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

[rich]

dressing up in drag for his next book about the transgendered

(insert simpsons shudder)

rich

On 7/29/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.”
>