Europe Central

[jd]

I rode out to the Lake Placid area this weekend, bagged not a small
number of trout, good times.  But anyways I started reading The Royal
Family by Vollmann and am a few hundred pages in.  Enjoying it quite a
bit but the way he writes himself into his own book be it an on-page
appearance when a character says the Queen's name is Gloria ("I
thought you said it was Vanna!") or the way he constantly interjects
first person opinions in a way that just somehow doesn't ring as true
as in Dostoyevsky novels, for which he seems to have a considerable
amount of respect.  It's a good book, I'm enjoying it a lot, but the
author stands as too much of a presence in it.  A graphic design
teacher once told me that great design is the sort of design that when
you look at it, you don't realize that it was consciously designed at
all - it's just always been.  I think Vollmann seems to have missed
that point in writing this book.

It seems he is at some level trying to be Dostoyevsky-ish in this
manner but when he interjects himself or his own opinion it's just too
much more evident - maybe because it was written so recently that the
grave hasn't had time to distance the writer from his work.

That said, again, it IS a good book, but I see the ability there for
it to be a GREAT book and he seems somewhat unable to get over himself
enough to just let the book play out on its own without his own
interjections.  This might be able to slide with a lot of authors but
when you're dealing with someone who so obviously wants to go down in
history as a great author, these nit-picky details come out - I just
end up looking for them the more and end up saying that, while it's
better than the majority of tripe coming out, it falls short of the
ranks of greatness.  A different metric of quality measurement if you
will.

I will certainly pick up more books by him and will read Europe
Central one of these days.  It sounds like a good read.

On 5/30/06, Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> "two"
>
> Otto wrote:
> >
> > Seems as if there are only Vollmann-novels that have been translated
> > into German yet:
> > http://www.perlentaucher.de/autoren/13488.html
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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