Voluble and voracious, he's building own history

[rich]

I guess what gets me about that is there's too much of him in many of
the fictions--its very distracting and most of the time does nothing
for the story.
(admittedly, I really liked the Rifles, where I think his intrusions
worked and in the story the Back of My Head, e.g.)

will be interesting to see what he comes up with the remaining Seven
Dreams books


On 10/18/09, tbeshear <tbeshear at insightbb.com> wrote:
> There's humor in Vollmann's work, but it's very dry wit, and much of the
> humor is at his expense.
>
> He's one of the few prominent living American authors I could see getting a
> Nobel.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> To: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2009 11:26 AM
> Subject: Re: Voluble and voracious, he's building own history
>
>
>> but he ain't fun to read which will make him one of those cultish types
>>
>> hes the most humorless writer on the planet
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Dave Monroe
>> <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Voluble and voracious, he's building own history
>>> By Allen Pierleoni
>>> apierleoni at sacbee.com
>>> Published: Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 18
>>>
>>>
>>> The literary community is fractured in its views of author William T.
>>> Vollman.
>>>
>>> Consider these three sound bites from qualified observers:
>>>
>>> • Peter Grandbois, author and professor of creative writing and
>>> contemporary literature at California State University, Sacramento:
>>>
>>> "Vollmann is the conscience of our generation. In many ways, he is a
>>> throwback to an older generation of writers like Hemingway and
>>> Steinbeck. ...
>>>
>>> "What's amazing about his body of work is that he never dumbs it down,
>>> never simplifies the issues in order to form a neat plot line or
>>> support an agenda. ... His empathy for others and his ability to make
>>> the reader have empathy for those others is his greatest gift."
>>>
>>> • Matthew Stratton, assistant professor of English, University of
>>> California, Davis:
>>>
>>> "Ironically, it's due to just how prolific Vollmann is that it's too
>>> early to tell where in American literary history he will arrive.
>>>
>>> "His work hasn't received as much serious scholarly attention as it
>>> deserves, which is partially a function of its unruly brilliance, and
>>> partially a function of how long it takes literary scholarship to
>>> catch up.
>>>
>>> "Is he primarily a high-post-modern novelist to be read and taught
>>> with Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie? Does he belong with Joan
>>> Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, who render personal experience into
>>> unusually compelling analysis while erasing conventional borders
>>> between fact and fiction?
>>>
>>> "The answers are 'yes.' The question is 'when?' "
>>>
>>> • Michael Coffey, executive managing editor of Publishers Weekly
>>> magazine:
>>>
>>> "Vollmann is a kind of natural resource, a vivid
>>> historian-documentarian with a voracious appetite for conveying a
>>> diversity of lived experience. ... He writes with his feet and is
>>> literally out there ... but he writes with his head as well.
>>>
>>> "The amount of research evident in his longer projects is astounding.
>>> There's no one like Vollmann working now. He is an anomaly, being so
>>> wide-ranging in his interests. ...
>>>
>>> "And for all his production, he never writes a bad sentence."
>>>
>>> http://www.sacbee.com/books/story/2257063.html
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>