various places in Canada, but is also entwined with the likes of Napoli, Cairo, New South Wales, Boston, Mogadishu, Bangkok, Sicily's Mount Etna, Mexico, Oregon, Key West, Zagreb, Budapest, Berlin, Roma, Tokyo, Nevada, Afghanistan, Burma, Delhi, Sarajevo and France—I mean, it's genius! There are moments of beauty and kindness; of horror and ugliness; of sorrow and loss throughout the book, with an eye more on the hapless people living on the fringes of life from all over the globe, and even from the point of view of plants and birds sometimes. Within the first 20 pages or so, going from Grand Central Station, to the war in Sarajevo, to Walrus hunting in Canada's Northern Territories, I just new this collection was going to be epic; something very special indeed. That's not to say it wasn't hard work though. It was. But it was more rewarding than it was huffing and puffing frustration. It can be complex, surreal, otherworldly and disorientating, but that's not to say there aren't moments of clarity and day to day realism too. One thing is for certain; this is not easy on the eye Hemingway-esque short storytelling. Yes, the likes of Pynchon and other experimental writers come to mind, but Vollmann's inspiration for writing The Atlas was Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, which I haven't yet read. For me, this is easily a 5/5, but I think only a selected few would appreciate this work in the same way I did; it's not for everybody that's for sure.
June 15, 2023
There's probably no such thing as unique where books are concerned. But this is pretty unusual. Hundreds of stories set all around the globe, some consisting of only one or two paragraphs, like literary postcards, except not of beauty spots but of the dark impoverished underlife of places. What stands out is the lyrical impressionistic prose of the author. His writing has a kind of Don DeLillo vibe. The worst of the stories tend to be a bit pretentious and overwritten but they are so short that you quickly forget about them. The best are marvels of beautiful insightful writing. I've just bought two more of his books that I can't wait to read.
September 24, 2015
THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
"I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head." [Bowie/Pop]
"He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune." [Cave]
Ways of Gazing
...but evidently this is the nature of the world in which the author/narrator construct attempts to find himself in "The Atlas", while gazing at first world lakes and mountains and grass, freebasing with pimps and whores galore, and rescuing vulnerable third world women/girls in the name of lurve. The style fluctuates from the mundane to a frequently inept parody of sub-MFA pretension, over-description and underachievement. Just when you think it's done, it repeats itself, like some (in-)digestive (re-) flux (26+1+26=no limit).
Trashing the Aesthetic
Vollmann manages to trash two favoured aesthetics in this compendium - that of the encyclopaedia and the atlas.
He strips the encyclopaedia of all significance (e.g., a digest of diverse knowledge, experience and insight) and leaves us with a rump of maximalist offcuts and outtakes (i.e., where it is enough that the work be big and fat, unedited and undigested, upsized and unappetising). The reader is left to ask: is this all there is? Does it get any better than this? Could he try a little harder, or are we meant to be satisfied with his first draft? Enough of the typing. Where is the writing? Where is the rewriting? Whoops, Vollmann has already moved on. And on and on.
Equally, the atlas is just a wall label, a peg upon which to hang Vollmann's one-dimensional landscapes and self-portraits from diverse locations around the world, united only by their origin in the indulgent mind of the author/narrator construct seated comfortably numb at his Schreibtisch in some Californian study or studio, bar fridge close by and ready to hand.
Tales of Vollmann
For all the geographical diversity of this omnibus of disparable tales, for all the worship of the "mystery called motion" (i.e., travel), the one unifying factor is that we see the world through the eyes of a contemporary narcissistic American journal-keeper, working away in darkness and in gloom, convinced that every word he has typed about his latest vacation is not just a private record, but is literature of the order of Hemingway, Steinbeck and/or Dos Passos. He's self-consciously trying to join a tradition, for which, if it won't welcome him, he'll construct a substitute, a balm for an army of followers who are seeking a source of differentiation from their antecedents.
Pungent Liquid Irrelevancies
Perhaps one of the women, a lover, a wife (but here that is just somebody with whom he has had sex), has the greatest insight into the narrator. She protests his "exhibitionist possessiveness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies."
This captures how I've increasingly begun to feel about Vollmann's writing. He marks ownership and builds empires with his words. The more words, the larger the books, the greater the literary imperialism. Occasionally, there are moments of lonely, desperate tenderness, but even these can be (and are) interpreted as imperious or "imperialist intimacy". He's rarely managed to convince me of his sincerity or his authenticity. It's all so faux. His loving hands too often become the "filthy love claws" of possession. (As a lover, he would scare the shit out of me.)
Not in the Palm of Your Hand
Vollmann asks a lot of the relationhip with the reader. Frequently it's just too much. There's too little payout for time spent, too little return on investment. It's like living with a junky artist or musician. You come home each day to find something missing. How much should we endure in order to experience a few occasional, fleeting moments of beauty? And it's not as if the other options lack beauty.
After a while, the travelogue/slide show becomes repetitive, the colourful descriptors empty of effort, meaning and elegance, the scope of the project reveals itself as ambitious without necessarily being accomplished, the presenter renders himself as just another ugly American sex tourist ("I see that you like Oriental women") pretending to reveal his sensitive side. If only Graham Greene could have lived long enough to invent or describe this character. If only there was more to this world and this life than pimps and johns and hangers on. If only these Kawabata-derived "palm of the hand stories" didn't try so hard (or hard enough) to define some new autoerotic norm, some new jizz standard.
But perhaps we should let the author/narrator construct speak for himself. You will know soon enough whether he is your cup of verbal tea.
A SAMPLER OF VOLLMANN MAGIC AT ITS BEST:
[More Songs about Blue Crystal Skies, Participular Trees and Brownish-Greenish Grass]
"'Sno Country like Snow Country"
I
Once life had been
As mysterious
As a Sierra lake
At dawn.
The sky was a ceiling
Of blue crystal held up
With white pillars of birch
Carpeted so richly
With evening ferns.
Passing down the deep
Brown railroad ties,
They reached
The forest's end.
Wet fields of pale green
With trees between the rows,
Trees as woolly
As German participles,
Pale green.
II
Dead trees among the live ones,
Long blonde grass
On the knolls
Between the pools.
The ground was pale
With lichened tussocks.
The atlas opened
As he entered
That morning
Of birds.
III
In a field of gray ponds
And grass-haired water,
He saw
Three little ducks.
Then the train was vibrating
Across a flatness
Of dark brownish-greenish grass
Under a dark slate sky
With power towers
Making tall black skeletons
Of interlocking triangles
And a radio tower flashing
Like lightning far away
Under the night's thunderhead.
IV
They came into Churchill,
Where the land was
Spongy brown and green,
With so many indigo
Swiss cheese holes,
With flat olive-colored trees
Along the river's bank,
Ocher sand-islands,
Small infrequent
Patches of snow
Like crusty flakes of dryness
In the soggy boggy ground,
And ahead the sharp
Cracked white ice
Of the bay forest
With patches of bog
Eaten out of them.
The atlas closed.
He was in the snow country
Now.
V
VI
The snow country was
For Kawabata's protagonist
The end of this world
And the beginning
Of another,
The country of pure mountains
Of sunset crystal
Which all tunnels
Are supposed to lead to,
The zone of that
Uncanny whiteness
Hymned by Poe and Melville,
The pole of transcendence.
VII
Life lay outside the windows;
It throve only
Where the sunset's rays
Struck snowdrifts,
Everywhere nowhere everywhere.
VIII
He got off the train.
IX
X
His penis burst out of
The crown of her skull
The bone of her
Snowy like a birch.
She screamed.
He held her
More tightly
And kissed her;
How could he disturb
Or disappoint her now
When she was coming?
XI
And now he wanted to shout:
What lesson am I to learn
From these screams?
XII
XIII
He lay at the center
From which the world
Rotated round
And round and round.
XIV
Presently the snow
Began to fall.
The tussocks on the hill
Became white fairy mushrooms.
XV
SOUNDTRACK:
David Bowie - "China Girl"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8IX...
Lead guitar: Nile Rodgers
"I'm feeling tragic like I'm Marlon Brando
When I look at my China Girl
I could pretend that nothing really meant too much
When I look at my China Girl
I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head
Plans for everyone
Its in the white of my eyes
My little china girl
You shouldn't mess with me
I'll ruin everything you are
I'll give you television
I'll give you eyes of blue
I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world."
David Bowie - "China Girl" [Live on October 20, 1996 at The Bridge School Benefit]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdOC-...
Featuring Reeves Gabrels on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass.
Iggy Pop - "China Girl" (Live at the Olympia, 1991)
[From the DVD: Iggy Pop - "Kiss My Blood. Live at the Olympia 1991" - A film by Tim Pope (2004)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq0kC...
Lead guitar: Whitey Kirst
China Girl
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/...
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN: A CRITICAL COMPANION
**** The Rainbow Stories (1989)
**** The Ice-Shirt (1990)
**** Whores for Gloria (1991)
**** Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
*** The Atlas (1996)
* The Royal Family (2000)
**** Rising Up and Rising Down (2003)
* Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (2004)
***** Europe Central (2005)
*** Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
Un-rated Last Stories and Other Stories (2014)
*** The Dying Grass (2015)
"I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head." [Bowie/Pop]
"He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune." [Cave]
Ways of Gazing
...but evidently this is the nature of the world in which the author/narrator construct attempts to find himself in "The Atlas", while gazing at first world lakes and mountains and grass, freebasing with pimps and whores galore, and rescuing vulnerable third world women/girls in the name of lurve. The style fluctuates from the mundane to a frequently inept parody of sub-MFA pretension, over-description and underachievement. Just when you think it's done, it repeats itself, like some (in-)digestive (re-) flux (26+1+26=no limit).
Trashing the Aesthetic
Vollmann manages to trash two favoured aesthetics in this compendium - that of the encyclopaedia and the atlas.
He strips the encyclopaedia of all significance (e.g., a digest of diverse knowledge, experience and insight) and leaves us with a rump of maximalist offcuts and outtakes (i.e., where it is enough that the work be big and fat, unedited and undigested, upsized and unappetising). The reader is left to ask: is this all there is? Does it get any better than this? Could he try a little harder, or are we meant to be satisfied with his first draft? Enough of the typing. Where is the writing? Where is the rewriting? Whoops, Vollmann has already moved on. And on and on.
Equally, the atlas is just a wall label, a peg upon which to hang Vollmann's one-dimensional landscapes and self-portraits from diverse locations around the world, united only by their origin in the indulgent mind of the author/narrator construct seated comfortably numb at his Schreibtisch in some Californian study or studio, bar fridge close by and ready to hand.
Tales of Vollmann
For all the geographical diversity of this omnibus of disparable tales, for all the worship of the "mystery called motion" (i.e., travel), the one unifying factor is that we see the world through the eyes of a contemporary narcissistic American journal-keeper, working away in darkness and in gloom, convinced that every word he has typed about his latest vacation is not just a private record, but is literature of the order of Hemingway, Steinbeck and/or Dos Passos. He's self-consciously trying to join a tradition, for which, if it won't welcome him, he'll construct a substitute, a balm for an army of followers who are seeking a source of differentiation from their antecedents.
Pungent Liquid Irrelevancies
Perhaps one of the women, a lover, a wife (but here that is just somebody with whom he has had sex), has the greatest insight into the narrator. She protests his "exhibitionist possessiveness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies."
This captures how I've increasingly begun to feel about Vollmann's writing. He marks ownership and builds empires with his words. The more words, the larger the books, the greater the literary imperialism. Occasionally, there are moments of lonely, desperate tenderness, but even these can be (and are) interpreted as imperious or "imperialist intimacy". He's rarely managed to convince me of his sincerity or his authenticity. It's all so faux. His loving hands too often become the "filthy love claws" of possession. (As a lover, he would scare the shit out of me.)
Not in the Palm of Your Hand
Vollmann asks a lot of the relationhip with the reader. Frequently it's just too much. There's too little payout for time spent, too little return on investment. It's like living with a junky artist or musician. You come home each day to find something missing. How much should we endure in order to experience a few occasional, fleeting moments of beauty? And it's not as if the other options lack beauty.
After a while, the travelogue/slide show becomes repetitive, the colourful descriptors empty of effort, meaning and elegance, the scope of the project reveals itself as ambitious without necessarily being accomplished, the presenter renders himself as just another ugly American sex tourist ("I see that you like Oriental women") pretending to reveal his sensitive side. If only Graham Greene could have lived long enough to invent or describe this character. If only there was more to this world and this life than pimps and johns and hangers on. If only these Kawabata-derived "palm of the hand stories" didn't try so hard (or hard enough) to define some new autoerotic norm, some new jizz standard.
But perhaps we should let the author/narrator construct speak for himself. You will know soon enough whether he is your cup of verbal tea.
A SAMPLER OF VOLLMANN MAGIC AT ITS BEST:
[More Songs about Blue Crystal Skies, Participular Trees and Brownish-Greenish Grass]
"'Sno Country like Snow Country"
I
Once life had been
As mysterious
As a Sierra lake
At dawn.
The sky was a ceiling
Of blue crystal held up
With white pillars of birch
Carpeted so richly
With evening ferns.
Passing down the deep
Brown railroad ties,
They reached
The forest's end.
Wet fields of pale green
With trees between the rows,
Trees as woolly
As German participles,
Pale green.
II
Dead trees among the live ones,
Long blonde grass
On the knolls
Between the pools.
The ground was pale
With lichened tussocks.
The atlas opened
As he entered
That morning
Of birds.
III
In a field of gray ponds
And grass-haired water,
He saw
Three little ducks.
Then the train was vibrating
Across a flatness
Of dark brownish-greenish grass
Under a dark slate sky
With power towers
Making tall black skeletons
Of interlocking triangles
And a radio tower flashing
Like lightning far away
Under the night's thunderhead.
IV
They came into Churchill,
Where the land was
Spongy brown and green,
With so many indigo
Swiss cheese holes,
With flat olive-colored trees
Along the river's bank,
Ocher sand-islands,
Small infrequent
Patches of snow
Like crusty flakes of dryness
In the soggy boggy ground,
And ahead the sharp
Cracked white ice
Of the bay forest
With patches of bog
Eaten out of them.
The atlas closed.
He was in the snow country
Now.
V
From the long tunnel
The train pulled out,
Across the border
Into the snow country.
VI
The snow country was
For Kawabata's protagonist
The end of this world
And the beginning
Of another,
The country of pure mountains
Of sunset crystal
Which all tunnels
Are supposed to lead to,
The zone of that
Uncanny whiteness
Hymned by Poe and Melville,
The pole of transcendence.
VII
Life lay outside the windows;
It throve only
Where the sunset's rays
Struck snowdrifts,
Everywhere nowhere everywhere.
VIII
He got off the train.
IX
What then?
X
His penis burst out of
The crown of her skull
The bone of her
Snowy like a birch.
She screamed.
He held her
More tightly
And kissed her;
How could he disturb
Or disappoint her now
When she was coming?
XI
And now he wanted to shout:
What lesson am I to learn
From these screams?
XII
This was the soul of it.
XIII
He lay at the center
From which the world
Rotated round
And round and round.
XIV
Presently the snow
Began to fall.
The tussocks on the hill
Became white fairy mushrooms.
XV
I'm alive; I'm alive.
SOUNDTRACK:
David Bowie - "China Girl"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8IX...
Lead guitar: Nile Rodgers
"I'm feeling tragic like I'm Marlon Brando
When I look at my China Girl
I could pretend that nothing really meant too much
When I look at my China Girl
I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head
Plans for everyone
Its in the white of my eyes
My little china girl
You shouldn't mess with me
I'll ruin everything you are
I'll give you television
I'll give you eyes of blue
I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world."
David Bowie - "China Girl" [Live on October 20, 1996 at The Bridge School Benefit]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdOC-...
Featuring Reeves Gabrels on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass.
Iggy Pop - "China Girl" (Live at the Olympia, 1991)
[From the DVD: Iggy Pop - "Kiss My Blood. Live at the Olympia 1991" - A film by Tim Pope (2004)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq0kC...
Lead guitar: Whitey Kirst
China Girl
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/...
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN: A CRITICAL COMPANION
**** The Rainbow Stories (1989)
**** The Ice-Shirt (1990)
**** Whores for Gloria (1991)
**** Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
*** The Atlas (1996)
* The Royal Family (2000)
**** Rising Up and Rising Down (2003)
* Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (2004)
***** Europe Central (2005)
*** Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
Un-rated Last Stories and Other Stories (2014)
*** The Dying Grass (2015)
Read
April 8, 2023Video review: https://youtu.be/KzgwV45aFAw
March 20, 2023
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
November 9, 2016
Vollmann's Map of the World. Can you descry what territory it describes? Cosmic loneliness. May the Angel of Forgetfulness quickly cloud all of our eyes before we reach the other shore.
February 6, 2021
“Esas noches vivía en la calle Mission porque en aquella zona se movía tanta gente que cabía la esperanza de que alguien rompiera el delicado y plano cristal de su alma y le matara o le liberase, aunque en vez de ello la gente se limitaba a fluir por el vidrio como grises gotas de lluvia”.
.
El otro día hablando con una amiga de ‘El Atlas’ de Vollmann le decía medio en broma que podría usar el libro como los cuáqueros, creo, o los mormones o los que sean, utilizan la Biblia cuando abren al azar una página y leen unos versículos para vislumbrar el futuro. Porque ‘El Atlas’, como los evangelios o un libro de consulta, admite lecturas parciales, sosegadas o poseídas y febriles, depende. Me sigo adentrando en sus más de 50 historias y he pasado por la parte central, ‘El Atlas’, que el mismo texto define como el núcleo incandescente de la Tierra, un espejo que parte la novela en dos mitades que se reproducen como un palíndromo de viajes en tren, chutes de heroína, prostitutas y francotiradores serbios. Hace un rato oía en Radio Clásica que la sonda Voyager navega por el espacio con un disco de oro en el que hay grabaciones de música representativas de la historia del planeta por si se la encuentran otras culturas extraterrestres. Aunque supongo que no será así, me he imaginado el aria de ‘La flauta mágica’ y la chacona de Bach que han emitido sonando en el silencio del espacio y me ha parecido que la lectura, al menos la de algunos libros enciclopédicos é inabarcables como ‘Las mil y una noches’, son como esa sonda que de repente se encuentra con un extraterrestre que puede vislumbrar cómo de absurda y a la vez de bella es la vida en este atlas azul y marrón del Sistema Solar.
.
El otro día hablando con una amiga de ‘El Atlas’ de Vollmann le decía medio en broma que podría usar el libro como los cuáqueros, creo, o los mormones o los que sean, utilizan la Biblia cuando abren al azar una página y leen unos versículos para vislumbrar el futuro. Porque ‘El Atlas’, como los evangelios o un libro de consulta, admite lecturas parciales, sosegadas o poseídas y febriles, depende. Me sigo adentrando en sus más de 50 historias y he pasado por la parte central, ‘El Atlas’, que el mismo texto define como el núcleo incandescente de la Tierra, un espejo que parte la novela en dos mitades que se reproducen como un palíndromo de viajes en tren, chutes de heroína, prostitutas y francotiradores serbios. Hace un rato oía en Radio Clásica que la sonda Voyager navega por el espacio con un disco de oro en el que hay grabaciones de música representativas de la historia del planeta por si se la encuentran otras culturas extraterrestres. Aunque supongo que no será así, me he imaginado el aria de ‘La flauta mágica’ y la chacona de Bach que han emitido sonando en el silencio del espacio y me ha parecido que la lectura, al menos la de algunos libros enciclopédicos é inabarcables como ‘Las mil y una noches’, son como esa sonda que de repente se encuentra con un extraterrestre que puede vislumbrar cómo de absurda y a la vez de bella es la vida en este atlas azul y marrón del Sistema Solar.
March 8, 2016
Vollmann is, famously, impervious to editing. He’s gone on record as saying that he is willing to endure a lot of lugubrious assignments to ensure that his books are untouched. The Atlas shows this, both to its advantage and detriment. There are no two ways around it: if some of the stories had been culled, this would be a perfect book. But with so much breadth and span—53 stories!—some are bound to fall short of the mark.
But the ones that hit, my God. Thousands of pages of Vollmann read and my heart broken many times over by his writing, nothing prepared me for “Under the Grass.” It’s my favorite piece of writing that he has ever done (that I have encountered so far). An absolutely horrific retelling of the real-life drowning of his sister, this hurt deeply. It simply defies my pathetic attempt at criticism and I urge you to read it and, hopefully, be transformed by its tragic beauty. There are more than a few others. “Houses” and “A Vision” are equally capable of laying you out.
The Atlas could just as easily have been called Pain; that’s the theme here. Almost every story ends with a line that’s the equivalent of a mic-drop (‘try and top this’). The homage to Kawabata is a nice touch, and the logical rising up and rising down (puns, the last refuge) from the central story only heightens the proceedings in terms of ambition. The other side of the tunnel (metaphorical and actual, the rising down) in the book is brimfilled with incantations decoyed as stories; phantasmal fairy tales for an age where Grimm isn’t grim enough any longer (more fucking puns!)
Spleen-venting: I read peoples reviews of WTV books on GR and am consistently enervated by the caterwauling regarding his treatment of women, or 'how he treats female characters in his books' as the phenomenon should be regarded. (Let us not forego the fact that these books are published as Fiction and that their author doesn’t exactly shy away from honesty, so there’s every reason to suspect a forking-off from fact.) I say, who are we to judge? Vollmann certainly doesn’t. There’s a consensus on GR that he actively tries to ‘protagonize’ himself into a hero of sorts. Are we reading the same books? I can’t think of another author more willing to admit his many flaws time and again. Is it that he doesn’t apologize for them that makes him less noble a human being? I say hogwash. I say phooey. If I wanted to read apologists, I’d be swimming in shallower waters.
I know a few authors that are more successful than WTV (in terms of sales) personally and, as different as they are from each other, they have one thing in common: their exploitation of women. (I know them via work; they are reprehensible and their writing is shittier than mine.) Both men have turned their book tours into virtual sex circuits to literally fuck their female fans, going so far as to have a new one lined up in each city far ahead of arrival. Their public images are as happily married men and fathers, something that one of them writes into his own work! The other is consistently praised with writing 'fully-realized' women! I include this anecdote only to illustrate the error in confusing the author with the work, as the human and the written-page are oftentimes entirely different propositions. That Vollmann shares his inner-dialogue (remember: we can’t assume where fact and fiction diverge) about the way that he has engaged with the opposite sex is laudable in my opinion. If you can’t see the incredible empathy that Vollmann has towards women, I wonder what you find so compelling in him that you read on. Is it only to continue to detract? Is he our circus geek against which we can judge our own benchmarks and declare ourselves betters?
Meh, I’m grasping at straws. I’m not a literary critic nor do I play one on TV. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions of course. So, with no further ado, I leave you with this beauty from “Under the Grass:”
“They told me to take care because you were littler, but I forgot. Brawny ropes of water captured you. The fishes asked to drink your gurgling breaths. The mud asked to kiss your eyes. The sand asked to fill your mouth. The weeds asked to sprout inside your ears. Outside the night skull, a tunnel of blue light led you to India. Inside the night skull, your blood became cold brown water.”
But the ones that hit, my God. Thousands of pages of Vollmann read and my heart broken many times over by his writing, nothing prepared me for “Under the Grass.” It’s my favorite piece of writing that he has ever done (that I have encountered so far). An absolutely horrific retelling of the real-life drowning of his sister, this hurt deeply. It simply defies my pathetic attempt at criticism and I urge you to read it and, hopefully, be transformed by its tragic beauty. There are more than a few others. “Houses” and “A Vision” are equally capable of laying you out.
The Atlas could just as easily have been called Pain; that’s the theme here. Almost every story ends with a line that’s the equivalent of a mic-drop (‘try and top this’). The homage to Kawabata is a nice touch, and the logical rising up and rising down (puns, the last refuge) from the central story only heightens the proceedings in terms of ambition. The other side of the tunnel (metaphorical and actual, the rising down) in the book is brimfilled with incantations decoyed as stories; phantasmal fairy tales for an age where Grimm isn’t grim enough any longer (more fucking puns!)
Spleen-venting: I read peoples reviews of WTV books on GR and am consistently enervated by the caterwauling regarding his treatment of women, or 'how he treats female characters in his books' as the phenomenon should be regarded. (Let us not forego the fact that these books are published as Fiction and that their author doesn’t exactly shy away from honesty, so there’s every reason to suspect a forking-off from fact.) I say, who are we to judge? Vollmann certainly doesn’t. There’s a consensus on GR that he actively tries to ‘protagonize’ himself into a hero of sorts. Are we reading the same books? I can’t think of another author more willing to admit his many flaws time and again. Is it that he doesn’t apologize for them that makes him less noble a human being? I say hogwash. I say phooey. If I wanted to read apologists, I’d be swimming in shallower waters.
I know a few authors that are more successful than WTV (in terms of sales) personally and, as different as they are from each other, they have one thing in common: their exploitation of women. (I know them via work; they are reprehensible and their writing is shittier than mine.) Both men have turned their book tours into virtual sex circuits to literally fuck their female fans, going so far as to have a new one lined up in each city far ahead of arrival. Their public images are as happily married men and fathers, something that one of them writes into his own work! The other is consistently praised with writing 'fully-realized' women! I include this anecdote only to illustrate the error in confusing the author with the work, as the human and the written-page are oftentimes entirely different propositions. That Vollmann shares his inner-dialogue (remember: we can’t assume where fact and fiction diverge) about the way that he has engaged with the opposite sex is laudable in my opinion. If you can’t see the incredible empathy that Vollmann has towards women, I wonder what you find so compelling in him that you read on. Is it only to continue to detract? Is he our circus geek against which we can judge our own benchmarks and declare ourselves betters?
Meh, I’m grasping at straws. I’m not a literary critic nor do I play one on TV. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions of course. So, with no further ado, I leave you with this beauty from “Under the Grass:”
“They told me to take care because you were littler, but I forgot. Brawny ropes of water captured you. The fishes asked to drink your gurgling breaths. The mud asked to kiss your eyes. The sand asked to fill your mouth. The weeds asked to sprout inside your ears. Outside the night skull, a tunnel of blue light led you to India. Inside the night skull, your blood became cold brown water.”
Read
August 31, 2016The Vollmann Atlas, circa 1996 (unauthorized abridgment)
Mount Aetna, Sicily
Afghanistan
Agra, India
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario
Allan Water, Ontario
Madagascar
Avignon
Bangkok
Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand
Battambang City, Cambodia
Battle Rock, Oregon
Beograd
Berkley, CA
Berlin
Big Bend, CA
Bologna
Boot Hill, Nebraska
Boston, USA
Budapest
Cairo
California
Capri, Italia
Charlevoix, Québec
Chaing Mai, Thailand
Churchill, Manitoba
Southampton, Northwest Territories
Cornwall, Ontario
Delhi
Diesel Bend, Utah
Elma, Manitoba
Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories
Frankfurt am main
Goa, India
Grand Central Station, NYC
Great Western Desert, Australia
Guildwood, Ontario
Hanover, NH
Herculaneum
Highway 88 & 395, CA
Ho Mong, Shan State, Burma (Myanmar)
Home
Hong Kong
Interstate 80, CA
Inukjuak
Jaipur Province
Japan
Jerusualm
Joshua Tree National Monument
Karenni State, Burma (Myanmar)
Key West
Distrito Federal, Mexico
Limbo
LA
Lutton, OK
Madagascar
Mae Hong Song, Thailand
Mauritius
Malachi, Ontario
Marakooper Cave, Tasmania
Masada
Mendocino, CA
Mexicali
Mexico
its city
Mission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, Ontario
Mobile, AL
Mogadishu
Mont-Pellerin, Switzerland
Montréal
Nairobi
Napoli
Nevada
New Orleans
New South Wales
NYC&S
The Nile
North America
Omaha, Nebraska
Orillia, Ontario
Ottermere, Ontario
Pacific Palisades, California
Paris
Philadelphia
Phnom Penh
Pickering, Ontario
Poland
Pompeii
Pond Inlet, Baffin Island
Pot Hope, Ontario
Puako Bay, Hawaii
Reddit, Ontario
Redfern, Sydney, New South Wales
Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island
Rice Lake, Manitoba
Deep Springs Valley, CA
Roma
Sacramento
Samuel H. Boardman State Park, OR
San Bruno, Diego & Francisco, all CA
San Ignacio, Belize
Sarajevo
Savant Lake, Ontario
Sioux Lookout, also Ontario
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island
The Sphere of Stars
Split
State of Vatican City
Sudbury, Ontario
Sydney
Tamatave, Madagascar
Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico
Thailand
The Pas, Manitoba
Tokyo to Osaka
Toronto
Virginia Beach
Wailea, Maui
Washago, Ontario
Winnipeg
Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma)
Yukon Territory
Zagreb
Alternately his atlas is a series of palm-of-the-hand stories ; a stack of short-stories, simpliciter ; multiple moments of meditation ; tableaux of persons and places ; a novel, organized and unified thematically, palindromically ; a soporific for your drowsing and dreaming.
Mount Aetna, Sicily
Afghanistan
Agra, India
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario
Allan Water, Ontario
Madagascar
Avignon
Bangkok
Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand
Battambang City, Cambodia
Battle Rock, Oregon
Beograd
Berkley, CA
Berlin
Big Bend, CA
Bologna
Boot Hill, Nebraska
Boston, USA
Budapest
Cairo
California
Capri, Italia
Charlevoix, Québec
Chaing Mai, Thailand
Churchill, Manitoba
Southampton, Northwest Territories
Cornwall, Ontario
Delhi
Diesel Bend, Utah
Elma, Manitoba
Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories
Frankfurt am main
Goa, India
Grand Central Station, NYC
Great Western Desert, Australia
Guildwood, Ontario
Hanover, NH
Herculaneum
Highway 88 & 395, CA
Ho Mong, Shan State, Burma (Myanmar)
Home
Hong Kong
Interstate 80, CA
Inukjuak
Jaipur Province
Japan
Jerusualm
Joshua Tree National Monument
Karenni State, Burma (Myanmar)
Key West
Distrito Federal, Mexico
Limbo
LA
Lutton, OK
Madagascar
Mae Hong Song, Thailand
Mauritius
Malachi, Ontario
Marakooper Cave, Tasmania
Masada
Mendocino, CA
Mexicali
Mexico
its city
Mission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, Ontario
Mobile, AL
Mogadishu
Mont-Pellerin, Switzerland
Montréal
Nairobi
Napoli
Nevada
New Orleans
New South Wales
NYC&S
The Nile
North America
Omaha, Nebraska
Orillia, Ontario
Ottermere, Ontario
Pacific Palisades, California
Paris
Philadelphia
Phnom Penh
Pickering, Ontario
Poland
Pompeii
Pond Inlet, Baffin Island
Pot Hope, Ontario
Puako Bay, Hawaii
Reddit, Ontario
Redfern, Sydney, New South Wales
Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island
Rice Lake, Manitoba
Deep Springs Valley, CA
Roma
Sacramento
Samuel H. Boardman State Park, OR
San Bruno, Diego & Francisco, all CA
San Ignacio, Belize
Sarajevo
Savant Lake, Ontario
Sioux Lookout, also Ontario
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island
The Sphere of Stars
Split
State of Vatican City
Sudbury, Ontario
Sydney
Tamatave, Madagascar
Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico
Thailand
The Pas, Manitoba
Tokyo to Osaka
Toronto
Virginia Beach
Wailea, Maui
Washago, Ontario
Winnipeg
Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma)
Yukon Territory
Zagreb
Alternately his atlas is a series of palm-of-the-hand stories ; a stack of short-stories, simpliciter ; multiple moments of meditation ; tableaux of persons and places ; a novel, organized and unified thematically, palindromically ; a soporific for your drowsing and dreaming.
January 22, 2013
Sweet Reader,
Allow me to corral this stampede of kittens. One Blind Billy was so in love. Then his "wife" left him. There wasn't a ceremony as such, he just knew it. This was love for Lifetime movie Network, it lasted as long as he bought her drinks and paid for the hotel room. She was gone. Blind Billy then had horrific heartache in his penis. He had to win her back. Traveling through more time zones than a Jim Jarmusch film, Blind Billy discovered some indelible truths. Clean water and being exempt from shellfire are overrated. The quest isn't too bad when carrying hard currency. Prostitutes are wonderful creatures, dreamily lost and not suffering any issues from prior trauma or violation. Blind Billy also finds opportunities to digest and extrapolate history. He interweaves such with bad poetry about whimpering sunsets and ocher teardrops.
Allow me to corral this stampede of kittens. One Blind Billy was so in love. Then his "wife" left him. There wasn't a ceremony as such, he just knew it. This was love for Lifetime movie Network, it lasted as long as he bought her drinks and paid for the hotel room. She was gone. Blind Billy then had horrific heartache in his penis. He had to win her back. Traveling through more time zones than a Jim Jarmusch film, Blind Billy discovered some indelible truths. Clean water and being exempt from shellfire are overrated. The quest isn't too bad when carrying hard currency. Prostitutes are wonderful creatures, dreamily lost and not suffering any issues from prior trauma or violation. Blind Billy also finds opportunities to digest and extrapolate history. He interweaves such with bad poetry about whimpering sunsets and ocher teardrops.
May 22, 2015
Ostensibly a series of tenuously connected short stories, The Atlas reads like an assemblage of Vollmann's fractured recollections and imaginings from throughout his travels, mingled and stewed together into a single stream of undifferentiated consciousness until the former are indistinguishable from the latter. The influence of surrealism, of Lautremeant is palpable.
Vollamnn's voice is incredibly unique, managing to sound at once naive and world-weary. Despite the incredible horrors on display in each of the numerous locales visited throughout each of these stories--from war zones to brothels to ghettoes and Indian reservations--Vollmann somehow manages to retain his empathy, not only for the victims of these horrors but also, for the perpetrators.
Vollmann is a man who seems at home among junkies, murderers, pimps and, especially, prostitues, like Christ without the pretense of perfection, like a libidinous Buddha.
The Atlas functions almost like a Vollmann reader. Many of the stories seem to be seeds or leftovers from one of his other books. For instance, the hopelessly tragic Reepah, Vollmann's suicidal alcoholic Inuit girlfriend from The Rifles, makes an appearance. As does his Cambodian "wife" from the Butterfly Stories. But instead of feeling recycled, the inclusion of this material in the Atlas only testifies to Vollmann's prolific imagination. That he could write thousand page tomes about a subject and still have original material left over for inclusion in a 450 page short story collection is pretty impressive.
Vollamnn's voice is incredibly unique, managing to sound at once naive and world-weary. Despite the incredible horrors on display in each of the numerous locales visited throughout each of these stories--from war zones to brothels to ghettoes and Indian reservations--Vollmann somehow manages to retain his empathy, not only for the victims of these horrors but also, for the perpetrators.
Vollmann is a man who seems at home among junkies, murderers, pimps and, especially, prostitues, like Christ without the pretense of perfection, like a libidinous Buddha.
The Atlas functions almost like a Vollmann reader. Many of the stories seem to be seeds or leftovers from one of his other books. For instance, the hopelessly tragic Reepah, Vollmann's suicidal alcoholic Inuit girlfriend from The Rifles, makes an appearance. As does his Cambodian "wife" from the Butterfly Stories. But instead of feeling recycled, the inclusion of this material in the Atlas only testifies to Vollmann's prolific imagination. That he could write thousand page tomes about a subject and still have original material left over for inclusion in a 450 page short story collection is pretty impressive.
June 23, 2025
"This was the soul of it, this rushing and swooping in winged or wheeled tombs, always straining toward some beauty as remote as the sun."
What I hold here, is a piecemeal Atlas of the world Vollmann thinks in; a book that I personally believe is the gateway drug to drawing in a wealth of unprepared readers into a mind who’s genius is a woeful combination of both under-read, and undervalued. I don’t throw around the word “genius” with ease, mind you. The only contemporary (read: living) authors to whom I could confidently ascribe an adjective as loaded with expectation as this would be Laszlo Krasznahorkai and that other guy I never shut about it (you should know who by now).
‘The Atlas’ is a truly unique combination of disparate ingredients. Like its predecessor ‘The Rainbow Stories’, it’s a collection that is immediately and proudly hostile to gentle classification. Consider it’s constituent elements: a kaleidoscopic combination of reportage, memoire, wish-fulfilment, straight fiction, and alternative history. A text as diverse in form as the content that fills it’s (somehow slim) 450-odd pages.
That diversity is what makes it an experience that returns continually with the arrival and passage of each consecutive story nestled within. Whatever expectation or assurance you think you have going into each subsequent tale will be undercut with a dissonant combination of perversion, epiphany, or melancholy reflection. Vollmann’s mind operates on a frequency that - even four books into my reading of him - I’m still struggling to nail down. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to his writing. He never ceases to surprise me.
‘The Atlas’ is a brilliant collection and one I would recommend to any reader - seasoned or incumbent to his work - whose looking for bite-sized substantive, reflections on a world that is as deep as it is wide. A favourite author was established within these pages.
Side note: it was touching to read the inclusion of both the city I hail from and the one I now call home.
What I hold here, is a piecemeal Atlas of the world Vollmann thinks in; a book that I personally believe is the gateway drug to drawing in a wealth of unprepared readers into a mind who’s genius is a woeful combination of both under-read, and undervalued. I don’t throw around the word “genius” with ease, mind you. The only contemporary (read: living) authors to whom I could confidently ascribe an adjective as loaded with expectation as this would be Laszlo Krasznahorkai and that other guy I never shut about it (you should know who by now).
‘The Atlas’ is a truly unique combination of disparate ingredients. Like its predecessor ‘The Rainbow Stories’, it’s a collection that is immediately and proudly hostile to gentle classification. Consider it’s constituent elements: a kaleidoscopic combination of reportage, memoire, wish-fulfilment, straight fiction, and alternative history. A text as diverse in form as the content that fills it’s (somehow slim) 450-odd pages.
That diversity is what makes it an experience that returns continually with the arrival and passage of each consecutive story nestled within. Whatever expectation or assurance you think you have going into each subsequent tale will be undercut with a dissonant combination of perversion, epiphany, or melancholy reflection. Vollmann’s mind operates on a frequency that - even four books into my reading of him - I’m still struggling to nail down. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to his writing. He never ceases to surprise me.
‘The Atlas’ is a brilliant collection and one I would recommend to any reader - seasoned or incumbent to his work - whose looking for bite-sized substantive, reflections on a world that is as deep as it is wide. A favourite author was established within these pages.
Side note: it was touching to read the inclusion of both the city I hail from and the one I now call home.
March 16, 2016
The only wisdom is to drift - Francis Bacon (the painter)
This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through - Tom Waits
It's kind of a cliche to say this, but honestly who would expect the author of this book (published in 1996) to still be alive 20 years later?
Here travel mainly appears as a way to aggressively court death. In the past half century or so novelists with serious artistic ambitions have become more sheltered and insular, lifelong denizens of the artificial world of college campuses - at least in this country... right? Vollmann's adventures are all the more shocking for how completely he bucks this trend.
Has the man mellowed or settled down in the last twenty years? I noticed these early books are studded with philosophy, sometimes in the form explicit citation (an epigraph from Leibniz!), sometimes in the use of categories and abstract language. In recent years his style seems much more folksy and plain-spoken, his ideas at times surprisingly banal (see this disappointing op-ed in which he bemoans the "un-Americans" https://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/l...). While he still does a lot of really crazy things, he's now a property owner and the father of a teenage girl. Does this represent some kind of conciliation with reality?
I wonder if it ever occurred to Vollmann to think he was handsome as a young man. At first it's a little hard to see past the veneer of weirdness, but he was.
*
At his best, Vollmann is a kind of new-and-improved beat generation unto himself. I love the fact that, for all his exotic travels and highfalutin allusions, this book ends in a cheap diner in Sacramento.
This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through - Tom Waits
It's kind of a cliche to say this, but honestly who would expect the author of this book (published in 1996) to still be alive 20 years later?
Here travel mainly appears as a way to aggressively court death. In the past half century or so novelists with serious artistic ambitions have become more sheltered and insular, lifelong denizens of the artificial world of college campuses - at least in this country... right? Vollmann's adventures are all the more shocking for how completely he bucks this trend.
Has the man mellowed or settled down in the last twenty years? I noticed these early books are studded with philosophy, sometimes in the form explicit citation (an epigraph from Leibniz!), sometimes in the use of categories and abstract language. In recent years his style seems much more folksy and plain-spoken, his ideas at times surprisingly banal (see this disappointing op-ed in which he bemoans the "un-Americans" https://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/l...). While he still does a lot of really crazy things, he's now a property owner and the father of a teenage girl. Does this represent some kind of conciliation with reality?
I wonder if it ever occurred to Vollmann to think he was handsome as a young man. At first it's a little hard to see past the veneer of weirdness, but he was.
*
At his best, Vollmann is a kind of new-and-improved beat generation unto himself. I love the fact that, for all his exotic travels and highfalutin allusions, this book ends in a cheap diner in Sacramento.
March 17, 2018
«¡Y que tu alma revolotee libre por el mundo!»
Me rindo completamente ante William T. Vollmann. Para leer este libro seguí la recomedación que viene en la "Nota del compilador". Disfruté de casi todos los cuentos en un estado intermedio entre la vigilia y el sueño. Viajar así al atlas particular de Vollmann es encontrar una doble realidad. Por una parte, la inmensa dimensión de la experiencia: guerra, amor, lucha contra o admiración por la naturaleza, tristeza, soledad... Por otra parte, la variedad de paisajes, culturas e individuos. Resumir cada una de las cincuenta y tres historias que forman este libro sería traicionar su espíritu y sus conexiones internas, las cuales solo se revelan en la lectura. En consecuencia, solo puedo reflexionar de forma un tanto difusa, acaso con el infortunio de no asir lo más bello de la escritura, que siempre es concreto. Como un ritmo compuesto de latidos, el conjunto de relatos es una maravillosa apología de la vida: de la lucha por ella, de la valentía y de la cobardía, y de ambas como formas de sobrevivir. Existe una melodía, además, a manera de contrapunto: una elegía compuesta por las sucesivas contemplaciones de la muerte y de sus huellas, ángeles o fantasmas. Dice Vollmann: «El centro está donde estamos nosotros; de ahí que al viajar solo cambiemos nuestras periferias. Un viajero puede gobernar (o ser esclavo de) muchos, muchos mundos». Leer "El atlas" es desplazar la mirada, y con ella el pensamiento y las emociones, hacia esos mundos.
Me rindo completamente ante William T. Vollmann. Para leer este libro seguí la recomedación que viene en la "Nota del compilador". Disfruté de casi todos los cuentos en un estado intermedio entre la vigilia y el sueño. Viajar así al atlas particular de Vollmann es encontrar una doble realidad. Por una parte, la inmensa dimensión de la experiencia: guerra, amor, lucha contra o admiración por la naturaleza, tristeza, soledad... Por otra parte, la variedad de paisajes, culturas e individuos. Resumir cada una de las cincuenta y tres historias que forman este libro sería traicionar su espíritu y sus conexiones internas, las cuales solo se revelan en la lectura. En consecuencia, solo puedo reflexionar de forma un tanto difusa, acaso con el infortunio de no asir lo más bello de la escritura, que siempre es concreto. Como un ritmo compuesto de latidos, el conjunto de relatos es una maravillosa apología de la vida: de la lucha por ella, de la valentía y de la cobardía, y de ambas como formas de sobrevivir. Existe una melodía, además, a manera de contrapunto: una elegía compuesta por las sucesivas contemplaciones de la muerte y de sus huellas, ángeles o fantasmas. Dice Vollmann: «El centro está donde estamos nosotros; de ahí que al viajar solo cambiemos nuestras periferias. Un viajero puede gobernar (o ser esclavo de) muchos, muchos mundos». Leer "El atlas" es desplazar la mirada, y con ella el pensamiento y las emociones, hacia esos mundos.
February 8, 2018
Está por ver que este año lea algo mejor que esto, y eso que estamos en febrero. Tremendo Vollmann.
Read
March 12, 2023Eu devia ter desconfiado quando comecei a ler/ver conteúdos sobre o Vollmann e este livro em particular, todas muito elogiosas, mas exclusivamente masculinas. (Às vezes esqueço-me de como a desconfiança pode ser sadia e propensa à auto-preservação.)
«O Atlas» de William T Volmann é a cornice mais misógina e lenocina (eu sei que há aqui um pleonasmo; deixem-me!) que li em toda a minha vida.
E sim, há muita coisa por aí que partilha estas características odiosas, é vasta a lista de obras generosas em cornice misógina, romantização/normalização da exploração e objectificação dos corpos das mulheres, desumanização das mulheres, diabolização da mulher toxicodependente/incumpridora de deveres parentais/afectivamente reservada ou indisponível/simplesmente desobediente à vontade do macho.
Mas este agregado de trechos narrativos cornos eleva aquele leque aos píncaros de uma escrita forte e segura, densa de imagens e contextos plúrimos de uma deambulação planetária cornuda. «O Atlas» é um mapeamento de ódio sonso às mulheres que, se não enojar o leitor, então talvez este possa servir de matéria de estudo sociológico sobre a razão pela qual o predador das mulheres é o homem e nada na sociedade se muda para cessar a violência e opressão da qual as mulheres são e serão vítimas até nas sociedades que gostam de se pensar como «mais evoluídas».
Além de convocar o globo terrestre com focalizações em pontos escolhidos, cumprindo a forma de um palíndromo narrativo que é um tratado de cornice misógina e lenocínio, «O Atlas» também integra um asco de outro tipo: o do turista de guerra que sob as vestes do jornalismo vai sugar adrenalina e satisfação de pulsão sádica para depois relatar a barbárie enquanto adereço performativo de glutonia de atenção e sociopatia socialmente validada com a unção unânime. «Oh, a coragem de Beltrano! Que partiu da segurança do seu lar para, com valentia e dedicação à causa, comer torradas de abacate num bar de hotel, ao som de artilharia pesada sobre bairros de desgraçados sem nada para comer há semanas, e ainda encontra tempo para uns passeios voyeurs enquanto desafia a sorte sobre os quais envia textos cheios de si e pimenta no cu dos outros».
Haja intelectuais, e pessoas melhores do que eu, para receberem como heróis estes bravos sugadores da miséria alheia, e também para apreciarem cornice literária sem consciência de género ou de classe.
«O Atlas» de William T Volmann é a cornice mais misógina e lenocina (eu sei que há aqui um pleonasmo; deixem-me!) que li em toda a minha vida.
E sim, há muita coisa por aí que partilha estas características odiosas, é vasta a lista de obras generosas em cornice misógina, romantização/normalização da exploração e objectificação dos corpos das mulheres, desumanização das mulheres, diabolização da mulher toxicodependente/incumpridora de deveres parentais/afectivamente reservada ou indisponível/simplesmente desobediente à vontade do macho.
Mas este agregado de trechos narrativos cornos eleva aquele leque aos píncaros de uma escrita forte e segura, densa de imagens e contextos plúrimos de uma deambulação planetária cornuda. «O Atlas» é um mapeamento de ódio sonso às mulheres que, se não enojar o leitor, então talvez este possa servir de matéria de estudo sociológico sobre a razão pela qual o predador das mulheres é o homem e nada na sociedade se muda para cessar a violência e opressão da qual as mulheres são e serão vítimas até nas sociedades que gostam de se pensar como «mais evoluídas».
Além de convocar o globo terrestre com focalizações em pontos escolhidos, cumprindo a forma de um palíndromo narrativo que é um tratado de cornice misógina e lenocínio, «O Atlas» também integra um asco de outro tipo: o do turista de guerra que sob as vestes do jornalismo vai sugar adrenalina e satisfação de pulsão sádica para depois relatar a barbárie enquanto adereço performativo de glutonia de atenção e sociopatia socialmente validada com a unção unânime. «Oh, a coragem de Beltrano! Que partiu da segurança do seu lar para, com valentia e dedicação à causa, comer torradas de abacate num bar de hotel, ao som de artilharia pesada sobre bairros de desgraçados sem nada para comer há semanas, e ainda encontra tempo para uns passeios voyeurs enquanto desafia a sorte sobre os quais envia textos cheios de si e pimenta no cu dos outros».
Haja intelectuais, e pessoas melhores do que eu, para receberem como heróis estes bravos sugadores da miséria alheia, e também para apreciarem cornice literária sem consciência de género ou de classe.
March 28, 2025
Despite indeed being a collection of globetrotting adventures, The Atlas still comes across as a misleading title. There are certainly many tales told, each set in familiar or exotic locales spanning this great wide world of ours, but much of the time this matters little. Each segment spends more time in the head of the author than the places they’re named after, the diversities of the settings invariably obfuscated by the author’s tendency towards tedious, gratuitous descriptiveness. The breadth of his vocabulary, while perhaps impressive, is unleashed upon the audience with a torturous lack of restraint, presumably for the pleasure of Vollmann alone. Perversity, misanthropy and humiliation seem to be his game though, which are natural enemies of restraint. Inherently, this is all fine and well and intermittently used to great effect here, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, and Vollmann repeatedly runs headfirst into that wall with gusto which dovetails with the foremost reason that these stories fail to coalesce into the promise of its title. So many of them are about grubby sex tourism. All the novel ways found to elucidate and protract endless mundanities seemed to have produced a cap on imagining unique scenarios to house them in! The world through these eyes is nothing but a flesh pot dressed up in variable superfluidities. Be it a rain-drenched city, a seedy hole-in-the-wall or a sweltering jungle, the nexus of each of them is discovering which poor, terminally foreign wretch will pretend to profess love in broken English to another. Not so much an anecdotal collage of the world, but a cum-stained itinerary of where to get the best poontang. It’s looking at a Robert Crumb world taken seriously, aided by the rocky sophistication that a smart alec whose nose is stuck in a dictionary might pick up. It’s as vexing as it is sluggish because there actually are flashes of clear, realized brilliance that are hard to forget, but they’re only ever glints of diamonds, buried under the weighty detritus of unpolished ambition. Vollmann famously elects to have total control over his publications, free from an editor’s influence, but it’s likely that all parties would benefit from a critical intervention on the topic of hubris.
August 9, 2019
from jungle trails, river sides of the far north, war torn streets, bar alleys, bullfights, riding in cars, buses and trains, drinking and eating, sex and traveling.
February 4, 2023
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
January 2, 2009
Some of the most magnificent prose I've ever read -- short, staggering pieces assembled from long, beautiful sentences, like poetry without stanzas. Truly incredible. Bill does have an over-the-top obsession with prostitutes -- and I, knowing this reputation, thinking that he was just upset about the nature of the sex trade, had no idea that he was a frequent customer. Vollman himself reminds me, to a certain degree, of that really annoying indie rocker who's partied with all the great bands and loves to talk about it, but in that removed, I-don't-really-care-but-listen-to-me-anyway manner that can drive other people crazy. Still, his apparent death wish (traveling to Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Cambodia and the like) makes for gripping stories about the world's most horrifying circumstances. I admire Vollman greatly, though I doubt we'd make good company for each other.
January 22, 2018
En el centro del atlas está el escritor. El mapa que nos propone Vollmann es, por supuesto, literario. Relatos breves en una estructura palindrómica, dice, piramidal, digo, que recorre los temas de todas sus obras quizás bajo el motivo recurrente y unificador del amor. Un amor muy peculiar y subjetivo, voluble e itinerante, inconstante y pasional.
No es un drama, salvo sobre el papel.
Vollmann, como siempre, inclasificable y sublime.
No es un drama, salvo sobre el papel.
Vollmann, como siempre, inclasificable y sublime.
February 12, 2025
“Hell is all around us, each and every day, in the form of anything that goes on for long enough.”
It’s no wonder that William T. Vollmann adopted the moniker William The Blind. It would be a reasonable course of action for anyone who saw the things he saw from the years of 1991 to 1996. The events from those years which make up The Atlas are chosen piecemeal from throughout his travels for magazines like Spin, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, work which informed his entire career; it’s like an atlas of the world as he sees it. It picks up right where Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs left off, amid the verdant lush lawns of Sacramento’s winding drives. These homes serve as Vollmann’s residential eidolon and safe haven, while he ventures deeper and deeper into unknown territory, an alien observer in a world that wasn’t made for him. He records his observations in the smog-choked streets of Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and the roach-infested maw of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where battered and broken women guide his mouth to the glass pipe. He inhales of his own volition. Then he is in Mexico, cutting across the vast border wastes, exploring the secret halls of bordellos encrusted with blood-red rubies. (Imperial, 2011) He gets lost in snowdrifts in Montreal, drives over the black ice in the rural outskirts of Quebec. He meets an Inuit woman named Reepah and falls in love with her, and comes to believe he is a grave-twin (a sort of facing-deathwards reincarnation) of Sir John Franklin. Franklin’s ghost leads him to a nearly-fatal Northwest Passage of his own, at an abandoned research station with constant subzero temperatures and echoing metal corridors. (The Rifles, 1995) His travels in post-Khmer Rouge Thailand once again bring him into the path of Vanna, (Butterfly Stories, 1994) now struck with the early stages of HIV. They can barely communicate, she’s been sending him letters but he never seems to reply, the influence of Ken Miller lurks in the background. (The Rainbow Stories, 1989) Vanna holds his face in her hands while she shaves him with a straightrazor; a feverish barber later slices his cheek open. She loves him because he’s going to die for her. No matter how far he travels, he can never escape the specter that hangs over him. He ventures into Sarajevo with a friend from college, both on assignment for Spin magazine. They live in a long and unbroken series of smoky and hedonistic shelling parties in apartment flats while NATO bombers draw closer and closer: weekly casualty reports at the Holiday Inn, running with their heads ducked across the airfield under a rain of sniper fire, dancing cheek to cheek while singing along to the whistling of the shells. (Last Stories And Other Stories, 2014) They’re caught by snipers on the bridge to Mostar. Only one of them comes home, and the other spends the rest of his life holding a hand to the back of his head, wondering when the last shot is going to finally sink into the flesh. His most punishing expedition, however, isn’t through desolate wilderness or war-torn territory. It’s the train ride from Grand Central Station back to his childhood home, where his younger sister drowned in a pond when he was supposed to be watching over her. (Life As A Terrorist, Harper’s, 2013.) They used to scuttle like salamanders across the dew-slick rocks. Now he crosses fields of ashes, dives into raging rivers, listens to the shells. Suppose he’d never done what they never said he did, could he still have been who he now is? His blood-writing is his Atlas, his lifelong act of self punishment, but it’s not enough: he wishes she was still his sister, dancing above the grass.
It’s no wonder that William T. Vollmann adopted the moniker William The Blind. It would be a reasonable course of action for anyone who saw the things he saw from the years of 1991 to 1996. The events from those years which make up The Atlas are chosen piecemeal from throughout his travels for magazines like Spin, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, work which informed his entire career; it’s like an atlas of the world as he sees it. It picks up right where Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs left off, amid the verdant lush lawns of Sacramento’s winding drives. These homes serve as Vollmann’s residential eidolon and safe haven, while he ventures deeper and deeper into unknown territory, an alien observer in a world that wasn’t made for him. He records his observations in the smog-choked streets of Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and the roach-infested maw of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where battered and broken women guide his mouth to the glass pipe. He inhales of his own volition. Then he is in Mexico, cutting across the vast border wastes, exploring the secret halls of bordellos encrusted with blood-red rubies. (Imperial, 2011) He gets lost in snowdrifts in Montreal, drives over the black ice in the rural outskirts of Quebec. He meets an Inuit woman named Reepah and falls in love with her, and comes to believe he is a grave-twin (a sort of facing-deathwards reincarnation) of Sir John Franklin. Franklin’s ghost leads him to a nearly-fatal Northwest Passage of his own, at an abandoned research station with constant subzero temperatures and echoing metal corridors. (The Rifles, 1995) His travels in post-Khmer Rouge Thailand once again bring him into the path of Vanna, (Butterfly Stories, 1994) now struck with the early stages of HIV. They can barely communicate, she’s been sending him letters but he never seems to reply, the influence of Ken Miller lurks in the background. (The Rainbow Stories, 1989) Vanna holds his face in her hands while she shaves him with a straightrazor; a feverish barber later slices his cheek open. She loves him because he’s going to die for her. No matter how far he travels, he can never escape the specter that hangs over him. He ventures into Sarajevo with a friend from college, both on assignment for Spin magazine. They live in a long and unbroken series of smoky and hedonistic shelling parties in apartment flats while NATO bombers draw closer and closer: weekly casualty reports at the Holiday Inn, running with their heads ducked across the airfield under a rain of sniper fire, dancing cheek to cheek while singing along to the whistling of the shells. (Last Stories And Other Stories, 2014) They’re caught by snipers on the bridge to Mostar. Only one of them comes home, and the other spends the rest of his life holding a hand to the back of his head, wondering when the last shot is going to finally sink into the flesh. His most punishing expedition, however, isn’t through desolate wilderness or war-torn territory. It’s the train ride from Grand Central Station back to his childhood home, where his younger sister drowned in a pond when he was supposed to be watching over her. (Life As A Terrorist, Harper’s, 2013.) They used to scuttle like salamanders across the dew-slick rocks. Now he crosses fields of ashes, dives into raging rivers, listens to the shells. Suppose he’d never done what they never said he did, could he still have been who he now is? His blood-writing is his Atlas, his lifelong act of self punishment, but it’s not enough: he wishes she was still his sister, dancing above the grass.
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December 28, 2017William Vollmann writes stories on similar themes of war and sex for sale, set all over the world, but with a few focused locations -- America's urban fringe, Northern Canada, Bosnia, Southeast Asia. With the constant switching of locations and characters in these stories, it's got this almost William S. Burroughs cut-up quality, especially the central, titular story, in which there's no warning about a switch in setting.
But does the actual content of the cut-up bits count for much? I'm not so sure. As a Bangkok resident, I find the parts about this particular part of the world embarrassingly bad, the worst sort of superficial tourist-lit about Southeast Asia... but other parts have a haunting beauty. The Atlas is uneven, but probably worth it.
But does the actual content of the cut-up bits count for much? I'm not so sure. As a Bangkok resident, I find the parts about this particular part of the world embarrassingly bad, the worst sort of superficial tourist-lit about Southeast Asia... but other parts have a haunting beauty. The Atlas is uneven, but probably worth it.
March 8, 2022
not sure what it says about his 500+ page novels that he’s able to condense a few of them here into ~10 page stories. but whatever, i feel like i’m getting my head around Vollmann’s whole “deal” now. turns out he’s a bit of a misanthrope! not sure i necessarily agree with his declaration that life is war, but i think it certainly can be if you want it to be. for me life is more often like being an NPC in Skyrim
March 31, 2020
How can you even review a book like this? What parts of the world did he not write about in this book, what cultures and subcultures did he leave out and which human dynamics did he neglect? Looking back, the scope of this work is overwhelming.
Outside of that, this is really a big sampling of Vollmann. It contains some of his finest descriptive prose as well as his rougher, colloquially driven writing.
I gave this four stars because it also features another thematic dynamic of Vollmann’s style: dude, learn to kill your darlings. At least 20% of this could have been cropped out. Senseless filler, the same old prostitute stories and page long “stories” that leave you feeling cheated in the middle of an otherwise masterpiece, wondering, “Wait, what was the point of that one?” I swear, his biggest, if not only, flaw is his apparent lack of an authoritative editor.
Outside of that, this is really a big sampling of Vollmann. It contains some of his finest descriptive prose as well as his rougher, colloquially driven writing.
I gave this four stars because it also features another thematic dynamic of Vollmann’s style: dude, learn to kill your darlings. At least 20% of this could have been cropped out. Senseless filler, the same old prostitute stories and page long “stories” that leave you feeling cheated in the middle of an otherwise masterpiece, wondering, “Wait, what was the point of that one?” I swear, his biggest, if not only, flaw is his apparent lack of an authoritative editor.
March 20, 2025
The stories can be quite clunky in prose/structure, but the emotional core of Vollmann's writing is powerful. Some of the conceits he uses are also fantastic: see "Too Many Gods" and "Five Lonely Nights" for examples. He hasn't, at this point in his career, become a true storyteller as I see it. His Last Stories collection shows baffling growth there. There are also enough cool intellectual puzzles to keep my mind engaged through these pages. The actual stories would be closer to a 6/10, but they really connected with me personally.
September 29, 2021
diz-se que vollmann detesta a edição e revisão dos seus textos. a escrita sai de si assim, jorrando como uma nascente, e as palavras ficam gravadas em pedra. isto, para o melhor e o pior, faz dele um escritor raro. claro que algumas destas histórias (contos? episódios biográficos? nem uma coisa nem outra?), são mais de cinquenta, talvez não merecessem estar ao lado de pérolas como "casas", "uma visão", "encarnações do assassino" e "por baixo da relva" (magnífico texto sobre a morte da irmã), mas um atlas é isso mesmo: há sítios melhores do que outros para viver ou visitar.
October 22, 2022
I met Vollmann once after a reading and he recommended this as the best place to start with his large body of work. It’s a collection of stories and sketches from his travels. Themes include loneliness, prostitution, addiction, the harshness of nature, and indigenous peoples in the modern world. Ventures into surrealism are hit and miss. My favorites were “Under the Grass” and “The Prophet of the Road”.
February 12, 2023
This one takes a bit of reflection given the wealth of material in here.
It is an eclectic mix of reportage, short stories and deeply personal experiences which are often tragic and suffused with the feeling of listlessness and an inability of the author to commit.
I enjoyed it but I think I still prefer Vollman's fiction so far.
It is an eclectic mix of reportage, short stories and deeply personal experiences which are often tragic and suffused with the feeling of listlessness and an inability of the author to commit.
I enjoyed it but I think I still prefer Vollman's fiction so far.
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