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Storie della farfalla
Amici e complici di bravate, sesso e avventure, un giornalista e un fotografo americani si immergono e ci accompagnano in un lungo itinerario fra Oriente e Occidente. Nell’inferno della Cambogia, ancora segnata da un profondo retaggio di stragi e violenze, il giornalista si innamora perdutamente di Vanna, una prostituta proveniente dalla capitale. Ma anziché trovare un impossibile e forse ipocrita riscatto nell’amore, continua le sue peregrinazioni in un mondo nel quale degradazione e purezza formano un binomio inestricabile. Tra taxi-girl e turisti del sesso, tra cinismo e perdizione, Storie della farfalla è una fiaba crudele, che trasforma in incubo contemporaneo il sogno romantico dell’amore assoluto, dell’innocenza felice. Vollmann si spinge a individuare nella prostituzione e nello scambio economico «onesto» che la sottende la perfetta incarnazione dell’amore nell’era del capitalismo e del mercimonio; racconta il mercato del sesso e i suoi orrori senza alcun compiacimento o patetismo, e proprio per questo sa rappresentare l’Occidente e gli eccessi del postcolonialismo con una brutalità e un’autenticità che forse il solo Houellebecq di Piattaforma ha saputo eguagliare.
310 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1993
22 people are currently reading
1227 people want to read
About the author
William T. Vollmann
100 books1,467 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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May 20, 2017Moral fiction and Vollmann’s whores. By moral I want to mean the shape of a human being. DFW called it “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.” “Moral” is not a set of prescriptions and proscriptions, but the experience of having a world and being the kind of thing that has a definite way of being in that world; and being-with. Being-with is an empathy. Martha Nussbaum’s work is concerned with the way in which our moral being, our shaping ourselves into the kind of human beings we are, is worked out through the experience of reading fiction. Her touchstones are the masters such as Austen and Proust. Reading their works is a practice in empathy, a moral schooling; learning to imaginatively project into the experience of others such that we come to understand them as, just as ourselves, projecting and experiencing a world, undergoing experience just as we do. Moral fiction, as a training in empathy, is not a setting down of rights and wrongs, but a field in which we practice taking/perceiving the other person as a person and become convinced that it matters how we are with-them in the world.
There are also non-moral fictions. These are the kinds of books often taught in eighth grade English classes and sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They are didactic. They will preach to you what you already want to hear. They reinforce what you are and how you already experience the world. The other persons you meet in these novels are people you already know and already know what to do with them; you know how to manipulate them. Or they are people who are you, narcissistic; you can identify with them; no need to stretch your empathy. And these non-moral books teach you even better how to manipulate these other people just as the author manipulates your responses to the characters and to the pablum being preached. Even as the author suffocates you with his/her platitudes, so the reader learns that what matters most is to get other persons to submit to their credos, that x, that y, that z; and to identify the other as one’s own self, merely repeated, but not its own.
A moral fiction, such as Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories, opens experience to the reader to find empathy on his/her own. Empathy is not directed by a nervous author but is left open as a mere possibility. Vollmann’s protagonists are not protagonists which one “can identify with” yet the moral task is precisely to identify with, to empathize with, because this creature, too, is a being in the world, human, however repugnant to the self-righteous or unflattering to the narcissist. But even this task is not so unguided because our journalist himself, whoring through Southeast Asia, is a human being empathizing with the human beings he encounters, allowing the whores whom he loves to have their being. He doesn’t want to fuck them but to be-with them, to leap in before them and save them from the coming Khmer Rouge slaughter; coming to their aid with stacks of bhat or buying them out. He is a moral actor.
Butterfly Stories is part of Vollmann’s famous “Whore Trilogy,” merely thematically trilogized, including also Whores for Gloria and The Royal Family. Stylistically, my preference is for the long-form of The Royal Family while the other two whore books feel more akin to the shorter 13 Stories or to Rainbow Stories. Butterfly itself consists of several short pieces tied together by our journalist cum husband main character. The novel is weighted heavily by the two central chapters. The Thailand and Cambodia whoring story is written in a Hemingway-esque terseness of short sentences and direct recounting of events. This chapter needs to be waded through for the payoff of the following story, “The New Wife,” in which Vollmann reproduces the lostness of the journalist/husband upon his return to the states, his assignment to the Arctic, the experience of having lost his whore-love-wife, Vanna; reproduces this lostness by way of a prose disconnected and lost, surreal, contorting the heart lost to pain of aloneness and searching for a whore-love-wife, Vanna, most certainly eliminated by now by the Khmer Rouge, his searches (failed) for substitutes, a false hope found in hypnotism, a failed attempt to transcendentalize his whore-love-wife, Vanna. “I wouldn’t smile like that if I were you,” but he does because he is happy because he has AIDS.
What is it about? It’s about whores. About whoring through Southeast Asia. It’s about the Khmer Rouge. It’s about taxi girls. About AIDS. About johns. It’s about a journalist and a photographer whoring through Thailand and Cambodia on the dime of a periodical you probably subscribe to. It’s about genocide. About a return. It’s about poverty. But mostly it’s a love story. It’s about salvation.
There are also non-moral fictions. These are the kinds of books often taught in eighth grade English classes and sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They are didactic. They will preach to you what you already want to hear. They reinforce what you are and how you already experience the world. The other persons you meet in these novels are people you already know and already know what to do with them; you know how to manipulate them. Or they are people who are you, narcissistic; you can identify with them; no need to stretch your empathy. And these non-moral books teach you even better how to manipulate these other people just as the author manipulates your responses to the characters and to the pablum being preached. Even as the author suffocates you with his/her platitudes, so the reader learns that what matters most is to get other persons to submit to their credos, that x, that y, that z; and to identify the other as one’s own self, merely repeated, but not its own.
A moral fiction, such as Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories, opens experience to the reader to find empathy on his/her own. Empathy is not directed by a nervous author but is left open as a mere possibility. Vollmann’s protagonists are not protagonists which one “can identify with” yet the moral task is precisely to identify with, to empathize with, because this creature, too, is a being in the world, human, however repugnant to the self-righteous or unflattering to the narcissist. But even this task is not so unguided because our journalist himself, whoring through Southeast Asia, is a human being empathizing with the human beings he encounters, allowing the whores whom he loves to have their being. He doesn’t want to fuck them but to be-with them, to leap in before them and save them from the coming Khmer Rouge slaughter; coming to their aid with stacks of bhat or buying them out. He is a moral actor.
Butterfly Stories is part of Vollmann’s famous “Whore Trilogy,” merely thematically trilogized, including also Whores for Gloria and The Royal Family. Stylistically, my preference is for the long-form of The Royal Family while the other two whore books feel more akin to the shorter 13 Stories or to Rainbow Stories. Butterfly itself consists of several short pieces tied together by our journalist cum husband main character. The novel is weighted heavily by the two central chapters. The Thailand and Cambodia whoring story is written in a Hemingway-esque terseness of short sentences and direct recounting of events. This chapter needs to be waded through for the payoff of the following story, “The New Wife,” in which Vollmann reproduces the lostness of the journalist/husband upon his return to the states, his assignment to the Arctic, the experience of having lost his whore-love-wife, Vanna; reproduces this lostness by way of a prose disconnected and lost, surreal, contorting the heart lost to pain of aloneness and searching for a whore-love-wife, Vanna, most certainly eliminated by now by the Khmer Rouge, his searches (failed) for substitutes, a false hope found in hypnotism, a failed attempt to transcendentalize his whore-love-wife, Vanna. “I wouldn’t smile like that if I were you,” but he does because he is happy because he has AIDS.
What is it about? It’s about whores. About whoring through Southeast Asia. It’s about the Khmer Rouge. It’s about taxi girls. About AIDS. About johns. It’s about a journalist and a photographer whoring through Thailand and Cambodia on the dime of a periodical you probably subscribe to. It’s about genocide. About a return. It’s about poverty. But mostly it’s a love story. It’s about salvation.
September 18, 2024
The novel starts in childhood with that of the butterfly boy being bullied at school and forming a closer tie with the girls rather than the boys. This intense feeling towards the opposite sex from an early age would lead him in later years as a journalist—possibly written as Vollmann himself—to become dangerously obsessed with tourism sex and the search for love whilst covering a story on the Khmer Rouge reign of terror with an unnamed photographer. Mostly set in Thailand and Cambodia, the journalist happens to fall in love with a sex worker—we also start to learn more about his disintegrating marriage back home in America—with most of the second half of the novel seeing him consumed with the search for her after she leaves Thailand, where he met her, and supposedly returned to Cambodia.
This novel was pretty intense I have to say, especially later on when all that risky sex—and there is a hell of a lot of it—without protection, comes back to bite him in the ass in the form of a certain deadly sexually transmitted disease; plus, even though they aren't mentioned that often, the Khmer Rouge sent a shiver down my spine when it came to their killing methods; including bashing babies heads in on trees and deflowering children in front of their parents before slaughtering them all. Told in an unorthodox style, with ink sketches; assumingly by Vollmann, littered throughout, and chapters than can be as short as a few lines at times, it is still nevertheless easy to read, when thinking he has been compared to the likes of Pynchon and Burroughs.
Despite being under 300 pages, Vollmann seems to drift aimlessly in parts of the narrative making it seem longer than it actually is. Also, unlike the previous Vollmann novel I read, Whores for Gloria, there is more of a disconnection; more of a gap, between the reader and protagonist/narrator. When it comes to the economically depressed setting though this you can truly feel—the poverty, the war-torn streets, the biblical rain and sweltering heat, the depravity, the illness, the horror, the desperate.
For the most part it really impressed me.
November 27, 2014
"One Must Do Abnormal Things"
The whole of Vollmann’s novel is conveyed by an omniscient narrator. It’s tempting to assume that it’s Vollmann himself. However, as usual that would probably be a mistake, even if we learn a lot about the author by what he writes in the guise of others.
The key protagonist is a male American, known variously as the butterfly boy, the journalist, the husband and Vanna’s husband.
These guises or masks represent different stages in the unnamed protagonist’s life. Vollmann presents them almost like short stories, but together they constitute a legitimate novel.
For almost half of the narrative, the journalist is accompanied by a double, the photographer, on an Asian assignment for a glossy magazine (presumably Esquire). One is responsible for the words, the other the pictures.
They complement each other. They’re a team. However, the assignment is a ruse to whore their way around Asia and document it for payment. Of the two, the photographer is the more vainglorious, the journalist the more sensitive. Together, they’re just as bad as each other.
Perhaps, I shouldn’t use the word "bad". Vollmann asks us to leave morality and all concepts of Good and Evil behind when we open the book. It’s good advice. This is not a morality tale, it’s not a moral calculus. It’s about men fucking women with whom they share only enough words of either language to negotiate a sexual transaction. Despite the title of Vollmann's "Prostitution Trilogy", it's not so much about the abstract of prostitution as the concrete of what men do to prostitutes.
Still, it’s a Bildungsroman of sorts. It’s about the getting of wisdom, even if the journalist seems to make no progress over the course of the novel:
"He remembered again what the Inuit had always said, that to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. The Inuit had done it by going off into the ice alone until animal spirits came. The husband would do it through promiscuity."
Flings like a Butterfly, Stings like a Bee
For all of its metaphysical concerns (which can be inferred from the eminently brainy epigraphs at the head of each story), the style of the novel is more realistic than Post-Modern.
But for its sexual subject matter, the language is fairly pedestrian, almost nondescript and utilitarian.
The structure of the novel and the emphasis on the time in Asia does, however, tend to disguise the fact that the two protagonists were only in Asia for about two weeks. They got to know about a dozen whores each. Like all male western sex tourists (or "falangs"), they were regarded as butterflies, because of their tendency to flutter from one woman to another without commitment. This novel, then, is the monarch of butterfly stories.
Both protagonists were already married back in America. Both believed that they fell in love with at least one of their whores (Vanna in the case of the journalist, and Joy in the case of the photographer). The photographer, despite (or perhaps because of) his general lechery, had the good sense to realise it was a holiday infatuation. The journalist was never able to adjust. On his return, he decided to divorce his wife of 11 years, without necessarily knowing whether he would ever see Vanna again.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
There is much talk about love in the novel. The whores use the term almost as an inducement to another night in the sack, i.e., another payment. For all of their abject poverty, they are the most realistic about the personal and economic situation.
They reassure the journalist that, in finding Vanna, he has not necessarily found love. He has only “found a hole; he knew from the Pat Pong girls that there’d always be a hole if he wanted one badly enough.”
The journalist kids himself that he's in love. But what is love? What is the difference between love and filling a hole? Does love just fill a hole?
"And what was she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would do it, come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough?"
He summarises his predicament to a friend:
"I’m thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose language I can’t speak a word of."
Still, Vanna is not without her appeal. Here is a physical description of her:
"She was so slender, like a thin hymen of flesh stretched over bones; he could feel her every rib under his palm. Her long brown nipples did not excite him, but enriched his tenderness."
Love and Loneliness
This is about as lyrical as Vollmann gets in this tale, apart from describing the journalist’s love and (the hole of his own) loneliness:
"He was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn’t really loving them…"
Still, he leaves a special place for Vanna, at least in his mind. She is different from any other wife or whore, even though he plans to make a wife of her:
"…the similarity between whores and wives is that you don’t have to consider their pleasure when you fuck them, unlike sweethearts such as Vanna (who probably don’t enjoy it either)."
Even as he contemplates the implications of what he has done, he justifies his butterfly activities:
"There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives…The husband loved Vanna the best. He’d keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn’t need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a whore would be used to it."
Ironically, some of Vollmann’s best writing is reserved for a whore the journalist meets after Vanna:
"Lying in bed with Noi, the light still on, the butterfly fluttered excitedly knowing that Noi’s vulva was going to open up for him like one of those Ayutthaya-style gilded lacquer book cabinets: gold leaves and birds and leaf-flames on black…He saw himself, though, as some old white palace with gilded lacquer doorways and windows, the courtyard still and green…Inside him there was definitely room for Noi. Inside Noi there was room for him."
Longing for a New Wife
There’s no need for me to colour this writing with any insinuation of (im)morality or self-indulgence. You can infer that for yourself, if you so desire. Hopefully, I have represented the concerns of the novel accurately enough to let you judge whether it might be your thing.
Still, at a more philosophical level, I think it’s a bit much to suggest that the journalist forms any relationships that embody any Hegelian mutual recognition or Heideggerian Mitsein. Rather, the novel seems to describe the perils of contemporary western narcissism, if not necessarily wholesale solipsism.
The journalist is in a prison of his own making. Now, finally, he can understand de Sade’s prison scribblings:
"…the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike de Sade he didn’t want to hurt anyone, really didn’t; didn’t even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman…"
This is a novel about longing, about a quest for "Love, I guess. A new wife." The journalist recognises several times that he is lost. He has lost his religion. Yet, somehow he believes that he is not lost at all. He still has his new wife, Vanna, the wife he can experience only in his mind, even if she too can be supplanted by the next tight cunt he encounters:
"What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality, blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn’t remember the name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn’t remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left him a liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by."
Even if this might be grist for an edgy new fiction mill, surely it's not the way to find a new wife or a new life?
WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR TO EXPLAIN:
Paris Review Interview (What I Would Do For My Art)
INTERVIEWER (Madison Smartt Bell):
It’s clear that parts of Butterfly Stories have to be fictional, but still I wonder, did you have unprotected sex with that many prostitutes? Why take those risks?
VOLLMANN
Well, I wouldn’t mind finding some other way. When I was writing Angels, Rainbow Stories, and the other stories, that sort of thing wasn’t particularly interesting to me—getting involved with all the prostitutes that way. But I kept thinking when I first began writing that my female characters were very weak and unconvincing. What is the best way to really improve that? I thought, Well, the best way is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to pick up whores.
INTERVIEWER
Has this worked?
VOLLMANN
I don’t know, but I feel that I have created some really good characters. Also, I often feel lonely. It’s been really nice for me to have all of these women who really, I truly believe, care about me. I care about them. I keep in touch with them. I help them out, they help me out; they pay my rent because I can write about them. I do pictures of them, I give them pictures; I paint them myself. It works pretty well.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me you’d learn a whole lot about how prostitutes think and are, and not necessarily that much about more conventional women.
VOLLMANN
Right. Well, I have been able to sleep around with some of them too.
INTERVIEWER
Well, good. I’m glad to hear that.
VOLLMANN
I almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really want me to—if they are going to get hurt if I don’t. I have a lot of them as friends. They pose for me as models, and I have written a lot of stories about them.
...
INTERVIEWER:
There are some other writers who do make an issue of their personalities in their work in one way or another—Norman Mailer, in certain phases of his career, or Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski, whose material is similar to what’s in The Rainbow Stories. But that style of self-presentation is often about vanity. I was wondering how you felt about this. Are you aware that people are watching? Do you care? Do you think that no one’s watching?
VOLLMANN:
I figure some people are watching, but I really don’t care what anybody thinks. All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that’s great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn’t care less.
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
BESIDES AND RARITIES:
Divine Revelation a la Sade et Genet
What I write is
Ninety percent
Masturbation
And ten percent
Inspiration.
Hello, Tiny Madam
[Inspired by Robyn Hitchcock]
Now we've got our K-Y Jelly
And some porn on the telly,
Will you lick the royal jelly
That you've drizzled on my belly?
Waiting for Our Bill to Come
by Vladimir Jackoffalot
We came in off the street
For the best steak in town.
The neon sign, it said,
"You can't beat our meat."
Upstairs, Vanna disagrees.
She gladly lends a hand.
She'll even share dessert.
She's not one to displease.
Obsessed with tender loins,
But way down on his luck,
The writer can't afford
A blowjob or a fuck.
We spot him all our notes,
Two hundred dollars plus,
For a tip, these coins.
Let's hope he gets some quotes.
Now he's down on his knees
Begging her just to please,
Let him get a close-up,
So he can write it up.
Ninety minutes later,
We're still here, waiting
For our bill to come,
With the female waiter.
The Blue Boy
The blue boy moved to a new school on the outskirts of the city midway through grade two. He can remember arriving early and sitting down in the sandpit near the oval, where pretty soon he was joined by a girl with long, straight hair called Karen. They became friends. They even talked about each other as boy- and girlfriend by the end of the week. On that first day, Karen introduced the blue boy to everybody else in their class, and he quickly found a place in the pecking order. There was another boy whose name he can't remember now. Let's call him Martin. His family came from somewhere in England. Martin was the first person he'd known who really liked Alice Cooper. The blue boy was really into David Bowie, but in those days Alice Cooper was pretty cool too. They became friends, too, though not as close as Karen. One day, Martin's father walked to school with him. His hands were shaking and his eyes looked like he had been crying. He hugged Martin and said goodbye. When he'd gone, the blue boy asked Martin what was wrong. He said his dad had been in the war. The blue boy thought he meant the second world war, but he was talking about some war that had just been on in Malaya. "Wow, what did he do? Did he shoot anyone?" Martin looked hesitant, then decided to answer, "I suppose so, but not with bullets. He was a photographer." The blue boy wasn't sure what this involved: "What did he photograph?" Martin's eyes lit up in pride: "Dead bodies." It turned out that Martin's father had kept a stash of black and white photos of dead Communist insurgents. Martin agreed to bring them along to school later that week. The blue boy flicked through them anxiously. Their purpose had been to identify exactly how each insurgent had died. They were graphic portraits of horrific injuries. Close up shots of skulls half-blown away with the eyes still open. Open chests exploded as if from inside, broken ribs jutting out while supporting bloody mangled internal organs that had long ceased to function. The blue boy kept reacting, "Oh, yuck." He had thought he could handle something like this, but after a while he had to stop looking. He could understand why Martin's father still shook. He had started to shake himself.
SOUNDTRACK:
Robyn Hitchcock - "The Afterlight"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY93a...
[Track actually ends at 3:47]
"The Monarch is a butterfly who’s built the same as you and I
He wears blue jeans with a wine belly
He’s secreting royal jelly
Which his consort loves to cook
And then they peer in the cooking book...
Hello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonight
With the tiny world so bright
Hello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonight
When the priest has gone? Oh, right!"
Robyn Hitchcock - "You've Got a Sweet Mouth on You Baby"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxsi3...
Robyn Hitchcock - "Sounds Great When You're Dead"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3S1...
"Your mother is a journalist, your father is a creep
They make it in your bedroom when they think you're fast asleep
The scenes that they're enacting now beside your little bed
Are never in your consciousness but always in your head
...
He lives and breathes on systems that nobody can supply
And you're immune to everything except the butterfly."
The whole of Vollmann’s novel is conveyed by an omniscient narrator. It’s tempting to assume that it’s Vollmann himself. However, as usual that would probably be a mistake, even if we learn a lot about the author by what he writes in the guise of others.
The key protagonist is a male American, known variously as the butterfly boy, the journalist, the husband and Vanna’s husband.
These guises or masks represent different stages in the unnamed protagonist’s life. Vollmann presents them almost like short stories, but together they constitute a legitimate novel.
For almost half of the narrative, the journalist is accompanied by a double, the photographer, on an Asian assignment for a glossy magazine (presumably Esquire). One is responsible for the words, the other the pictures.
They complement each other. They’re a team. However, the assignment is a ruse to whore their way around Asia and document it for payment. Of the two, the photographer is the more vainglorious, the journalist the more sensitive. Together, they’re just as bad as each other.
Perhaps, I shouldn’t use the word "bad". Vollmann asks us to leave morality and all concepts of Good and Evil behind when we open the book. It’s good advice. This is not a morality tale, it’s not a moral calculus. It’s about men fucking women with whom they share only enough words of either language to negotiate a sexual transaction. Despite the title of Vollmann's "Prostitution Trilogy", it's not so much about the abstract of prostitution as the concrete of what men do to prostitutes.
Still, it’s a Bildungsroman of sorts. It’s about the getting of wisdom, even if the journalist seems to make no progress over the course of the novel:
"He remembered again what the Inuit had always said, that to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. The Inuit had done it by going off into the ice alone until animal spirits came. The husband would do it through promiscuity."
Flings like a Butterfly, Stings like a Bee
For all of its metaphysical concerns (which can be inferred from the eminently brainy epigraphs at the head of each story), the style of the novel is more realistic than Post-Modern.
But for its sexual subject matter, the language is fairly pedestrian, almost nondescript and utilitarian.
The structure of the novel and the emphasis on the time in Asia does, however, tend to disguise the fact that the two protagonists were only in Asia for about two weeks. They got to know about a dozen whores each. Like all male western sex tourists (or "falangs"), they were regarded as butterflies, because of their tendency to flutter from one woman to another without commitment. This novel, then, is the monarch of butterfly stories.
Both protagonists were already married back in America. Both believed that they fell in love with at least one of their whores (Vanna in the case of the journalist, and Joy in the case of the photographer). The photographer, despite (or perhaps because of) his general lechery, had the good sense to realise it was a holiday infatuation. The journalist was never able to adjust. On his return, he decided to divorce his wife of 11 years, without necessarily knowing whether he would ever see Vanna again.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
There is much talk about love in the novel. The whores use the term almost as an inducement to another night in the sack, i.e., another payment. For all of their abject poverty, they are the most realistic about the personal and economic situation.
They reassure the journalist that, in finding Vanna, he has not necessarily found love. He has only “found a hole; he knew from the Pat Pong girls that there’d always be a hole if he wanted one badly enough.”
The journalist kids himself that he's in love. But what is love? What is the difference between love and filling a hole? Does love just fill a hole?
"And what was she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would do it, come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough?"
He summarises his predicament to a friend:
"I’m thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose language I can’t speak a word of."
Still, Vanna is not without her appeal. Here is a physical description of her:
"She was so slender, like a thin hymen of flesh stretched over bones; he could feel her every rib under his palm. Her long brown nipples did not excite him, but enriched his tenderness."
Love and Loneliness
This is about as lyrical as Vollmann gets in this tale, apart from describing the journalist’s love and (the hole of his own) loneliness:
"He was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn’t really loving them…"
Still, he leaves a special place for Vanna, at least in his mind. She is different from any other wife or whore, even though he plans to make a wife of her:
"…the similarity between whores and wives is that you don’t have to consider their pleasure when you fuck them, unlike sweethearts such as Vanna (who probably don’t enjoy it either)."
Even as he contemplates the implications of what he has done, he justifies his butterfly activities:
"There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives…The husband loved Vanna the best. He’d keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn’t need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a whore would be used to it."
Ironically, some of Vollmann’s best writing is reserved for a whore the journalist meets after Vanna:
"Lying in bed with Noi, the light still on, the butterfly fluttered excitedly knowing that Noi’s vulva was going to open up for him like one of those Ayutthaya-style gilded lacquer book cabinets: gold leaves and birds and leaf-flames on black…He saw himself, though, as some old white palace with gilded lacquer doorways and windows, the courtyard still and green…Inside him there was definitely room for Noi. Inside Noi there was room for him."
Longing for a New Wife
There’s no need for me to colour this writing with any insinuation of (im)morality or self-indulgence. You can infer that for yourself, if you so desire. Hopefully, I have represented the concerns of the novel accurately enough to let you judge whether it might be your thing.
Still, at a more philosophical level, I think it’s a bit much to suggest that the journalist forms any relationships that embody any Hegelian mutual recognition or Heideggerian Mitsein. Rather, the novel seems to describe the perils of contemporary western narcissism, if not necessarily wholesale solipsism.
The journalist is in a prison of his own making. Now, finally, he can understand de Sade’s prison scribblings:
"…the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike de Sade he didn’t want to hurt anyone, really didn’t; didn’t even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman…"
This is a novel about longing, about a quest for "Love, I guess. A new wife." The journalist recognises several times that he is lost. He has lost his religion. Yet, somehow he believes that he is not lost at all. He still has his new wife, Vanna, the wife he can experience only in his mind, even if she too can be supplanted by the next tight cunt he encounters:
"What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality, blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn’t remember the name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn’t remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left him a liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by."
Even if this might be grist for an edgy new fiction mill, surely it's not the way to find a new wife or a new life?
WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR TO EXPLAIN:
Paris Review Interview (What I Would Do For My Art)
INTERVIEWER (Madison Smartt Bell):
It’s clear that parts of Butterfly Stories have to be fictional, but still I wonder, did you have unprotected sex with that many prostitutes? Why take those risks?
VOLLMANN
Well, I wouldn’t mind finding some other way. When I was writing Angels, Rainbow Stories, and the other stories, that sort of thing wasn’t particularly interesting to me—getting involved with all the prostitutes that way. But I kept thinking when I first began writing that my female characters were very weak and unconvincing. What is the best way to really improve that? I thought, Well, the best way is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to pick up whores.
INTERVIEWER
Has this worked?
VOLLMANN
I don’t know, but I feel that I have created some really good characters. Also, I often feel lonely. It’s been really nice for me to have all of these women who really, I truly believe, care about me. I care about them. I keep in touch with them. I help them out, they help me out; they pay my rent because I can write about them. I do pictures of them, I give them pictures; I paint them myself. It works pretty well.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me you’d learn a whole lot about how prostitutes think and are, and not necessarily that much about more conventional women.
VOLLMANN
Right. Well, I have been able to sleep around with some of them too.
INTERVIEWER
Well, good. I’m glad to hear that.
VOLLMANN
I almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really want me to—if they are going to get hurt if I don’t. I have a lot of them as friends. They pose for me as models, and I have written a lot of stories about them.
...
INTERVIEWER:
There are some other writers who do make an issue of their personalities in their work in one way or another—Norman Mailer, in certain phases of his career, or Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski, whose material is similar to what’s in The Rainbow Stories. But that style of self-presentation is often about vanity. I was wondering how you felt about this. Are you aware that people are watching? Do you care? Do you think that no one’s watching?
VOLLMANN:
I figure some people are watching, but I really don’t care what anybody thinks. All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that’s great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn’t care less.
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
BESIDES AND RARITIES:
Divine Revelation a la Sade et Genet
What I write is
Ninety percent
Masturbation
And ten percent
Inspiration.
Hello, Tiny Madam
[Inspired by Robyn Hitchcock]
Now we've got our K-Y Jelly
And some porn on the telly,
Will you lick the royal jelly
That you've drizzled on my belly?
Waiting for Our Bill to Come
by Vladimir Jackoffalot
We came in off the street
For the best steak in town.
The neon sign, it said,
"You can't beat our meat."
Upstairs, Vanna disagrees.
She gladly lends a hand.
She'll even share dessert.
She's not one to displease.
Obsessed with tender loins,
But way down on his luck,
The writer can't afford
A blowjob or a fuck.
We spot him all our notes,
Two hundred dollars plus,
For a tip, these coins.
Let's hope he gets some quotes.
Now he's down on his knees
Begging her just to please,
Let him get a close-up,
So he can write it up.
Ninety minutes later,
We're still here, waiting
For our bill to come,
With the female waiter.
The Blue Boy
The blue boy moved to a new school on the outskirts of the city midway through grade two. He can remember arriving early and sitting down in the sandpit near the oval, where pretty soon he was joined by a girl with long, straight hair called Karen. They became friends. They even talked about each other as boy- and girlfriend by the end of the week. On that first day, Karen introduced the blue boy to everybody else in their class, and he quickly found a place in the pecking order. There was another boy whose name he can't remember now. Let's call him Martin. His family came from somewhere in England. Martin was the first person he'd known who really liked Alice Cooper. The blue boy was really into David Bowie, but in those days Alice Cooper was pretty cool too. They became friends, too, though not as close as Karen. One day, Martin's father walked to school with him. His hands were shaking and his eyes looked like he had been crying. He hugged Martin and said goodbye. When he'd gone, the blue boy asked Martin what was wrong. He said his dad had been in the war. The blue boy thought he meant the second world war, but he was talking about some war that had just been on in Malaya. "Wow, what did he do? Did he shoot anyone?" Martin looked hesitant, then decided to answer, "I suppose so, but not with bullets. He was a photographer." The blue boy wasn't sure what this involved: "What did he photograph?" Martin's eyes lit up in pride: "Dead bodies." It turned out that Martin's father had kept a stash of black and white photos of dead Communist insurgents. Martin agreed to bring them along to school later that week. The blue boy flicked through them anxiously. Their purpose had been to identify exactly how each insurgent had died. They were graphic portraits of horrific injuries. Close up shots of skulls half-blown away with the eyes still open. Open chests exploded as if from inside, broken ribs jutting out while supporting bloody mangled internal organs that had long ceased to function. The blue boy kept reacting, "Oh, yuck." He had thought he could handle something like this, but after a while he had to stop looking. He could understand why Martin's father still shook. He had started to shake himself.
SOUNDTRACK:
Robyn Hitchcock - "The Afterlight"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY93a...
[Track actually ends at 3:47]
"The Monarch is a butterfly who’s built the same as you and I
He wears blue jeans with a wine belly
He’s secreting royal jelly
Which his consort loves to cook
And then they peer in the cooking book...
Hello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonight
With the tiny world so bright
Hello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonight
When the priest has gone? Oh, right!"
Robyn Hitchcock - "You've Got a Sweet Mouth on You Baby"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxsi3...
Robyn Hitchcock - "Sounds Great When You're Dead"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3S1...
"Your mother is a journalist, your father is a creep
They make it in your bedroom when they think you're fast asleep
The scenes that they're enacting now beside your little bed
Are never in your consciousness but always in your head
...
He lives and breathes on systems that nobody can supply
And you're immune to everything except the butterfly."
December 17, 2025
“Ahem! — Benadryl, you know, is only an antihistamine — not one of those profound and omnipotent benzodiazepines that can stop a man’s heart even better than a pretty whore…”
Butterfly Stories is a book I want to give three stars with one hand and clutch to my chest with the other. Vollmann writes neediness like a weather system: affection turning obsessive, obsession turning theatrical, reality quietly abandoned while the narrator keeps fluttering — butterfly-style — from feeling to feeling. There’s humor here, yes, but it’s nervous humor, the kind that laughs because the alternative is to admit how much it hurts.
Some passages left me genuinely wordless. Not impressed — undone. The aesthetic charge of certain sections can’t really be summarized; they have to be read, absorbed, endured. This is not a book for everyone, and perhaps not even for me — which, paradoxically, might be its greatest strength.
Vana. Vana. Vana — the one with the smile that scorned the world’s scorn…
Or was it Joy? Noi? Pukki? The travesti whose name keeps slipping the way desire does.
“How many of my sweaty twilights has God seen?”
Butterfly Stories is a book I want to give three stars with one hand and clutch to my chest with the other. Vollmann writes neediness like a weather system: affection turning obsessive, obsession turning theatrical, reality quietly abandoned while the narrator keeps fluttering — butterfly-style — from feeling to feeling. There’s humor here, yes, but it’s nervous humor, the kind that laughs because the alternative is to admit how much it hurts.
Some passages left me genuinely wordless. Not impressed — undone. The aesthetic charge of certain sections can’t really be summarized; they have to be read, absorbed, endured. This is not a book for everyone, and perhaps not even for me — which, paradoxically, might be its greatest strength.
Vana. Vana. Vana — the one with the smile that scorned the world’s scorn…
Or was it Joy? Noi? Pukki? The travesti whose name keeps slipping the way desire does.
“How many of my sweaty twilights has God seen?”
December 29, 2019
I was not prepared for this novel. I thought, Vollmann has been called "a Pez dispenser of career-capping megavolumes." Maybe starting with a 275-pager would be "easier" than tackling one of the solid bricks, denser than Neolithic ice, of his other books.
It was devastating.
Sprinkled with his occasionally grotesque pen drawings of naked women crouching in surreal jungles, I only became impressed after the first dozen pages. I noticed trademark integrated dialogue. No quotation marks, like ticker tape reportage, narrative suggestions scattering like frightened butterflies.
The first part, taking place in America, establishes the narrator's psychological need for women, which he calls love. This does not translate into respect for their bodies, but into a morbid obsession and a helpless compulsion in the face of a raging libido.
Michel Houellebecq, most notably in Platform, came to mind during the sections in Croatia, Turkey and Cambodia. In fact, you might plaster Michel's face onto the journalist's body if you want to have a laugh. But the protagonist is clearly both suicidal and self-destructive. I began to sink into the aggressive prose, so hypnotic and immersive that I actually had to force myself out of the trance of reading to take breaks.
WTV conjures an incredible sense of place, laced with existential terror, as he describes with crude elegance and constantly surprising word choice the underbellies of undeveloped places, and the downtrodden people who suffer there, in the semblance of what they can only call living. And yet, the mouthpiece of the novel observes greatness in people in proportion to how much suffering they've endured.
It evolves into a novel of compressed experience and expressed progression toward moral outrage.
Combining reverence and disgust for the sanctity of the human body with righteous indignation and clinical frankness. Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup used shock value to jolt the reader out of comfort zones, and propel the narrator into existential crises. I recalled the subliminal layers in Bataille's Story of the Eye, and with chills, let the heat and lusciously cloying atmosphere of this book supersede those experiences...
It is about a journalist fascinated with women, who possesses a sympathy and desire for prostitutes to an unhealthy degree, who embraces dichotomies, and relishes monstrous depravity while somehow exuding moral forthrightness, and a disdain for ruling oppressors. He becomes the embodiment of the butterfly which first drew him in in childhood, this motif - the flighty, nectar-craving, frail being, the soul cocooned in flesh.
Unlike William S. Burroughs, I got the sense that the author was in complete control of his powers, and letting his mind slide into dark corners, far beneath the everyday stomping grounds of polite society. The audacious style and the uncanny realism of the pinyin English (or the Khmer equivalent) are inimitable. It was a quick read, comprised of a couple hundred micro-chapters, exploring unapologetically, the tenderness latent in troubled hearts, the pathos buried in human contact, with affectionate regard for love's myriad forms and manifestations.
Vollmann is clearly the enfant terrible of American letters. A writer Pynchon himself could read and enviously admire. It goes without saying that he is well-read, well-traveled, and that his overwhelming talent has produced well-researched unmerciful tomes, determined to take up as much shelf space as humanly conceivable, unconcerned with appealing to a wide audience, and so he remains, quietly toiling in his unadorned warehouse, chronicling the inner workings of the human psyche, which mirror the gearboxes of the macrocosmic world.
If you are brave enough to read this book, you will encounter, among the dross of startling human-insects, the stark inner need for human comfort, bought and sold, in a land deprived of warmth and humanity. Concluding brilliantly in Thailand, and the Arctic, converging in a surreal spiral, like the butterfly's pulsing proboscis, tunneling toward internal, dissipating hellscapes, inescapable ends, dread and somnolent nescience, having traversed the dives and infested hotels and brothels of war-torn, bomb-penetrated landscapes on the edge of inhabitability - "To gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things."
And with these disturbing images, and in these daunting mental zones, we discover unadulterated beauty, or our fragile hearts make something beautiful out of what we find there.
It was devastating.
Sprinkled with his occasionally grotesque pen drawings of naked women crouching in surreal jungles, I only became impressed after the first dozen pages. I noticed trademark integrated dialogue. No quotation marks, like ticker tape reportage, narrative suggestions scattering like frightened butterflies.
The first part, taking place in America, establishes the narrator's psychological need for women, which he calls love. This does not translate into respect for their bodies, but into a morbid obsession and a helpless compulsion in the face of a raging libido.
Michel Houellebecq, most notably in Platform, came to mind during the sections in Croatia, Turkey and Cambodia. In fact, you might plaster Michel's face onto the journalist's body if you want to have a laugh. But the protagonist is clearly both suicidal and self-destructive. I began to sink into the aggressive prose, so hypnotic and immersive that I actually had to force myself out of the trance of reading to take breaks.
WTV conjures an incredible sense of place, laced with existential terror, as he describes with crude elegance and constantly surprising word choice the underbellies of undeveloped places, and the downtrodden people who suffer there, in the semblance of what they can only call living. And yet, the mouthpiece of the novel observes greatness in people in proportion to how much suffering they've endured.
It evolves into a novel of compressed experience and expressed progression toward moral outrage.
Combining reverence and disgust for the sanctity of the human body with righteous indignation and clinical frankness. Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup used shock value to jolt the reader out of comfort zones, and propel the narrator into existential crises. I recalled the subliminal layers in Bataille's Story of the Eye, and with chills, let the heat and lusciously cloying atmosphere of this book supersede those experiences...
It is about a journalist fascinated with women, who possesses a sympathy and desire for prostitutes to an unhealthy degree, who embraces dichotomies, and relishes monstrous depravity while somehow exuding moral forthrightness, and a disdain for ruling oppressors. He becomes the embodiment of the butterfly which first drew him in in childhood, this motif - the flighty, nectar-craving, frail being, the soul cocooned in flesh.
Unlike William S. Burroughs, I got the sense that the author was in complete control of his powers, and letting his mind slide into dark corners, far beneath the everyday stomping grounds of polite society. The audacious style and the uncanny realism of the pinyin English (or the Khmer equivalent) are inimitable. It was a quick read, comprised of a couple hundred micro-chapters, exploring unapologetically, the tenderness latent in troubled hearts, the pathos buried in human contact, with affectionate regard for love's myriad forms and manifestations.
Vollmann is clearly the enfant terrible of American letters. A writer Pynchon himself could read and enviously admire. It goes without saying that he is well-read, well-traveled, and that his overwhelming talent has produced well-researched unmerciful tomes, determined to take up as much shelf space as humanly conceivable, unconcerned with appealing to a wide audience, and so he remains, quietly toiling in his unadorned warehouse, chronicling the inner workings of the human psyche, which mirror the gearboxes of the macrocosmic world.
If you are brave enough to read this book, you will encounter, among the dross of startling human-insects, the stark inner need for human comfort, bought and sold, in a land deprived of warmth and humanity. Concluding brilliantly in Thailand, and the Arctic, converging in a surreal spiral, like the butterfly's pulsing proboscis, tunneling toward internal, dissipating hellscapes, inescapable ends, dread and somnolent nescience, having traversed the dives and infested hotels and brothels of war-torn, bomb-penetrated landscapes on the edge of inhabitability - "To gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things."
And with these disturbing images, and in these daunting mental zones, we discover unadulterated beauty, or our fragile hearts make something beautiful out of what we find there.
August 5, 2014
My first of WTV's "Whore" novels, and I was greatly impressed. What I find most interesting about his project remains the fluidity of fictionalised selves he places at the center of his works. The "main character" here, for instance, is clearly a form of WTV with certain attributes and characteristics extended or given greater or lesser emphasis. These changes in turn lead to a narrative which, while I am sure contains much which has its roots in the autobiographical, is altered, distorted, fictionalised, transformed. WTV is unafraid of pushing his consciousness into the darker and less pleasant corners of his self and allowing this mutated character to make decisions and act in ways he perhaps would not. He is unconcerned that many seem not to understand the distinction between the author and his characters.
The more I read him, and the more I get to know the complexity of his view of "Woman" or "the Female", the more forgiving I am of those parts I find problematic. I think it is clear, for example, that the death of his sister in particular has created a complex and confused sense of "protectiveness" towards women, a sense of a duty to "save", whether by love or by money (or by words), the countless suffering women he meets. When one combines this with his honesty about his sexual desires, it is unsurprising that he feels so conflicted, and so often deeply depressed. That he is prepared to be so completely honest about this, and refuse to present his actions as in any way "noble", is to be applauded.
One final point, off on rather a tangent, I have been considering is the difference between writing the word "breasts" and the word "tits". The more I think about it, the more complex the issue becomes. What does our choice of word to describe this part of a woman's body mean? How do the author's other narrative and voice choices effect the impact of the chosen word? What is the different effect each has on the reader? Can we go so far as to say they actually signify a different thing? How important is the different sound of each word - the softness and the hardness respectively? Is it possible to use the word "tits" without being demeaning, or without inferring the pornographic? It is also interesting that one would call someone a "tit" as an insult, but not a "breast".
Anyway, a couple of quotes:
" A black dog scuttered across the street like a moving hole."
"scuttered" is lovely (as is the alliteration with "street"), and the image of a "moving hole" is great. That sentence alone is enough to demonstrate that WTV writes well.
"Please believe me when I say that he did not want to be unfaithful to Vanna this time, that he took her to the Hotel Victory for the same reason that he bought other girls drinks: when anyone asked him for something, he hated to cause disappointment. I honestly think that the journalist was fundamentally good. I believe that the photographer was fundamentally good. Even Pol Pot must have meant well."
Quoted as an example of how clear WTV is about his "moral" position on this characters (and, by extension, his/our thoughts, actions and inactions), though there are many more examples to be found throughout the book.
The more I read him, and the more I get to know the complexity of his view of "Woman" or "the Female", the more forgiving I am of those parts I find problematic. I think it is clear, for example, that the death of his sister in particular has created a complex and confused sense of "protectiveness" towards women, a sense of a duty to "save", whether by love or by money (or by words), the countless suffering women he meets. When one combines this with his honesty about his sexual desires, it is unsurprising that he feels so conflicted, and so often deeply depressed. That he is prepared to be so completely honest about this, and refuse to present his actions as in any way "noble", is to be applauded.
One final point, off on rather a tangent, I have been considering is the difference between writing the word "breasts" and the word "tits". The more I think about it, the more complex the issue becomes. What does our choice of word to describe this part of a woman's body mean? How do the author's other narrative and voice choices effect the impact of the chosen word? What is the different effect each has on the reader? Can we go so far as to say they actually signify a different thing? How important is the different sound of each word - the softness and the hardness respectively? Is it possible to use the word "tits" without being demeaning, or without inferring the pornographic? It is also interesting that one would call someone a "tit" as an insult, but not a "breast".
Anyway, a couple of quotes:
" A black dog scuttered across the street like a moving hole."
"scuttered" is lovely (as is the alliteration with "street"), and the image of a "moving hole" is great. That sentence alone is enough to demonstrate that WTV writes well.
"Please believe me when I say that he did not want to be unfaithful to Vanna this time, that he took her to the Hotel Victory for the same reason that he bought other girls drinks: when anyone asked him for something, he hated to cause disappointment. I honestly think that the journalist was fundamentally good. I believe that the photographer was fundamentally good. Even Pol Pot must have meant well."
Quoted as an example of how clear WTV is about his "moral" position on this characters (and, by extension, his/our thoughts, actions and inactions), though there are many more examples to be found throughout the book.
January 27, 2019
A series of vignettes go to make up this novel and this is Vollmann at his most troublesome. This is one in a trilogy of novels Vollmann wrote about prostitution. It’s grim, depressing, comic, a parody of romance and a romance, the sex scenes are not erotic, but sad and desperate. As one reviewer says, this is the death of modernity, but it is also a devastating indictment of western civilisation.
There is also a fairy tale feel to the bleakness:
“Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it. They each armed themselves with a tube of coll soft K-Y jelly and a box of Trojans. The photographer, who knew such essential Thai phrases as: very beautiful!, how much?, thank you and I’m gonna knock you around! (topsa-lopsa-lei), preferred the extra-strength lubricated, while the journalist selected the non-lubricated with special receptacle end. The journalist never tried the photographer’s condoms because he didn’t even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don’t want anything but morals need read no further.”
The journalist is a very fictionalized version of Vollmann and the setting is around the time of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The main section and of the book involves the travels of the journalist and the photographer in south-east Asia: Thailand and Cambodia primarily. It is a third person narration that drifts along through the journalist’s childhood (when he was bullied) and into the bars of Thailand. Vollmann periodically asks pertinent questions:
“..interesting that the photographer, who wanted to break as many hearts as possible. And the journalist, who wanted to make as many happy as possible, accomplished the same results...! Does that prove that the journalist was lying to himself?”
The costs of desire are high and unrelenting, even apart from the inevitable sexually transmitted diseases (described in a little too much detail), and the journalist falls in love with a prostitute called Vanna and spends much of the book trying to find her again. He manages to cause her pain even for the little time he is with her, despite his best intentions and he is aware of her tears:
“..were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him-- why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault?"
There is the element of parable here too and there is a sense of suicide by sexual intercourse as the journalist discovers he is HIV positive, a situation the journalist embraces along with his condition. Vanna is most likely dead, but the journalist still cuts the ties with his life back in America and tries to raise enough money to return to Thailand and Cambodia to search for her. There is a very driven feel to it and that is because Vollmann is driven. When he was nine he was looking after his six year old sister. He lost concentration briefly and she drowned in a pond. This has haunted him since, as he said in an interview:
"I had nightmares practically every night of her skeleton chasing me and punishing me, pretty much through high school,"
Vollmann’s driveness has lead him to focus on the most exploited and deprived in society and here is no exception. For many authors this would not have worked and it would have felt paternalistic or tainted with misogyny. Vollmann manages to avoid that and despite the degradation and sleaze this is a moral tale. As David Foster Wallace says, it’s “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.” Especially one at the very bottom of society, prey to those above.
There is also a fairy tale feel to the bleakness:
“Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it. They each armed themselves with a tube of coll soft K-Y jelly and a box of Trojans. The photographer, who knew such essential Thai phrases as: very beautiful!, how much?, thank you and I’m gonna knock you around! (topsa-lopsa-lei), preferred the extra-strength lubricated, while the journalist selected the non-lubricated with special receptacle end. The journalist never tried the photographer’s condoms because he didn’t even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don’t want anything but morals need read no further.”
The journalist is a very fictionalized version of Vollmann and the setting is around the time of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The main section and of the book involves the travels of the journalist and the photographer in south-east Asia: Thailand and Cambodia primarily. It is a third person narration that drifts along through the journalist’s childhood (when he was bullied) and into the bars of Thailand. Vollmann periodically asks pertinent questions:
“..interesting that the photographer, who wanted to break as many hearts as possible. And the journalist, who wanted to make as many happy as possible, accomplished the same results...! Does that prove that the journalist was lying to himself?”
The costs of desire are high and unrelenting, even apart from the inevitable sexually transmitted diseases (described in a little too much detail), and the journalist falls in love with a prostitute called Vanna and spends much of the book trying to find her again. He manages to cause her pain even for the little time he is with her, despite his best intentions and he is aware of her tears:
“..were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him-- why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault?"
There is the element of parable here too and there is a sense of suicide by sexual intercourse as the journalist discovers he is HIV positive, a situation the journalist embraces along with his condition. Vanna is most likely dead, but the journalist still cuts the ties with his life back in America and tries to raise enough money to return to Thailand and Cambodia to search for her. There is a very driven feel to it and that is because Vollmann is driven. When he was nine he was looking after his six year old sister. He lost concentration briefly and she drowned in a pond. This has haunted him since, as he said in an interview:
"I had nightmares practically every night of her skeleton chasing me and punishing me, pretty much through high school,"
Vollmann’s driveness has lead him to focus on the most exploited and deprived in society and here is no exception. For many authors this would not have worked and it would have felt paternalistic or tainted with misogyny. Vollmann manages to avoid that and despite the degradation and sleaze this is a moral tale. As David Foster Wallace says, it’s “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.” Especially one at the very bottom of society, prey to those above.
October 7, 2023
This is considerably less ambitious than the other two books of his I've read. It's the story of a jaded American journalist sent to Cambodia who befriends a hedonistic photographer and their life with the prostitutes in Thailand. It's a bleak book in which the male is depicted as lost and floundering in a world with little virtue - not that he himself has much to spare. There's some great writing as I've come to expect from Vollman but it's not quite a book I'd recommend. Miles better is his Europe Central.
May 21, 2019
Although perhaps it's because the two other segments of this Trilogy of Prostitution are a fading a bit in my memory, this one felt like the most gut-wrenching of the three installments. Despite the fact that I have a much stronger identification with San Francisco's Tenderloin and its inhabitants--having dwelt there for some years--where The Royal Family takes place, this one hit me even harder because of how damned real it felt. Also, perhaps, the situation of a man whoring--a pursuit so commonly associated with male exploitation and a lack of conscience--is here practiced by a wounded human being who falls in love with every woman he pays for. Although an extreme situation, it probably resonated with me because, as a long-time Bohemian, I, too, have approached many situations with a cool veneer and a cynical attitude while the sentimental romantic within me cried out with desire and in agony to be expressed. This is a novel of full immersion, hopelessness, and the endlessly tragic situation of desire. Also the drawings are cool. But it's simply too real for fiction and too utterly tragic (with what is perhaps most real in our human condition, desire vs. the defense of cynicism) to review as a mere work of literature.
July 22, 2016
[int: Typical American dining room. A boy sits alone at the table, playing with his food. His mind is obviously elsewhere, something that his mother soon notices]
Mother: Why Cody, you’ve barely touched your food.
Cody: I’m not hungry.
M: Of course you are, dear. Is something bothering you?
C: I don’t wanna talk about it.
M: Come now, you know you can tell me. Besides, if you don’t finish your dinner you can’t have any pi-men-to loaf.
C: No pimento loaf?!?
M: Not until you tell me what’s on your mind.
C: Ok…I was just…
M: Yes?
C: I was just…just…thinking about pussy.
M: Pussy, dear?
C: Yeah. It’s just that…that…Billy Vollmann is sick from some bad pussy.
M: Why dear, wherever did you get such an idea?
C: He told me in Butterfly Stories.
M: You mean you read it in Butterfly Stories?
C: Uh-huh.
M: Oh son, why that’s just a book. He’s not sick. He just made it up for the book.
C: Why’d he wanna go an’ do a thing like that?
M: Why? I’ll tell you why, mister: because William Tanner Vollmann is the most kinetic, daring, and innately talented author under 60 working in contemporary fiction, that’s why. His blending of fiction and fact most closely resembles the Japanese “I” novel, wherein a given true foundation is extrapolated into fiction at some point, disorienting the reader and destabilizing the line between authorial reality and illusion. In Butterfly Stories, he once again dazzles us by not only demystifying the taboo of whores and their pussies and what he likes to do with their whore pussies, but also by treating the subject matter as if it were no better or worse than any other. And also, as you may have noticed, he brushes quite brusque, vulgar sentences against prose so achingly beautiful that the effect only strengthens the hypocrisy of ‘morality’ past the point of recognition. What is beauty? What is vulgarity? When treated on equal footing, Vollmann illustrates to us that that distinction can only be made by the individual, if, indeed, it need be made at all.
Okay? So what do you say; are you ready to finish your dinner now?
C: Oh boy am I!
M: Good.
C: Thanks, mom. But I’m gonna need some more.
M: More? Why, darling?
C: I tell you, Ma, when I grow up I’m gonna be just like Billy Vollmann and go eat out all the whore’s pussies I can, so I gotta be big and strong!
[Mother affectionately tousles the boy’s hair.]
M: Of course you are, dear, of course you are. I’ll go whip up another sloppy joe and bring you some pimento loaf.
C: Pimento loaf! I almost forgot. You’re the best, ma!
[Lights fade to black. End scene.]
Mother: Why Cody, you’ve barely touched your food.
Cody: I’m not hungry.
M: Of course you are, dear. Is something bothering you?
C: I don’t wanna talk about it.
M: Come now, you know you can tell me. Besides, if you don’t finish your dinner you can’t have any pi-men-to loaf.
C: No pimento loaf?!?
M: Not until you tell me what’s on your mind.
C: Ok…I was just…
M: Yes?
C: I was just…just…thinking about pussy.
M: Pussy, dear?
C: Yeah. It’s just that…that…Billy Vollmann is sick from some bad pussy.
M: Why dear, wherever did you get such an idea?
C: He told me in Butterfly Stories.
M: You mean you read it in Butterfly Stories?
C: Uh-huh.
M: Oh son, why that’s just a book. He’s not sick. He just made it up for the book.
C: Why’d he wanna go an’ do a thing like that?
M: Why? I’ll tell you why, mister: because William Tanner Vollmann is the most kinetic, daring, and innately talented author under 60 working in contemporary fiction, that’s why. His blending of fiction and fact most closely resembles the Japanese “I” novel, wherein a given true foundation is extrapolated into fiction at some point, disorienting the reader and destabilizing the line between authorial reality and illusion. In Butterfly Stories, he once again dazzles us by not only demystifying the taboo of whores and their pussies and what he likes to do with their whore pussies, but also by treating the subject matter as if it were no better or worse than any other. And also, as you may have noticed, he brushes quite brusque, vulgar sentences against prose so achingly beautiful that the effect only strengthens the hypocrisy of ‘morality’ past the point of recognition. What is beauty? What is vulgarity? When treated on equal footing, Vollmann illustrates to us that that distinction can only be made by the individual, if, indeed, it need be made at all.
Okay? So what do you say; are you ready to finish your dinner now?
C: Oh boy am I!
M: Good.
C: Thanks, mom. But I’m gonna need some more.
M: More? Why, darling?
C: I tell you, Ma, when I grow up I’m gonna be just like Billy Vollmann and go eat out all the whore’s pussies I can, so I gotta be big and strong!
[Mother affectionately tousles the boy’s hair.]
M: Of course you are, dear, of course you are. I’ll go whip up another sloppy joe and bring you some pimento loaf.
C: Pimento loaf! I almost forgot. You’re the best, ma!
[Lights fade to black. End scene.]
January 29, 2016
This is a novel masquerading as a collection of short stories. Because of this approach, the novel consists of a series of vignettes or fragments. And that is, in part, the modern aspect of it. The prose is fairly conventional, though there are a few intersting stream-of-observation passages that are very effective.
The central, and by far the longest story -- "More Benadryl" -- is outstanding. It describes the experiences of the protagonist whoring in Thailand and in Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge. There is barely a false note in it. The other stories are not as good and have a certain artificiality about them that is missing from "Benadryl". As such, Vollmann's strengths and limitation (sic) seem both to be on display. What is good is very, very good. What is less good is still pretty good.
The central, and by far the longest story -- "More Benadryl" -- is outstanding. It describes the experiences of the protagonist whoring in Thailand and in Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge. There is barely a false note in it. The other stories are not as good and have a certain artificiality about them that is missing from "Benadryl". As such, Vollmann's strengths and limitation (sic) seem both to be on display. What is good is very, very good. What is less good is still pretty good.
May 14, 2016
Of all the Vollmann books I've read so far, I would say Butterfly Stories is the most punk, the most transgressive, and, let's be real, the just plain trashiest. Straight men aren't supposed to write this shamelessly about sex anymore - didn't he get the memo from David Foster Wallace? Apparently not, he carries on like a gooddamned homo, like he's Alan Hollinghurst or something. With this in mind, and giving all due deference to his love of pussy, I'd like to propose that Vollmann be named an honorary fag.
July 26, 2010
My roommate, who was a much better teen than I was, read this when she was seventeen and mainly determined what to read by how disturbing it sounded. She recalls this novel as "adequately disturbing". I didn't exactly find it disturbing, despite its greatest part being an account of sex tourism in Vietnam and Cambodia. Rather, I felt pulled along its trajectory from pathetic and sad to pathetic and vaguely cathartic. The protagonist, who despite being described in third person (and often with the narrator's approbation) I could not help but see as somewhat autobiographical, is a journalist who spends much of his time in southeast Asia falling rapidly in love with prostitutes. It's unclear why exactly he is predisposed to this despite the introductory sections of the book, offering glimpses of his formative experience, but he seems predisposed to falling in love with almost anyone, and perhaps prostitutes have that additional draw of (seeming to him to) need someone to fall in love with them. But as the more overtly chauvinist photographer who accompanies him observes, in the end there really is not that much difference between fucking prostitutes out of a desire to save them and fucking them out of a desire to fuck them. Why these two men are on a sex tour of southeast Asia isn't really all that obvious since their actions mostly fail to reflect any real purpose, but it seems likely they were to follow the political situation in Cambodia. And it is in the creeping references to this (everyone bears scars of, or lost friends and family to, the brutal Khmer Rouge) that give the narrative a deeper resonance, whatever the preoccupations of its characters. Later, back in the states, the journalist cannot leave behind these experiences and the two threads seem inextricably intertwined in them.
Overall, Vollmann's often pared-down style and content come off like a more self-conscious (sometimes annoyingly so) Bukowski, punctuated by stretches of lyricism, narrative experiment, and a grasping at significance. I enjoyed it enough that I picked up a more ambitious selection on my next Strand trip, his massive Europe Central.
Overall, Vollmann's often pared-down style and content come off like a more self-conscious (sometimes annoyingly so) Bukowski, punctuated by stretches of lyricism, narrative experiment, and a grasping at significance. I enjoyed it enough that I picked up a more ambitious selection on my next Strand trip, his massive Europe Central.
April 7, 2009
Vollman’s guided tour through a highly personal experience of Thai and Cambodian prostitution is operated neither for the benefit of lusty travelers nor for the righteously indignant. He deploys neither statistics nor sob stories to manipulate his readers, nor does he pander to voyeurists and perverts. However, his project is still manipulative—especially because of the tacked on narrative frame.
The bulk of the novel (at least 80% of it) transpires in chapters three and four. These can (and should) stand on their own as the full text of Vollman’s effort. The novel would exercise far more raw power without the sloppy and stereotypical fragments and short stories that he has packed around the edges.
The first chapter follows the grade school protagonist through the process of being humiliated in the playground, misunderstood by his parents and sheltered by little girls willing to show him their underpants. The selection of details is irritatingly limited to those sorts of events that might “explain” the “deviousness” of a grownup sex tourist.
The second chapter falls into the same trap, showing the protagonist in his early twenties grappling with suicide, substances and relational inhibitions. Are we supposed to take these forty anemic pages as the cause for the protagonist’s drive to start his third chapter with the sentence, “Once upon a time a journalist (the protagonist) and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia?” A throwaway chapter is sort of excusable; but not if it is meant to work as an interpretive key.
The final four chapters, each less than ten pages of fragmentary narrative snippets, dream sequences and hallucination, are presented as a sort of verdict or moral. It seems like all six less substantive chapters might have been requested by an editor who was trying to render the book more digestible for popular audiences—to defend the rottenness of the two core chapters by offering a justification and a punishment. These tactics should be beneath William Vollman; they cheapen what he accomplishes in the sour guts of his novel. “Butterfly Stories” does not in any way deserve the comparison; but imagine if “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” started with thirty pages about how tough it was to be a young Hunter S. Thompson and then ended with him reconstituting in a rehabilitation program—that is how affected the periphery of Vollman’s novel seems.
Now, what about the two hundred pages in between? They come from the mirthless perspective of someone almost adolescent in his willful refusal to acknowledge just how self-pitying he is. The photographer who travels with the journalist is not ever humanized. He is just a more promiscuous, hurtful and opportunistic person than the journalist, someone so jaded and emotionally detached that he will always make the journalist seem dimensional and interesting by comparison—if he didn’t seem somehow like a realistic companion to the journalist, I would accuse him of being a cheap plot device.
Vollman’s writing veers unexpectedly between crass artlessness and attempts at denser, more poetic and even experimental fiction. So, a reader encounters something as gradeschool as “Eventually, she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he’d have to do it. What a chore! But life isn’t always a bed of guacamole. He squeezed K-Y into her cunt, handed her the rubber, and then she said she didn’t know how to put it on . . . Wasn’t that SOMETHING?” And just a few pages later, Vollman may start unleashing sentences like the following (which I will not excerpt in full): “Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men’s cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus . . . etc.”
I’m not sure that Vollman actually succeeds with his less conventional dream/hallucination prose; but he doesn’t totally fail and I appreciate his trying. I also found the two primary chapters addictive in spite of their faults and honest in spite of their manipulative self-defenses.
“Atlas” was a better and more memorable book—and certainly the place to start. But, “Butterfly Stories” was worth reading as a sort of faux-memoire/travel literature offering. Vollman’s work that falls in those genres will continue to interest me. I haven’t been able to make any headway into his massive myth/history/shirt series. If anyone can suggest the path of least resistance, I’d be willing to give it another attempt.
The bulk of the novel (at least 80% of it) transpires in chapters three and four. These can (and should) stand on their own as the full text of Vollman’s effort. The novel would exercise far more raw power without the sloppy and stereotypical fragments and short stories that he has packed around the edges.
The first chapter follows the grade school protagonist through the process of being humiliated in the playground, misunderstood by his parents and sheltered by little girls willing to show him their underpants. The selection of details is irritatingly limited to those sorts of events that might “explain” the “deviousness” of a grownup sex tourist.
The second chapter falls into the same trap, showing the protagonist in his early twenties grappling with suicide, substances and relational inhibitions. Are we supposed to take these forty anemic pages as the cause for the protagonist’s drive to start his third chapter with the sentence, “Once upon a time a journalist (the protagonist) and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia?” A throwaway chapter is sort of excusable; but not if it is meant to work as an interpretive key.
The final four chapters, each less than ten pages of fragmentary narrative snippets, dream sequences and hallucination, are presented as a sort of verdict or moral. It seems like all six less substantive chapters might have been requested by an editor who was trying to render the book more digestible for popular audiences—to defend the rottenness of the two core chapters by offering a justification and a punishment. These tactics should be beneath William Vollman; they cheapen what he accomplishes in the sour guts of his novel. “Butterfly Stories” does not in any way deserve the comparison; but imagine if “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” started with thirty pages about how tough it was to be a young Hunter S. Thompson and then ended with him reconstituting in a rehabilitation program—that is how affected the periphery of Vollman’s novel seems.
Now, what about the two hundred pages in between? They come from the mirthless perspective of someone almost adolescent in his willful refusal to acknowledge just how self-pitying he is. The photographer who travels with the journalist is not ever humanized. He is just a more promiscuous, hurtful and opportunistic person than the journalist, someone so jaded and emotionally detached that he will always make the journalist seem dimensional and interesting by comparison—if he didn’t seem somehow like a realistic companion to the journalist, I would accuse him of being a cheap plot device.
Vollman’s writing veers unexpectedly between crass artlessness and attempts at denser, more poetic and even experimental fiction. So, a reader encounters something as gradeschool as “Eventually, she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he’d have to do it. What a chore! But life isn’t always a bed of guacamole. He squeezed K-Y into her cunt, handed her the rubber, and then she said she didn’t know how to put it on . . . Wasn’t that SOMETHING?” And just a few pages later, Vollman may start unleashing sentences like the following (which I will not excerpt in full): “Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men’s cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus . . . etc.”
I’m not sure that Vollman actually succeeds with his less conventional dream/hallucination prose; but he doesn’t totally fail and I appreciate his trying. I also found the two primary chapters addictive in spite of their faults and honest in spite of their manipulative self-defenses.
“Atlas” was a better and more memorable book—and certainly the place to start. But, “Butterfly Stories” was worth reading as a sort of faux-memoire/travel literature offering. Vollman’s work that falls in those genres will continue to interest me. I haven’t been able to make any headway into his massive myth/history/shirt series. If anyone can suggest the path of least resistance, I’d be willing to give it another attempt.
July 26, 2023
Ho letto questo libro sospinto dallo stile, dalla forma della prosa, di Vollmann e la storia, purtroppo, si è guadagnata poco spazio lungo il mio percorso di lettura. Mi perdevo nell’originalità delle sue similitudini, nei suoi lunghi periodi, balzando di capitolo in capitolo sempre più sorpreso.
Mi domando se non è questo l’unico modo per leggere un libro simile. Portandosi dietro solo vaghi ricordi, frammenti della storia (delle storie?), accompagnati da vivide sensazioni che non possono non aderire al lettore; certe immagini sono descritte con una sorta di sintetica crudezza, unita a un insolito distacco, tale per cui esse si appiccicano a noi, lettori, senza nemmeno chiederci il permesso.
L’alternanza dello stile nel descrivere ciò che i protagonisti (un giornalista e un fotografo) vedono e compiono, in Thailandia e in Cambogia, è calibrata con estrema precisione. La scrittura di Vollmann vive di vita propria ma solo quando è necessario, e si limita a riportare i fatti senza giudicare quando bastano poche e semplici parole per riportarli. Il postmodernismo che incontra la cruda realtà.
E così ci infiliamo in discoteche, madidi di sudore, a pagare birre a sempre più ragazze, finiamo a letto con alcune di queste (il numero si scorda ogni volta), non usiamo le protezioni, ci becchiamo l’aids e altre malattie, diventiamo anche noi farfalle con i protagonisti, attingiamo più polline possibile da più fiori possibili… e non c’è buonismo e patetismo in queste azioni, e nelle loro descrizioni, ma solo la brutalità di un luogo in cui tutto ciò è normalità e dove l’americano fiero sguazza assuefatto rivelando tutta la meschinità che cela.
Vollmann riporta come nessun altro la realtà che ci circonda, senza dare risposte ma cercando di scaturire curiosità nel lettore che, in seguito, ne trarrà le proprie.
Un autore folle, geniale, che sta dedicando tutta la sua vita alla propria produzione letteraria, che spazia fra i temi più disparati in cerca di una disperata comprensione del mondo, a cui forse, purtroppo, non è possibile giungere. Ma come ha detto Vollmann stesso all’incontro tenutosi alla biblioteca Salaborsa di Bologna: “magari sarà qualcuno di voi lettori che riuscirà ad arrivare a comprenderlo (il mondo)”.
Mi domando se non è questo l’unico modo per leggere un libro simile. Portandosi dietro solo vaghi ricordi, frammenti della storia (delle storie?), accompagnati da vivide sensazioni che non possono non aderire al lettore; certe immagini sono descritte con una sorta di sintetica crudezza, unita a un insolito distacco, tale per cui esse si appiccicano a noi, lettori, senza nemmeno chiederci il permesso.
L’alternanza dello stile nel descrivere ciò che i protagonisti (un giornalista e un fotografo) vedono e compiono, in Thailandia e in Cambogia, è calibrata con estrema precisione. La scrittura di Vollmann vive di vita propria ma solo quando è necessario, e si limita a riportare i fatti senza giudicare quando bastano poche e semplici parole per riportarli. Il postmodernismo che incontra la cruda realtà.
E così ci infiliamo in discoteche, madidi di sudore, a pagare birre a sempre più ragazze, finiamo a letto con alcune di queste (il numero si scorda ogni volta), non usiamo le protezioni, ci becchiamo l’aids e altre malattie, diventiamo anche noi farfalle con i protagonisti, attingiamo più polline possibile da più fiori possibili… e non c’è buonismo e patetismo in queste azioni, e nelle loro descrizioni, ma solo la brutalità di un luogo in cui tutto ciò è normalità e dove l’americano fiero sguazza assuefatto rivelando tutta la meschinità che cela.
Vollmann riporta come nessun altro la realtà che ci circonda, senza dare risposte ma cercando di scaturire curiosità nel lettore che, in seguito, ne trarrà le proprie.
Un autore folle, geniale, che sta dedicando tutta la sua vita alla propria produzione letteraria, che spazia fra i temi più disparati in cerca di una disperata comprensione del mondo, a cui forse, purtroppo, non è possibile giungere. Ma come ha detto Vollmann stesso all’incontro tenutosi alla biblioteca Salaborsa di Bologna: “magari sarà qualcuno di voi lettori che riuscirà ad arrivare a comprenderlo (il mondo)”.
February 13, 2008
I got herpes, aids and the clap just from reading this depressing book.
December 29, 2019
Davvero troppo deprimente.
![Profile Image for Jeffrey Paris [was Infinite Tasks].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1280795564i%2F4099259._UX200_CR0%2C10%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
October 10, 2013
Sigh. How do you rate a book like this? At best, it reminds me of Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions," in which I constantly said to myself (or maybe it was aloud), "Wtf, is this really a book, or is it actually the total corruption of a human soul drawn on the pages of a book?" The drawings by Vollman make the comparison more than a little obvious, I guess. Anybody out there have one of the color versions?
Yeah, the language. The images. How utterly and magnificently horrible. Nobody should read this book. You should read this book.
Yeah, the language. The images. How utterly and magnificently horrible. Nobody should read this book. You should read this book.
January 24, 2025
Pathetic narrator who fantasizes about getting AIDS, then does.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 19, 2023
Una specie di storia d’amore disperata o un reportage sulla prostituzione (e il turismo sessuale) nel sud est asiatico.
Traiettorie dal patetico al triste al vagamente catartico. Scrittura polarizzante, con frasi secche, tratti di lirismo e un registro iperrealistico che elimina gli abbellimenti.
Forse non rapisce, ma fa percepire il senso del culto verso Vollmann e invoglia a leggere altro.
Intro e outro visionari. Da archiviare nella cartella “pugno nello stomaco”.
[70/100]
Frasario minimo/
∞ La bellezza della farfalla sembrò una specie di vendetta che lo lasciò sconcertato e incredulo.
∞ Rimase a guardare la pioggia che si abbatteva, crepitava sui tetti di latta, si spargeva per le strade, cresceva e calava scricchiolando sotto i tuoni, creando nuove sbarre verticali malferme tra le sbarre delle finestre, solide sbarre di pioggia che si inchiodavano sui davanzali di cemento, sui tetti più in basso, da dove rimbalzavano all’istante e si allargavano come proiettili deformabili, ormai cadeva sempre più fitta fino a oscurare l’aria.
∞ Per diventare più saggi degli altri bisogna fare cose anormali. Gli inuit ci erano riusciti andando tutti soli nei ghiacci fino all’avvento degli spiriti animali. Il marito ci sarebbe riuscito grazie alla promiscuità.
∞ Ormai, a causa del divisionismo misterioso e inverso di tutte quelle altre influenze, l’immagine di Vanna si era disintegrata disperdendosi nel buio della sua mente come polvere di una protostella che perde energia. Quella notte vide in sogno una donna che non vedeva da anni, una donna bianca dal viso bellissimo che aveva sempre amato e che non lo aveva mai ricambiato. Nella visione non gli diceva niente, lo guardava con amore, e questo gli bastava e avanzava. Nella vita reale quella donna stava morendo o era già morta.
∞ Incrociarono un altro treno, dai cui finestrini vide altre teste e poi finestrini, ritagli di foglie di palma. I treni gli sembravano destini. Chissà che tipo di persona sarebbe diventato se avesse viaggiato su quell’altro treno.
Traiettorie dal patetico al triste al vagamente catartico. Scrittura polarizzante, con frasi secche, tratti di lirismo e un registro iperrealistico che elimina gli abbellimenti.
Forse non rapisce, ma fa percepire il senso del culto verso Vollmann e invoglia a leggere altro.
Intro e outro visionari. Da archiviare nella cartella “pugno nello stomaco”.
[70/100]
Frasario minimo/
∞ La bellezza della farfalla sembrò una specie di vendetta che lo lasciò sconcertato e incredulo.
∞ Rimase a guardare la pioggia che si abbatteva, crepitava sui tetti di latta, si spargeva per le strade, cresceva e calava scricchiolando sotto i tuoni, creando nuove sbarre verticali malferme tra le sbarre delle finestre, solide sbarre di pioggia che si inchiodavano sui davanzali di cemento, sui tetti più in basso, da dove rimbalzavano all’istante e si allargavano come proiettili deformabili, ormai cadeva sempre più fitta fino a oscurare l’aria.
∞ Per diventare più saggi degli altri bisogna fare cose anormali. Gli inuit ci erano riusciti andando tutti soli nei ghiacci fino all’avvento degli spiriti animali. Il marito ci sarebbe riuscito grazie alla promiscuità.
∞ Ormai, a causa del divisionismo misterioso e inverso di tutte quelle altre influenze, l’immagine di Vanna si era disintegrata disperdendosi nel buio della sua mente come polvere di una protostella che perde energia. Quella notte vide in sogno una donna che non vedeva da anni, una donna bianca dal viso bellissimo che aveva sempre amato e che non lo aveva mai ricambiato. Nella visione non gli diceva niente, lo guardava con amore, e questo gli bastava e avanzava. Nella vita reale quella donna stava morendo o era già morta.
∞ Incrociarono un altro treno, dai cui finestrini vide altre teste e poi finestrini, ritagli di foglie di palma. I treni gli sembravano destini. Chissà che tipo di persona sarebbe diventato se avesse viaggiato su quell’altro treno.
July 15, 2008
***I wrote this in a slap dash way and will be editing it in the future. Sorry. ***
I started to read this book with a kind of sneering contempt and felt that the narrator too pathetic, the setting was predictably offensive, everything about Butterfly Stories seemed too self-conscious, too sensational, just kind of mawkish and over-written in a bad way.
As I continued reading though, I feel like the greater project of the novel lured me in, ultimately that was the most satisfying and amazing part of it. The protagonist was pathetic, not like pathos but like a horrible spoiled douchebag sort of pathetic. The Cambodian and Thai whores were, well, whores, not disembodied 19th century abstractions or one foot in the grave junkie Law & Order abstraction, but confusing, vulnerable, manipulative, and sort of absent-minded. Everyone is horrible and anonymous, and makes really bad decisions... The characters (mainly the photographer and the journalist/butterfly boy) are revolting, but Vollman does a good job with characterization so we feel sorry for the journalist and his emotional retardation.
I think after finishing the book, I appreciated it as a parable. Ultimately, Vollman is trying to teach us a lesson about love and obsession. A contemporary Death in Venice, but with a kind of dumb hopeless American protagonist and no homosexuality, if that makes any sense.
I started to read this book with a kind of sneering contempt and felt that the narrator too pathetic, the setting was predictably offensive, everything about Butterfly Stories seemed too self-conscious, too sensational, just kind of mawkish and over-written in a bad way.
As I continued reading though, I feel like the greater project of the novel lured me in, ultimately that was the most satisfying and amazing part of it. The protagonist was pathetic, not like pathos but like a horrible spoiled douchebag sort of pathetic. The Cambodian and Thai whores were, well, whores, not disembodied 19th century abstractions or one foot in the grave junkie Law & Order abstraction, but confusing, vulnerable, manipulative, and sort of absent-minded. Everyone is horrible and anonymous, and makes really bad decisions... The characters (mainly the photographer and the journalist/butterfly boy) are revolting, but Vollman does a good job with characterization so we feel sorry for the journalist and his emotional retardation.
I think after finishing the book, I appreciated it as a parable. Ultimately, Vollman is trying to teach us a lesson about love and obsession. A contemporary Death in Venice, but with a kind of dumb hopeless American protagonist and no homosexuality, if that makes any sense.
February 27, 2010
William T. Vollmann writes a lot about whores without managing to come off as a gynophobic prick. His writing and turns of phrase are unparalleled.
Two American men - a journalist and a photographer - travel to Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, for the express purpose of gorging on as many whores as they can stand. Afterward, of course, they discard the women like the condoms they don't use. This, and some introspective mooning on the part of the journalist, is pretty much the action.
The self-referencing, omniscient narrator (though the story is told strictly from the journalist's point of view; both men are unnamed) at several points in the story refers to the men as "the misogynists" or other appellations regarding their uncouthness, rampant white/male/American privilege, and mistreatment of women who after all are just brown-colored whores. Their behavior is by no means glorified, and if you want to know what usually happens to someone after a few weeks of unprotected sexual tourism, pick this up to find out.
This is not an uplifting, light read. It reminded me quite often of Dennis Cooper, whose writing may be good but whom I can't usually stand to read because I feel like slicing open a vein afterward. Despite the uncomfortable subject matter and complete bleakness throughout, however, Vollmann is an an incredible writer, though I prefer his non-fiction.
Two American men - a journalist and a photographer - travel to Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, for the express purpose of gorging on as many whores as they can stand. Afterward, of course, they discard the women like the condoms they don't use. This, and some introspective mooning on the part of the journalist, is pretty much the action.
The self-referencing, omniscient narrator (though the story is told strictly from the journalist's point of view; both men are unnamed) at several points in the story refers to the men as "the misogynists" or other appellations regarding their uncouthness, rampant white/male/American privilege, and mistreatment of women who after all are just brown-colored whores. Their behavior is by no means glorified, and if you want to know what usually happens to someone after a few weeks of unprotected sexual tourism, pick this up to find out.
This is not an uplifting, light read. It reminded me quite often of Dennis Cooper, whose writing may be good but whom I can't usually stand to read because I feel like slicing open a vein afterward. Despite the uncomfortable subject matter and complete bleakness throughout, however, Vollmann is an an incredible writer, though I prefer his non-fiction.
July 29, 2023
Due americani, a loro modo dilettanti della vita, vanno a puttane in Thailandia e Cambogia.
Aggiungi più amore, più dolore e più AIDS di quanto tu possa immaginare.
Aggiungi una prosa meravigliosa e disegnini weird.
Ne esce fuori, come dalla sua crisalide, Butterfly Stories: un malsano capolavoro.
Aggiungi più amore, più dolore e più AIDS di quanto tu possa immaginare.
Aggiungi una prosa meravigliosa e disegnini weird.
Ne esce fuori, come dalla sua crisalide, Butterfly Stories: un malsano capolavoro.
July 24, 2017
https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/163363...
This being only my third indulgence into the literary work of WTV it is painfully obvious to me that he isn’t an easy read. Previously a foolish premonition on my behalf perhaps, due often to his brief sentences and short paragraphs. But Vollmann makes me rather uncomfortable. And I can’t say my reading of him is “fun”. That is not to say it could be, one day, after I get past his own particular “difference” on the page. Simply put, Vollmann performs his craft in such a way as to make me see it just might be possible. Hearing others and discerning between these many voices, and then considering the foreign ideas presented in a devised, but parallel existence of deviance, can only do me some good. Perhaps my emerging tolerance for all the different sizes, colors, shapes, and smells I find in the world around me is due to this enlarging present feeling of acceptance I have evolved to not only for myself and my own differences but for the other strange ones among us.
…Something touched him. He didn’t know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crew-cut soft like sealskin kamiks…
The dude can obviously write when he wants to. My complaint is he does not care enough for what I need to tender more abundant examples of great sentences. The “whore trilogy” is a supersaturation of all things that drip of sweat, disease, stink, and slime. Of course, there is in his characters a constant need for love and then their roiling indifference as it pertains to others. If this review makes no sense and seems haphazard and wanting to flit, try reading the Butterfly Stories. The title says it all. It always felt as if Vollmann was keeping me away at arm’s length. No intimacy or connection with anyone, and of course no one ever fitting in. Not knowing if this novel was truly a love story or a death wish realized, but understanding all along that we, as in my heart and mind, are never coming back.
This being only my third indulgence into the literary work of WTV it is painfully obvious to me that he isn’t an easy read. Previously a foolish premonition on my behalf perhaps, due often to his brief sentences and short paragraphs. But Vollmann makes me rather uncomfortable. And I can’t say my reading of him is “fun”. That is not to say it could be, one day, after I get past his own particular “difference” on the page. Simply put, Vollmann performs his craft in such a way as to make me see it just might be possible. Hearing others and discerning between these many voices, and then considering the foreign ideas presented in a devised, but parallel existence of deviance, can only do me some good. Perhaps my emerging tolerance for all the different sizes, colors, shapes, and smells I find in the world around me is due to this enlarging present feeling of acceptance I have evolved to not only for myself and my own differences but for the other strange ones among us.
…Something touched him. He didn’t know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crew-cut soft like sealskin kamiks…
The dude can obviously write when he wants to. My complaint is he does not care enough for what I need to tender more abundant examples of great sentences. The “whore trilogy” is a supersaturation of all things that drip of sweat, disease, stink, and slime. Of course, there is in his characters a constant need for love and then their roiling indifference as it pertains to others. If this review makes no sense and seems haphazard and wanting to flit, try reading the Butterfly Stories. The title says it all. It always felt as if Vollmann was keeping me away at arm’s length. No intimacy or connection with anyone, and of course no one ever fitting in. Not knowing if this novel was truly a love story or a death wish realized, but understanding all along that we, as in my heart and mind, are never coming back.
March 8, 2010
“ . . . she couldn’t exactly be enjoying herself, but the similarity between wives and whores is that you don’t have to consider their pleasure when you f*ck them . .”
I think this pretty much sums up the sentiment of this book. It was entirely chauvinistic and degrading, and the characters were despicable in an outright way with no naivety that could help your relate to them. I don’t have anything against books with promiscuity or prostitution if its done well but this one was just a gross excuse to detail the author’s morbid sick fantasies.
With the journalist and photographer theme, this book seemed to attempt an emulation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Except that it’s in Thailand and Cambodia and instead of drugs, they use women. But it wasn’t clever or funny the way Fear and Loathing was. Mostly it was just gross. I hoped I would learn something about Southeast Asia, but instead all I learned was the taste, color, tightness, smell, diseases and cost of the “whores” they bought. I kept reading only because I hoped I would find something redeeming but it was just more of the self pitying, self absorbed assholes screwing women over.
Big thumbs down. I think I might have gotten VD just from reading this disgusting book.
I think this pretty much sums up the sentiment of this book. It was entirely chauvinistic and degrading, and the characters were despicable in an outright way with no naivety that could help your relate to them. I don’t have anything against books with promiscuity or prostitution if its done well but this one was just a gross excuse to detail the author’s morbid sick fantasies.
With the journalist and photographer theme, this book seemed to attempt an emulation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Except that it’s in Thailand and Cambodia and instead of drugs, they use women. But it wasn’t clever or funny the way Fear and Loathing was. Mostly it was just gross. I hoped I would learn something about Southeast Asia, but instead all I learned was the taste, color, tightness, smell, diseases and cost of the “whores” they bought. I kept reading only because I hoped I would find something redeeming but it was just more of the self pitying, self absorbed assholes screwing women over.
Big thumbs down. I think I might have gotten VD just from reading this disgusting book.
February 9, 2020
There's a feeling most of you can probably relate to. It's the one you get when you read an author for the first time and you get this childish sense of joy, knowing you just encountered the potential for many new excellent books to burrow their way into your heart.
This "new author" feeling took me by storm the first time I read works by Bolaño, McCarthy, Borges, and most recently Pynchon. Now I am getting that same feeling by Vollmann.
This novel isn't perfect. It's fragmented and lacking in some ways. But it is also brilliant. Briefly, this novel follows a man first introduced to us as a young, bullied child referred to simply as the "Butterfly Boy". We follow this boy through various transformations, including one where he is an adult, and a journalist traveling across Thailand and Cambodia, whoring at every opportunity, eventually falling in love with a Cambodian whore.
One point that struck me as brilliant comes near the end of the book. After having fallen in love with Vanna (the aforementioned whore), and upon returning to the US from his assignment of depravity in the sexual fringes of humanity, he spends his time and energy in a state of mental instability, deluded and flirting with psychosis while earning money and laboring towards carving a path to get his beloved Vanna into the United States. In the mental breakdown(s) that follows, he chances upon a hypnotist who then hypnotizes(or drugs) our protagonist and sends us down a brilliantly written, surreal digression of hallucinations, realizations, and hypnosis that goes on for a good dozen or so pages. I loved it, and I can't help but call it Pynchonian.
Vollmann, at least in this novel, is among many other things vulgar and vile, lyrical, and intelligent. With themes of violence, sexual depravity, and the obscene this novel hypnotized me, and left me with this giddy feeling I described earlier is urging me to read more of the man's work.
And so I will.
Read
May 26, 2025loser journalist from the new york crimes goes to cambodia for sex tourism, with traces of exploring a connection between the casual violence of american daily life and the (neo?)-imperialist project.
maybe i was reaching too hard with that last part, but it's a theme i'm really interested in and was optimistic he would pull the thread. instead he lost me with the sensitive-horny orientalist caricatures of every thai or cambodian woman in the story.
maybe i was reaching too hard with that last part, but it's a theme i'm really interested in and was optimistic he would pull the thread. instead he lost me with the sensitive-horny orientalist caricatures of every thai or cambodian woman in the story.
January 23, 2013
This book and others by Vollmann came highly recommended by my dear friend and confidant Natalie Ballard. So, while returning home from Cambodia, I started reading it. What a perfect, absolutely perfect time to read such a novel. It is reminiscent of the time I read "Blood Meridian" for the first time while traveling across the Chinese desert by train. Sometimes, the setting in which you read a book is worth a star in itself.
With that said, "Butterfly Stories" would probably have gotten five stars anyway. What it lacks in, say, the latter half of the book, it more than makes up for in the first half and the gorgeous, incredible use of language and prose throughout the rest of the novel.
The "butterfly boy," later the journalist, the husband, and the new husband, actually reminded me of so many people I've encountered while living in China all those years. And loathe I am to admit it, he reminded me of myself a little as well. Not a stranger to just a wee bit of the lifestyle and strange respect, attraction, and even admiration of the Asian ladies of the night, I found in the "Journalist" a person I could identify with and try to understand better.
Vollmann tells a relatively simple story, but heaps upon that story layers and layers of human depth, realism, angst, and beautifully raw descriptions of Bangkok and Phnom Penh. Having been to both places, I can say that the man can describe an environment second to none. Not only is Vollmann a master craftsman of the word, but also a gifted artist when it comes to aesthetics, inventive writing style and technique, and brutal dialogue. I loved every second of this novel, and found my jaw dropped several times because of either what awful perverse thing Vollmann just described, or how perversely amazing and gifted a writer the man is.
I will be reading more of Vollmann's work, to say the least.
With that said, "Butterfly Stories" would probably have gotten five stars anyway. What it lacks in, say, the latter half of the book, it more than makes up for in the first half and the gorgeous, incredible use of language and prose throughout the rest of the novel.
The "butterfly boy," later the journalist, the husband, and the new husband, actually reminded me of so many people I've encountered while living in China all those years. And loathe I am to admit it, he reminded me of myself a little as well. Not a stranger to just a wee bit of the lifestyle and strange respect, attraction, and even admiration of the Asian ladies of the night, I found in the "Journalist" a person I could identify with and try to understand better.
Vollmann tells a relatively simple story, but heaps upon that story layers and layers of human depth, realism, angst, and beautifully raw descriptions of Bangkok and Phnom Penh. Having been to both places, I can say that the man can describe an environment second to none. Not only is Vollmann a master craftsman of the word, but also a gifted artist when it comes to aesthetics, inventive writing style and technique, and brutal dialogue. I loved every second of this novel, and found my jaw dropped several times because of either what awful perverse thing Vollmann just described, or how perversely amazing and gifted a writer the man is.
I will be reading more of Vollmann's work, to say the least.
January 23, 2025
The more I read of Vollmann, the more I believe my initial impression of him and what he's trying to do was badly mistaken.
This is a book that does nothing if not invite you to empathize with the "journalist", and those he encounters in his travels between Thailand, Cambodia, England, and the Arctic. The problem (at least for some) would be that- at his core- the journalist is pretty frankly self-pitying, pathetic, and self-centered. I personally think that he does in some way care for all of the prostitutes he sleeps with throughout the book- I don't know if everyone else would agree. I also could intensely relate with the feelings of shame and self-revulsion Vollmann describes in the main character- he is quite good at capturing the multi-faceted odiousness shame inspires in people. I also really liked his prose here- it changes depending on the chapter. The main chapter- focused on the journalist and photographer's "adventures"- is written in a sparse, repetitive style that I was beginning to tire of; however, the repetition is the point- setting up the scene for the following chapter which follows the journalist in the aftermath of his "butterflying" trip back in the states and the emotional (and physical) fallout he experiences over the years, and is written in a much more experimental style. Not all of it was necessary- I don't think the first two chapters were needed at all, as they didn't really provide any sufficient background development for the main character and why he behaves how he does.
Overall though, I thought this was a much better read than my first introduction to Vollmann- and I believe I underestimated that as well.
This is a book that does nothing if not invite you to empathize with the "journalist", and those he encounters in his travels between Thailand, Cambodia, England, and the Arctic. The problem (at least for some) would be that- at his core- the journalist is pretty frankly self-pitying, pathetic, and self-centered. I personally think that he does in some way care for all of the prostitutes he sleeps with throughout the book- I don't know if everyone else would agree. I also could intensely relate with the feelings of shame and self-revulsion Vollmann describes in the main character- he is quite good at capturing the multi-faceted odiousness shame inspires in people. I also really liked his prose here- it changes depending on the chapter. The main chapter- focused on the journalist and photographer's "adventures"- is written in a sparse, repetitive style that I was beginning to tire of; however, the repetition is the point- setting up the scene for the following chapter which follows the journalist in the aftermath of his "butterflying" trip back in the states and the emotional (and physical) fallout he experiences over the years, and is written in a much more experimental style. Not all of it was necessary- I don't think the first two chapters were needed at all, as they didn't really provide any sufficient background development for the main character and why he behaves how he does.
Overall though, I thought this was a much better read than my first introduction to Vollmann- and I believe I underestimated that as well.
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