James’s Reviews > The Atlas > Status Update

Some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in a long time. Jungles, deserts, caves intertwined with paranormal or Southern-gothic-esque hauntings of esoteric religions...

Before this the only masterfully written work is ever read that took place in a jungle was “Terra Incognita” by Nabokov. Read it many times over. Can’t believe it’s taken me over three decades to find out about Vollmann...

The best kind of Vollmann dialogue:


“I'm going to rip your underpants off and rape you.
I'd like to see you try. All I have to do is look at you and it goes limp. You couldn't rape a jellyfish.
Did you ever love me?
I don't remember.”

Excerpt From
The Atlas
William T. Vollmann
This material may be protected by copyright.

Vollmann is currently retelling the story of the Siege of Masada in biblical form.

This is such a “why didn’t I or anyone else think of that before” historical fiction writing style that it hurts. What a collection.

Vollmann in a nutshell:

“Her labia had flushed the reddish-orange of molten copper. The empty needle hung from her like a breast sucked dry as she hunched forward, masturbating furiously.
She smiled and swayed for a long time. Then she turned to look at the man. Defiantly she said: Have you ever been in love?
No, the man said.
Oh, she said. I was just curious.”

Chewin’ khat with prostitutes in Kenya, boxing in Sacramento, tramping around in the Canadian wilderness, train hopping, crack smoking... ah, Vollmann. You satisfy my ADD and need for romanticized grit.

“Did I really have the power to make another person happy or unhappy? Was I ever that much alive?”

tl;dr romance is hard when you’re a John in Cambodia

One of those terribly boring Vollmann passages that are emotionally disappointing—but I get it, he modeled this after a Kawabata collection which presumably depicted “mysterious” geishas and love-lorn Japanese men because it’s fucking Kawabata. I don’t know if I’ve matured or become less mature to not even bother trying to give a fuck.

Already getting sick of it and feel like I’ve read this before in his other short story collections I’ve read: poverty, prostitutes, drugs, and gruesome deaths, but this time set in “exotic” places and among what I guess would be “exotic” cultures not routinely explored in American literature. Realist, heterosexual William Burroughs—but like Burroughs, creatively-written enough to keep interest.