Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
Parables of a Violent World
By Michael Wood
Europe Central
by William T. Vollmann
Viking, 811 pp., $39.95
Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader
edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson
Thunder's Mouth, 479 pp., $17.95 (paper)
'A piecemeal atlas of the world I think in' was William T. Vollmann's phrase for a book he wrote almost ten years ago. That world is certainly worth mapping. It is full of contemporary history, politics, guns, prostitution, drugs, crowds, and violence. But it is also the shifting residence of a lonely, obsessive reader and writer determined to make sense of things. The work in question is in fact called The Atlas (1996), and contains fifty-five items of varying length, written alternatively in the first and third person, from the point of view of a male traveler, set in an impressive list of locations around the globe, from Afghanistan to Zagreb, and from Grand Central Station to the Yukon.
Review, 4523 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |