NP - NYT Review of Volman's new release "Imperial"

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/books/29vollman.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking
Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed
recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to
be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs
he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera
while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable
raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the
most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk
polio vaccine.
[...]

“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and
arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an
extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in
others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta
(“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and
dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to
exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had
characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to
stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs,
on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A
page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”
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