| Title | : | Whores for Gloria |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140231579 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140231571 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1991 |
Whores for Gloria Reviews
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4.5 stars
This is my first Vollman; an easy way in I thought because it is short. I should have known better because it raises all sorts of issues and defies neat classification. The novel is a series of vignettes and short chapters. The main protagonist is Jimmy, who is a Vietnam veteran; middle-aged and living in a flophouse, surviving on his regular cheque and spending much time drinking in bars. It is set in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Jimmy is obsessed with Gloria, who seems to be an idealised woman (possibly a prostitute, or maybe not) who he may or may not have known in his past. He pays a variety of prostitutes; some for sex, others for stories, sad and happy. He starts to build a composite picture of Gloria from stories, memories and individual character traits and physical attributes of the women he meets. He even asks for a lock of hair. Gloria is usually almost within reach for Jimmy, but just beyond what he can conceive and bring to reality. Vollman has done his research, at the back of the book is a glossary of terms (necessary) and he interviewed many prostitutes in the Tenderloin area as part of his research. There are notes on these interviews at the back of the book and these make the book more powerful being authentic voices. There is also a price list for the period 1985-88. We follow Jimmy in his encounters with prostitutes, some of whom are transvestites and transgender. Other characters include the barmaids in various bars, a number of pimps and Code Six, Jimmy’s Vietnam buddy who is even worse off than Jimmy, living in an alley.
This is not a novel in the same genre as American Psycho et al; the difference being that Vollman clearly has great compassion for those who inhabit the world he draws. John Rechy has drawn a comparison with Don Quixote with Gloria as Dulcinea and in an odd sort of way I can understand that.
This is the first of a trilogy and it has been noted that Vollman does seem to focus on prostitution quite a lot. When asked about this he makes a point about it being an intersection between love, sex and money and contends that in terms of our materialistic society prostitutes do openly what the rest of society do covertly and so by looking at them we see ourselves more sharply.
This is in a way a love story; the language is very strong and the descriptions vivid. The women who work as prostitutes are portrayed with understanding and warmth. It is never really clear whether Gloria is real and in some ways Jimmy is also a composite of one of the denizens of the area. It could be a ghost story. It is all the more powerful because of the knowledge that many of the stories Vollman uses are real. Vollman clearly has a strong moral sense. The pimps, although as lost as everyone else, are using the structure and agency society gives them to control the women; backed up of course by physical violence. It is moving and harrowing and very bleak. Vollman leaves open a lot of questions about gender relations and how men and women negotiate relationships. But he does leave the reader with some explanation;
“For we must all build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously” -
Driving home from a movie last week with my seven year old daughter, I chose the way that took us up 6th Street, across Market and through the heart of San Francisco's Tenderloin. At a stoplight my daughter pointed out the car window at a disheveled, drug-addled man stumbling through pedestrian traffic in bright, mid-afternoon sunshine and asked, "Daddy, how does a person get to be like that man?"
After ten years of living in San Francisco, I realize that I inhabit a real-life version of China Miéville's
The City & the City. Chronic homelessness, agressive panhandling and shuck-and-jive pageantry have become a part of the city's backdrop and are now nearly unrecognizable in their individuality; so much so that you can tell a local from a tourist because the local isn't just ignoring that plea for money, they just don't see that person anymore . Six years ago when my family moved to the place where I currently reside there was a white homeless man with a shopping cart in front of our house, standing at the stairs as if he was expecting our arrival. His long unkempt hair had tangled itself into some unintentional version of dreadlocks; his unwashed clothes and strong scent of booze, urine and shopping cart filth was not the neighborhood welcome we had anticipated. Over the first few weeks after moving-in we would see him rambling down the street with his cart, talking incoherently to himself, sometimes sleeping off a high on the sidewalk. He soon became a recognizable and colorful feature of the neighborhood - we noticed that he defended the trash and recycle bins from other homeless men in some type of inscrutable turf claimstaking. We began to refer to him as Dread (shorthand for his hairstyle), and his sidewalk sleeping, public urinating presence became something of a landmark - like a friendly feral cat or a derelict car we wondered when would be towed. His life story, and basically his humanity, had been subsumed by my family's need to create order from his chaos, and by doing so, erase him. Six years later, I couldn't tell you how frequently he is on the street. Occasionally I will see a tourist on Fillmore Street walk in a wide parabola while looking at a human on the ground. My Miéville veil will drop and I will think to myself, "Oh, it's just Dread." And my culpability in de-humanizing this person is complete. He just doesn't even register anymore.
So my daughter's question, like so much unwitting wisdom of children, was a much needed bolt of reality. I tried to look at the man on 6th Street through her eyes, and then answered, "A life of bad choices." But that was the cop-out to a question I was not educated enough to properly answer. And then, that same day, GR chum N.R. Gaddis recommended Vollmann's "Whores for Gloria". Serendipity doesn't even begin to tell the story.
Vollmann doesn't write about the denizens of San Francisco's Tenderloin district, he channels them like a medium. "I hate myself hate myself HATE myself! thegirl shouted, but everybody in the bar including Jimmy again pretended not to hear because it might be her self-hatred was the base of her integrity which everyone had to have..." Vollmann's characters are richly portrayed, hopeless of outlook, helpless in changing the trajectory of their lives. Jimmy, the main character of the novel, spends his days trying to exorcise his demon, Gloria. From one carnal episode to the next; employing prostitutes to relay their memories (whether happy or sad), even gathering locks of hooker hair to create a voodoo version of his savior yields predictable results. "The problem he said to himself is how can I put one foot ahead of the other day after day for the rest of my life?" Vollmann's prose is taut, gritty, vivid. Flop-house hotel rooms ooze disease, and meticulous descriptions of hooker lesion filled, track-marked bodies read like a health clinic's cautionary pamphlet.
And so Vollmann has taught me, convinced me, that there is no one answer to my daughter's question. He is clear, however, to let the reader know that whatever path brings a person to the Tenderloin of human existence - once you have crossed that Rubicon - you have entered the world where Gloria is the protagonist, and you are forever her whore. In one of Jimmy's few clear moments, he reflects, "Here we have the Whore of Hell: Abandon hope all ye who enter her." -
Gloria, Gloria, Gloria
Bill rang me and said do you want to come and meet Jimmy, so I said yes, I’d heard so much about him from Bill, he was going to write a piece, an article or a story about him for some magazine, he was infatuated with some whore, an ex-girlfriend, Gloria, who’d just up and disappeared six months ago, Bill didn’t know whether she was dead or in prison or had gone back to her family to have a baby, Bill had never even met her or seen a photo, all he had to go on was a description from Jimmy, none of the other whores in the ‘Loin remembered her, they’d all arrived since she’d left, once Bill even speculated that she might never have existed, and Jimmy heard about it, and next time he saw him, he punched him in the side of the jaw and loosened a tooth, though they’re good friends now, well good enough to have a drink with and to introduce me to, though as the editor of the novel he was supposed to be writing (I didn't "officially" know about the article) I had to pay of course, not that Bill needed or wanted an editor, he just got me for free, and I had a modest expense account.
We were supposed to meet him at the Black Rose, but he wasn’t there, so we went on a virtual bar crawl, HaRa, Summer Place, Nite Cap, and the Geary Club, nobody had seen him, so I said why don’t we check if he’s at home, it was almost noon and I was ready for a drink, I hadn’t had one since I downed a couple of Bloody Mary’s in the hotel bar for breakfast. We ran into Pearl in the lobby of Jimmy’s building, but she hadn’t seen him yet, so we walked up three flights of stairs until we got to his floor and located room 19, the door was open and the light was on, so we walked in, when this beautiful tall amazonian woman with a great shock of long hair, says, what the fuck are you doing here, we’re looking for Jimmy, we said, well he’s not here, do you know where he is then, no, she said, but if you see him first, tell him I’m looking for him, and if he’s with some whore, he’d better watch his back. Who the fuck are you then, Bill asked, unusually cocky for the writer Bill I knew. Only Jimmy needs to know that, and he’s smart enough to work it out himself. She turned around and continued to unload groceries out of plastic bags into the pantry. Go on, you two can fuck off. She was beautiful, but she had a foul mouth.
We went back to the Black Rose and sure enough, there was Jimmy, sitting at a table, half a Bud in his hand, but it wasn’t his first of the day, he looked like he’d been drinking all day or had started last night and hadn’t stopped. He was talking to a big-breasted whore named Luna, who looked pretty good for her age, behind her sunglasses, we sat with them for five or six rounds, while Jimmy’s head set more and more into his folded arms on the table, all the time calling Luna Gloria, and insisting that she wear a wig he’d brought along in a plastic shopping bag.
To be honest, Bill and I totally forgot to mention the woman in his room, we’d got to talking as soon as we arrived, then some other girls arrived and asked both of us if we wanted to go upstairs, we both said yes, I thought Bill was going to fuck his girl, the younger of the two, but he reckoned afterwards, all he did was talk to her with a recorder going the whole time. My whore, a melancholy one, was an ex-med student who wanted to be a writer, so she was all over me when she found out what I did, she sat me down on the red velvet couch, unbuttoned my shirt and flung it over the side chair, I struggled to get my trousers off, but she stopped me as she crept onto my lap and started to play with my hair, which I hate being messed up, then she ran her hands over my chest, I’m still pretty fit for my age, and she squeezed me, while my grin struggled not to become a grimace, then suddenly, Jesus, fuck, what did you do? I looked down at my left nipple and she had run a six inch safety pin through the soft flesh at its base and closed it before I even knew what was happening. A trickle of blood emerged from the puncture mark at each end, but once the initial shock wore off, it didn’t seem to hurt at all. Still, I wasn’t about to have the other one done. Come on, put your shirt back on and have another drink with me, big boy.
We went back downstairs to our table, from which Jimmy and Luna had departed. I ordered another round of drinks, and the German beer wench asked if I wanted to get a drink for Jimmy and Luna, they were just in the alleyway. I took their drinks out, but the two of them were busily fucking against the wall of the Chinese Restaurant next door.
I put their drinks on the pavement, and returned inside to our table. By this time Bill had come down, we were both thinking it was time to go, he said he wanted to transcribe his tape, I didn’t believe him until later when I saw the transcript of what happened that day. Then there was a commotion at the front door. The woman from Jimmy’s room had arrived and knocked over somebody’s bourbon. The German woman panicked behind the bar, scheiss, Gloria, she said, I thought you were dead. She didn’t bother to return the greeting, she just said, where the fuck is Jimmy, the German hesitated to answer, but her eyes gave her away, they had unknowingly pointed towards the alley, so Gloria went out into the alley and past the Chinese restaurant, not knowing that she would find not just Jimmy, but Jimmy flatbacking Luna on the hood of a car. She wasn’t to know that the whole time he fucked her, he was saying, Gloria, Gloria, Gloria. And that’s just about all I can remember. -
Here we have a novel or novella about unhappy love and those who are bound in peculiarly painful kinds of loneliness. Here is a story about religious devotion to an ideal, and a kind of Mother Mary made of scraps one might assemble scouring the shores of hell. Or a Mary Magdalene and her seven demons stitched together out of pieces of other people's sad stories. Here we have a novella about those made to sin by the need of money. Here we have a novel about what's washed up when we send people to kill other people in far away wars and leave them in the wind when they return, leave them to waste when they return. A novella about America and its cruelty. Here we have a novel or novella about being locked out of Paradise. Hell is on earth and the residents of hell look a lot like you and me. Here on earth we trade each other our sufferings and loneliness as bone-currency while the hot wind howls our voices down.
-
I did it! I really did it! I finally managed to not helicopter a book by Vollmann across the room after the first thirty-odd pages or so. Despite the rabid adulation on the GR from his (admittedly) small number of unwavering acolytes, something about his prose style has never clicked with me. Again and again I found his run-on sentences too unwieldy and stilted as they clunked along the page, regurgitating a Mulligan stew of overly self-serious authorial asides and (admittedly) erudite annotations-- and any semblance of editing be damned! However this trim bit of social-realist/surrealist nasty managed to keep my attention for the several hours it took to thumb through its 138 pages. And, yes, I was impressed with Vollmann's handling of his subject matter, utilizing the oral accounts of actual female and transgender prostitutes to present an unflinching panorama of their wretched existence in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. With his obvious deep well of compassion for his "whores", Vollmann strives through art to offer their experiences a level of dignity that the real world can't be bothered to give. This range of sad, irreverent, angry and pragmatic voices is filtered into the framework of a quest narrative featuring a barely functional Vietnam veteran that hopelessly seeks to fill a goddess-sized hole in his perverted soul that he has named Gloria. A grungy but humane jumble of the erotic and the repugnant, this first of Vollmann's so-called "Prostitution Trilogy" offers enough textual richness to keep many well-meaning undergrads happy as they fumble overeagerly with queer, marxist, post-colonial and feminist theory.
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It is difficult to not resort to the man, his biography, his researches, when reading Vollmann's work on the Tenderloin and its prostitutes. One comes to feel at home, belonging here, among our nation's caste-offs, our prostitutes and pimps and homeless and drunks and transvestites.
Jimmy knows his whores. He pays for the stories that they might tell him, first the happy ones and, when those run short, the sad ones. With the addition of a lock of whore's hair he turns these stories into his goddess, Gloria. Jimmy's imaginative work is Vollmann's own; from dirt and filth, art creates Gloria.
Vollmann writes of sadness. But this is the sadness of a search for salvation, not a nihilism, not a conversion to a righteousness. Rather his stories of the underworld, the forgotten and persecuted--the law and its shadowy endeavors of entrapment constantly shade and threaten the lives of our non-heroes--shine a narrative light on what most would rather have left unremarked. Vollmann rewrites the stories of Jesus's ministry in Galilee among the outcasts, the beggars, the prostitutes, the forsaken. If the kingdom of heaven is for the least of us, Vollmann's world is the coming of that kingdom.
Whores for Gloria, despite its slim size, is an excellent showcase for what Vollmann can do. -
Whores for Gloria is about Jimmy, an ex-soldier who cashes in his SSI checks only to spend them – after paying his rent at the hotel – on whores. Vollmann weaves a captivating and most disturbing tale that captures the grittiness and vulgarity of street prostitution and the frightening and depressing reality around it.
Jimmy is on the lookout for Gloria, who appears to be a figment of his imagination, and it’s never clear if Jimmy is high, psychotic, mentally handicapped or whatever, but this doesn’t matter because Vollmann shifts the focus from Jimmy to Jimmy’s desire for Gloria, and how the prostitutes fill that void in strange and unusual ways.
If literature is indeed the search for truth, or, as I like to think of it, creative documentation of the truth, then Vollmann has done street prostitution literary justice. While some scenes and the syntax did occasionally turn my stomach, I’m not naïve enough to deny the ugliness of reality depicted in this novella. Vollmann’s writing is gritty, depicting the essence of the story through intricate scenes where monologue, dialogue, and atmosphere demand the reader’s attention.Melissa held the grating open for him. The lobby was old-style marble, but as soon as they went upstairs everything was dark and shabby and stinking. Melissa took him around the corner for a minute and stood thinking and then led Jimmy to the elevator. Jimmy’s dick was hard. They went down together in the little steel cage, neither saying a thing because they both had exactly what they wanted and then the cage stopped and they were in the basement. Melissa led him into the laundry room. -Close the door, said Jimmy, but Melissa wouldn’t because she was afraid of him.
You remind me of Gloria, said Jimmy. -Who’s Gloria? said Melissa. -Oh she used to live here, Jimmy lied; she moved out about three weeks ago. Have you seen her? -No, Melissa said. I’ve never seen her.
The only qualm I do have is the premise of Jimmy seeking Gloria, which seemed to be the catalyst for this documentary-like story. I would like to know more as to why Vollmann used this angle since I feel the story would have had a more powerful effect if Jimmy wasn’t himself as run down as the whores depicted. In any event, it’s a strong story with some disturbing scenes and characters.
Vollmann is definitely a writer with a distinctive, edgy style who does not shy away from grim subjects. Whores for Gloria is the first part of the Prostitution Trilogy, not a trilogy per se in terms of connectedness but a trilogy in terms of theme only.
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Jimmy's Tricky Tenderloin
or
Flatbacked in the Financial District
"...and she fixed her huge pupils on him she was not even thinking of the money for the moment but the thrill of making him see her as she wanted to be for all those lonely men whose greed of lust was nothing but an aching prayer for beauty..."
-- William T Vollmann, Whores for Gloria
Not an easy read. I picked up 'Whores for Gloria' at City Lights last time I was in San Francisco. Paid full price. Figured it was a book about the City, and I was all for buying a bit a piece of the grit lit of the city. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my experience with this funky little novel is similar to my entire experience with Vollmann. It remained a big to do, a far orbit, and even when I was doing it, it was slow and deliberate. It was a thin novel, but no cinch. Not a quick roll or one night read-and-bed. It is an almost documentary exploration of the pimping and prostitution of the Tenderloin neighborhood (btw, pretty close to where I was staying at the time I purchased this novel). It is gritty and funky. But it ends up also being a fantasy or perhaps a dark phantasm. The narrator, the stand-in for Vollmann, is a guy named Jimmy who is sleeping with whores and collecting their stories (and hair) trying to conjure up/evoke/summon Gloria (G.L.O.R.I.A.) the missing love of his life, his past, his innocence. It really is a trip of a novel, just not one I would send home, hand-in-hand, with my mother to her punch and book club. This isn't a novel for the many unwashed, but for those chosen few who appreciate Vollmann's depth and the sad honesty of curiosity about the Earths's many far corners and the unnoticed low cracks of the world. If this corner or that crack is your game, your fix, your drug, then this is certainly one amazing dark crack to start with. -
Virgil stopped, retreating the few steps. "This. You do not see?"
"Yes. I see…"
A hand clasped about my shoulder, "But you see the drugs, human bodies bought and sold, the frenzy of blight. You see through the eyes of a Parole Officer. You see guns, knives, prostitution, rapes, muggings, death. You should have never taken that job…"
"It was all I could find. And only eighteen months before leaving. I did it different. More their friend. They knew I was on their side. I grew up in a neighborhood where I could talk their talk. Most believed I understood. I was more successful…I…"
"So? Why stop here? Now?"
"Well. Because. I mean since…"
"You stopped here witnessing human beings abandoning themselves, abandoning each other. Objects to be used to douse temporarily the heat of desires, the pawing hunger of gratification. Confusing what they need from whom they are. Then, there is the theft of hope. How far away is it, I ask you, please put down the book for just a moment, your free market trade world. The large corporations, their viewpoint of their competitors, customers, employees, is, using one of your days passwords established to mean nothing while sounding like something, 'trending', towards this?"
"Whore's, drug dealers, criminals who have the power to make their actions legal. Their needs exist as the only needs, consequences never considered. But. But."
"Yes your book you snuck in here,"
"But, I just finished it. There was nowhere to put it."
"Why not drop it?"
"I knew I wanted to come back to it, that it might be pertinent to…to this walk. I know how ridiculous this must seem to hold any writer …I mean after what you accomplished, what you wrote, sir."
"Please call me Virgil."
"Yes. Of course. May I call you Vir., or V.?"
"Virgil will do. As will this book you read. Written by a Mister Vollmann?"
"You heard of him."
"Not in my time but in yours."
"Any chance of … "
"Of a what?"
"An autograph?"
"I don't think so. But maybe your Mister Vollmann. He seems quite worthy. The Royal Family also was a master work."
"Not ancient greek though."
"He writes in the poetry of despair. It is quite an accomplishment. Then there is the haunting he conjures up. He is not shy is he? Using prostitutes and their customers, johns, their merciless obsessions, exploits, to convey the despair of isolation nearing complete in its fold. Certainly there will be those who consider it disgusting, a ploy for the author to confess his own obsessions mixing Mister Vollmann up with his narrator. The only person you see, on this level, who except for a few isolated events seeks relationship, is our John. The ghastly tale here is the woman, Gloria, does not exist. His love is entailed in the porous web of his imagination. His life since returning from the VietNam War, suffering from rampant alcoholism, has been built around widening Gloria's existence. Attempting to move her from the abstract into the concrete. Using what he can get from the women working the streets for the brutality of their own survival, to buffer this relationship that has no chance to be. The bitter sadness of this expands poetry, its metaphorical message, its ghostly prophecies. You shouldn't have to carry books with you. In our age, though ancient as you call it, we had other ways of reading and discussing books. Have you ever heard of something named Goodreads."
"Yes. Yes Virg. I mean Virgil. Sir. We have such a thing."
"Then you will understand my five star rating."
"I gave it the same."
"You will have to excuse me now. I must be getting back to enter the rating and pass it along to my contemporaries. We discuss your Mister Vollmann frequently. -
My first Vollmann (in at the shallow end):
Whores for Gloria is the harrowing, episodic story of an alcoholic, mentally disturbed veteran of the Vietnam War, Jimmy, who is trying to fabricate a love he calls Gloria from the clothes, hair, appearances and (the more pleasant, if necessarily quite distant) memories of the most desperate, diseased, sliding-along-the-filthy-bottom-of-the-barrel prostitutes in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. The reader is pulled along in this unspeakably sad quest from one human wreck to the next, each worst than the last. What makes this horror show actually horrible is that Vollmann shows us the dying spark of humanity in each. Then Jimmy transforms the stories and mementos, images and scents into Gloria. After each encounter Gloria becomes more solid, more complete to Jimmy.
For no apparent reason (except, of course, for the purposes of the story), there is a setback, and Gloria makes herself scarce. Jimmy then finds a level below the bottom of the barrel, drinks even more, loses his already tentative hold on reality, and finds himself beaten, stabbed and robbed in the street. At the end of this final transformation Jimmy "realizes" that what he needs in order to bring Gloria back to him and to keep her at his side are memories of pain and torture. (!) Fortunately, the book does not dwell long on this and ends quickly with an unconvincing, but short epilogue.
I found the story to be compelling up until this final "realization", where Vollmann lost me in the last 10 pages. I couldn't see this as anything more than a "shocking" way to end the tale, in other words, just a literary device. But it is a relatively early work (1991) and is an unusually short piece for Vollmann. So it is likely to be not at all representative of Vollmann in his encyclopedic prime. There are some further, though less significant false notes: on occasion it seemed to me that Vollmann crossed the line into sentimentality; and this text is no place for gestures to the literati like "when the names of streets are like Nabokov's wearisome cleverness" (Bill, that is an example of wearisome cleverness!).
All in all, I am impressed with his ability to unblinkingly examine the most miserable of lives and to fully empathize with the human beings whose doom it is to live them. From what little I know about Vollmann's work at this point, precisely this ability breathes life into most of his literary efforts. And I am impressed with the absence of judgment and bitterness in this book. This absence is, I believe, the mark of a man who is trying to understand the world around him instead of projecting himself into that world. A la prochaine , Bill! -
Vollmann scrive divinamente e ce lo dimostra con un romanzo crudo e a tratti cruento ma che regala pagine di rara bellezza.
La storia è quella di Jimmy, reduce del Vietnam, alla ricerca del suo amore perduto Gloria.
Amore che cerca nel sesso a pagamento con un'infinità di prostitute, alle quali chiede sì sesso ma anche di raccontargli le loro storie, per poter carpire da tutte loro quanto basta per dare vita alla storia di Gloria.
A tratti dolce a tratti drammatico, infine tragico.
... E appoggiata contro la parete di marmo di un albergo che un tempo era stato di lusso, si abbassò le spalline del top per mettere in mostra i suoi seni dannatamente belli mentre abbassava il capo con un sorrisetto e alzava un timido braccio come se avesse paura di lui (e sul quel braccio lui scorse una lunga cicatrice rossa che le correva lungo la vena). Il lampione stradale, intanto, incipriava di un bianco intenso la sua nudità e la piega delle labbra le conferiva un'aria da ragazzina poiché le rughe che gli anni avevano seminato intorno alla sua bocca non avevano ancora messo radici profonde, e così lei adesso faceva per lui il suo numero di magia con quegli occhi color nocciola e gli orecchini a forma di guscio di tartaruga che aveva avuto in prestito da Luna. Prenditeli, le aveva detto con sprezzante gentilezza, e tanti saluti, povera, vecchia lurida troia. Eppure adesso, mentre lo fissava con le sue enormi pupille, non pensava affatto al denaro, ma al brivido che le dava l'apparire agli occhi di lui come ciò che lei aspirava a essere per tutti quegli uomini soli il cui desiderio di lussuria altro non era che una struggente richiesta di bellezza. Ma poi lui si spostò un po'. Oh, ti prego, non andartene proprio adesso, figlio di puttana, pensò lei, ti dovrò accalappiare le palle nella stretta delle mie cosce perché ho tanto, tanto bisogno della mia dose.
Poi, una settimana più tardi, quando fu dimesso dal policlinico di San Francisco con abiti di seconda mano e un sacchetto di cibo, comin- ciava a imbrunire e Jimmy, incamminatosi per Ellis Street strascicando i piedi e prendendo a calci vecchi quotidiani, vide un'innocente coppia di neri che si baciavano con grande trasporto davanti a un portone e pensò Com'è triste che gli uomini siano capaci di parlare d'amore alle donne con una voce ferma e profonda come l'immutabile scorrere di un fiume e poi però dimentichino la bellezza del fiume, come ho fatto io, al punto che ora ne sento soltanto il mugghiare che mi rimbomba nelle orecchie come una scarica elettrica. -
"We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend no matter how much of it she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase "shooting the shit", and so filled the needel with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses. Less well known is the tale of the man who decided to kill himself by swallowing his athlete's foot medicine. Loving Gloria, he died in inconceivable agony. When they collected a sample of urine, it melted the plastic cup.-That, it is safe to say, is despair. More obscure still, because fictitious, is the following. All of the whore's tales herein, however, are real."
That is the first page of the novella, Whores For Gloria, and it is one hell of a start to an epic search for love. Yes that's correct, a love story with whores, and druggies, and pimps, and a whole cast of despicable dregs of society.
From the start of the novella, you are drawn up like a drug into a syringe and injected into the Tenderloin, and taken for a very wild ride. You get to learn about how the castaways live their lives from the comfort of your home. How much is real, and how much is made doesn't matter, you will continue to read to find Gloria with Jimmy. You will read to know what horrible, disgusting things some people will go through to get that next high. And sometimes, you may wonder if you would ever go that fair, you begin to question if the stories are real, and you will try and make them fairy tales of horror to comfort yourself.
Reading this was an extreme pleasure, and quick. It is funny to say reading something about drug addicts and whores is a pleasure, but it was. I was able to journey with a man to find the love of his life while living in deplorable conditions. He had true love on his mind, and was going to do absolutely anything to get it.
The details that Vollmann gives in the story are amazing, and it makes you wonder what stories of these did he actually partake in. He completes the story, in my edition, in 138 pages, but damn did if feel like a much longer novel. When reading some of the stories the whores tell Jimmy, your mind will begin to create backgrounds for these women, and you will start to see the journey they made to the Tenderloin, and want to stay until you are finished.
I have read Europe Central and The Ice-Shirt, and I think I am in love with his whore stories, and like a drug, I feel like I need to get back to the Tenderloin with Vollmann. -
Video Review
Additional points cut from the video review:
While WfG is a creative exercise in writing a protagonist in denial of their ruin, WfG might also be an exploration of crossdressing and transgenderism in sex work in California.
Viewing it from this second perspective, I find the book much more interesting. Firstly for its novelty, secondly for its biographical relevance (see: The Book of Dolores), and thirdly as it gives a rationale for why Jimmy is unaware of his ruin. The story then, would be that Gloria is some kind of psychological projection for Jimmy's questioning sexuality. Or... it's hard to say really, is it his sexuality, or his own sexual persona/image (crossdressing), or Gloria as a sexual persona that he is trying to 'find'?
It might be an excessive conceptual stretch to think this far, given the only vague signs in the book for this actually occurring in the book are his liking of Phyllis and the collecting of body hair (and the wig). Although, given how broken Jimmy seems, it could be closer to the reality of what Vollmann was trying to convey.
I guess this perspective shows that I think that had Vollmann pushed this narrative a bit further into a wider context, I personally might have appreciated it much more. This could all be a personal gripe I have with this, but that's the best that I can explain it. -
Whores for Gloriousness...
(Note: All of the following draws me ineluctably closer to RURD. The RURD is calling. It must be sated. All hail the RURD. Haven't you heard that the RURD is the word?!?)
Jesus Christos' on a giant lower-case 't'! How did Vollmann accomplish this beautiful and terrible feat? This is a crushing book, full of so much empathy that you could practically wring some out and use later it to seem like a swell guy or gal in your real life. In Steven Moore's words, Vollmann's lack of judgement and piousness "makes him a better person than me."
The stories of the whores (his word, not mine, sugar) are excruciating (something I would italicize if I knew html). If they don't affect you, you very likely have one of those blue globes in your ribcage. See past the exactingly frank depictions of sex to a fatalistic story of redemption for the doomed. Is such a thing possible? We're all gonna find out, and far too soon. -
https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/161848...
…I haven’t told the truth for so long now that I’ve given up lying.
William T. Vollmann’s name has come up often and been noticed on lists of books deserving to be remarked upon. For some reason I have resisted reading him, but my being recently compared to him by another writer I am intimate with, I decided to examine a bit of the fuss behind the legend of Vollmann. Whores for Gloria signals my starting point. And what a point it is.
…Virgin Mary candy full of sunlight and ocean fruit…
The narrator’s voice is natural and through the use of no punctuation the dialogue between all the players is easy to discern, understand, and know at all times just who is talking. But the subject matter perhaps excludes too many of us on purpose. And I like it that Vollman’s work is exclusionary. Becomes a sort of fraternity I have been temporarily made member of. In this particular case a membership in what might be referred to as a gutter club. Flying dirt balls of emotion and most certainly a fated dead end. It is obvious to me that Vollmann has studied his whoring subjects well. His disturbed protagonist is named Jimmy.
It isn’t easy for me being this close-up to Vollmann. Too few pages of pure joy, reading pleasures somehow massaging the pain and loss that permeates everything everywhere. Jimmy’s absent love conjured up in real time, futile attempts at recovering some sense of belonging in the world, even in light of his daily encounters with a confounding nature called time. And sadly, time being something apparently needing to end for him.
…alley by alley I will search and destroy…he could not believe that he was actually remembering anything because he had not done that since before he started drinking, and he felt uneasy…
In light of Jimmy’s incessant delusion in his remembrance of his long-lost Gloria the story is as much about forgetting. Fueled by alcohol his escape from the horrors of the Vietnam War seemed to morph into a parallel fantasy regarding the woman of his dreams brought to life through the seedy culture of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
One night Riley hopped a freight into town, and because he had been living the life of himself he was in bad shape.
For me, my first exposure to William T. Vollmann was portend, portend, portend. And for more of that I will be back.
Butterfly Stories is calling. -
Some thoughts:
1. This is the quickest read WTV has out there (I read it in a few hours), but it is NOT the place to start for newcomers to his work, in my opinion. I think I appreciate it more two reasons: (1) I know the story behind the book; and (2) I am situating it within his whole repertoire and not on its own.
2. It blows my mind that this is the same guy who gave us Fathers and Crows, You Bright and Risen Angels, The Ice-Shirt, Poor People, and Carbon Ideologies (among many others, of course). What can't this guy do?!
3. This one is gritty, grimy, raw--basically I wanted to wash my hands and shower constantly (and not just because of the current COVID-19 pandemic).
4. Beautiful, sprawling sentences bordering on a sort of oxymoronic Baroque minimalism bring a maximalist aesthetic to the hard-boiled mystery form.
5. The simple plot of a poor young man, Jimmy, obsessed with and trying to find a prostitute, Gloria, is the perfect catalyst for the real story behind the book: WTV and photographer friend Ken Miller spent much, much time in the Tenderloin of SF paying prostitutes to tell them stories. As the opening of the book tells us, the stories the ladies tell are all real.
6. WTV's dark humor and sardonic wit are on display here. -
So good to be back in San Francisco for the summer and reading Vollmann on the madmen and whores of my beloved Tenderloin district.
I felt like this was an updating of Dante's Vita Nova for the blasted blue collar Vietnam generation as they slunk toward the Tenderloin to die in addiction and madness. In light of that it's pretty amazing how tenaciously humankind clings to the dream of love despite PTSD, whoring, drug addiction, abscesses, and the general filth and stink and selfishness of poverty, madness, and addiction. It's quite possible that this melancholy yearning for an impossible love among the mundane trappings of the world has always been the best subject for a work of literature.
So, this is a fine little novel in its own meandering and mysterious way despite its also feeling like a trial run/sketch toward the far more ambitious masterpiece that is The Royal Family. -
Primo capitolo (autonomo) della trilogia Prostitution, Puttane per Gloria non è una raccolta di racconti, non è neppure un romanzo, casomai è una raccolta di episodi frammentari, monologhi registrati su carta, nella periferia notturna e sporca di San Francisco. Camminiamo nelle strade sudice, tra prostituzione e traffici illeciti, nei locali impregnati dall’odore di alcool e fumo, mentre la notte incombe sulle vite di noi emarginati. Al nostro fianco il sorridente Jimmy, reduce del Vietnam, infinitamente innamorato dell’invisibile Gloria, donna che tenta di ricostruire attraverso le storie delle prostitute che incontra. Il valore delle Storie per Vollmann è la possibilità di un’iniziale evasione dal reale e di una conseguente costruzione di un fittizio-reale che lo sostituisca. Ed è proprio attraverso le storie (Vollmann ci dice subito essere autentiche) delle prostitute che Jimmy incontra che il nostro protagonista tenta di ricreare la sua Gloria, di vederla apparirgli davanti agli occhi come un’apparizione divina per poterla finalmente riavere tra le sue braccia.
Vollmann è uno che si sporca le mani, che va sul campo, che ha vissuto davvero in mezzo alle prostitute, che si è appropriato delle loro storie e le getta davanti all’ignaro lettore (soprattutto se contestualizziamo questo romanzo all’anno di uscita 1991); quello di Vollmann non è uno sguardo vouyeristico o critico, è lo sguardo di un umile, di chi si è messo sullo stesso piano degli uomini e delle donne di cui racconta. A Vollmann interessa raccontare in modo anarchico: la sua scrittura sarà lirica quando vorrà, volgare quando vorrà, e non importa se la cronaca non si amalgamerà bene con la fiction, che la ripetitività disturberà il lettore, ciò che emergerà sarà un quadro assolutamente soddisfacente, un libro non incasellabile da nessuna parte, un’esperienza al contempo triste e grottescamente divertente, sicuramente realistica, mai retorica. -
If there must be filth in this world I'm going to be part of it -
Vollmann himself is not a whore, more like a humble student of human nature. He writes mainly from the perspective of johns (no one should hold this against him; not all johns are the same; a john may be filled with empathy and complex motives).
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"We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend now matter how much she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase 'shooting the shit', and so filled the needle with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses..."
Well, actually I'd never heard that story before. Depending on your temperament, the above might just seem disgusting in a gratuitous way. This, however, is genuinely poignant:
"...but I don't have any money right now and Luna said softly you don't have to give me any money and Jimmy's jaw fell open - he had never heard such astonishing words in his life!"
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Tried very hard to understand the message above all the lurid details of Jimmy and Gloria’s personal sex life. Gloria leaves Jimmy and Jimmy tried to find her in a range of women.
Maybe it’s just me who couldn’t understand. -
Μια αντρική ιστορία, που σε όλη την εξ��στόρηση της η αντρική ματιά και το βίωμα του συναισθήματος είναι ωμά δοσμένο. Σαν να έχεις δίπλα σου έναν άντρα και σου μιλάει και στα λέει χύμα και τσουβαλάτα χωρίς πολλές κορδέλες, φρου φρου κι αρώματα.
Προτείνεται. -
«(las putas y los sepultureros son los únicos optimistas perpetuos)».
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Otra incursión de Vollmann en el tema de la prostitución. Emparentada con Historias del Mariposa y La familia real, explora entrecortadamente, a través de diversos episodios, el intento de un hombre en reconstruir la historia de Gloria para así traerla a la vida. Entre el delirio y el reportaje periodístico. Muy Vollmann.
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As i was adding the Vollmann title that i am just beginning, imagine my surprise and delight to recognize one of those titles as a random book from the library that i read without really noting the author or even the correct title: this book. which i remember as hilarious if a bit tedious. One of my dearest friends was an older, somewhat crotchetity woman called Gloria and i think that was why i grabbed it as a bit of a joke; and i remember being blown away by the skill and imagination of this guy none of us feminist readers at the bookstore had ever heard of before
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The novelistic part (Gloria) was only so-so believable; the gritty skid row, very believable -- but it does get a bit repetitive after awhile -- not all unhappy 'families' being always different.
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Not sure who recommended this one, but found it pretty inaccessible. Comparisons with Pynchon and Burroughs seem valid given this fact, but for all the wrong reasons...
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I first read William T. Vollmann fairly early in the 21st century, around 2002 or 2003. I was about to finish or had just more or less finished grad school. After grad school I moved back across the country to my city of origin in order to cohabit with a woman with whom I had become romantically involved. She and I lived a circumscribed existence. We didn’t have much in the way of friends, more or less abstaining from the society of our fellows. Literature, music, and cinema were that over which we had initially bonded and they served as the fulcrum of our life together. Each of us brought a prodigious number of books to the relationship (not to mention CDs, vinyl LPs, DVDs, and VHS tapes). It was my partner who had gotten to Vollmann before I had. It was her copy of THE ATLAS I read—this being my first dip into the redoubtable author—it's coming into my hands on the back of her enthusiastic recommendation. THE ATLAS was poetic globetrotting reportage, an immersion in diaphanous states of mind linked to remote landscapes and a quality of existential/geographic drift. It was a slightly anxious book, a kind of searching without discernible object (perhaps a self-reconstruction). I would not have called this collection of compelling dispatches a gripping narrative. It was fragmented, impressionistic. In reflecting upon the book today I remember impressions, most especially the way its author describes the atmosphere in Canada’s far north, thick with mosquitos. THE ATLAS was idiosyncratic in the extreme. It was also oddly uncanny, working on me like a kind of phantasmic possession. I was certainly a convert, I thought, weeks and even moths later, but to what exactly? I kept a eye out for news of Vollmann’s doings and the appearance of new works. If I am remembering things correctly, it was not terribly long after I read THE ATLAS that his outrageously major treatise on violence appeared—this would be RISING UP AND RISING DOWN—first in a complete multi-volume version (running some three-thousand-plus pages) from McSweeny’s and subsequently in a truncated edition. It was an event that would have been hard to miss for anybody with even a cursory interest in literary matters. It was a daunting work, I suppose, but one the hype machine could hardly be expected to let alone all together. I never got around to reading it but certainly it piqued my interest. From the time I moved back to my hometown until I moved to California briefly in 2009 I was deep into late stage alcoholism with bipolar comorbidity. Sometimes I read prodigiously, but very often I was far too messed-up. I do remember coming across journalism by Vollmann here and there. I definitely read the fascinating essay about Chinese tunnels under Mexico in HARPER’S, a piece that would reappear in 2005’s Dave Eggers edited edition of THE BEST AMERICAN UNREQUIRED READING (and would later be repurposed for Vollmann’s 2009 non-fiction work IMPERIAL). I also read EUROPE CENTRAL when it came out that same year and went on to win the National Book Award. This was not too long before I spent thirty days in my first (of multiple) treatment facilities, my alcoholism having precipitated a couple of kidney failures. There was a certain amount of folk legend concerning Vollmann floating around at the time. Some of this related to his seemingly superhuman output (featuring absolutely giant books). I recall somebody telling me that Vollmann had extremely bad carpal tunnel simply on account of writing so goddamn much. I had also heard about the FBI having investigated him as a possible Unabomber suspect as well as his purported track record rescuing prostitutes from grave circumstances in foreign countries, placing himself in considerable peril in order to do so. Stuff like this can tend to seem apocryphal, but with Vollmann you are kind of inclined to buy it. I have done a more than commendable job of keeping up with the ensuing glut of product since stabilizing once again in November or 2013. LAST STORIES AND OTHER STORIES, THE DYING GRASS (Volume 5 of the sprawling SEVEN DREAMS series of historical novels), and both volumes of CARBON IDEOLOGIES. I have read each of these with tremendous admiration. In NO GOOD ALTERNATIVE, the second volume of CARBON IDEOLOGIES, Vollmann makes a passing joke about strip mining. Strip mining or stripping, engaged in by strippers. It is perhaps the general folksy ingenuousness of much of Vollmann’s later non-fiction work that allows him to get away with a playful aside; he reminds the reader not to confuse the kind of strippers who tear up and despoil the landscape, often in the context of mountaintop removal, with the other kind of stripper. He has spent a great deal of time with the other kind of stripper. Strippers are among his favourite people. Anybody familiar with Vollmann’s body of work and the general mythology surrounding him will understand that this perhaps-slightly-distasteful throwaway quip references not only things he gets up to in his spare time but a persistent focus in his overarching body of work, most obviously evident in, but not limited to, his so-called “Prostitution Trilogy,” consisting of WHORES FOR GLORIA (1991), BUTTERFLY STORIES (1993), and the epic THE ROYAL FAMILY (2000). WHORES FOR GLORIA, the first of these novels, is also the first I have read. I own a copy of the hardcover of THE ROYAL FAMILY, have in fact done so for years and years, but have not yet taken the leap. WHORES FOR GLORIA is, for a Vollmann, noticeably short, just over one hundred fifty pages. THE ROYAL FAMILY this ain’t. When it originally came out in 1991, Vollmann had only published YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS, THE RAINBOW STORIES, and THE ICE-SHIRT, only the latter two of which are mentioned on the back of the Picador UK paperback from 1991. Vollmann was not yet what we might call a totally known quantity. There was some appeal in this. A blurb on the back has Emma Dally from COSMOPOLITAN suggesting that it might not be totally clear if the author is a genius or a madman, which is kind of true, no doubt, but more strictly constitutes a calculated bit of marketing. Vollmann has never been a physically attractive man and he would appear to most to have led a somewhat shady existence. He would also appear to have spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of sex workers, especially those plying their trade on the streets, as such a great deal more vulnerable that their equivalents working out of massage parlours and agencies (who also command higher rates). WHORES FOR GLORIA concludes with a glossary of pertinent terminologies being employed in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district during the late 1980s, the milieu in which the novel is set, and also “A profile of the Tenderloin street prostitute (1985-1988)," a composite drawn from interviews in the field with sex workers and pimps. Vollmann also includes an inventory of going prices for various sex acts, ranging from hand jobs to BDSM. Interviews and “portrait photographs” can be anywhere from free to about $5.00. The novel, obviously, is a product of field research, we might call it, but what exactly Vollmann got up to with the (often obviously extremely desperate) women he encountered in San Francisco (and elsewhere) is open to speculation. It is difficult to imagine that transactional sex was not involved. The novel is itself comprised of 29 short chapters, themselves often broken down into multiple titled fragments. The syntax, the general style, and the form itself are highly idiosyncratic, outright unorthodox even, to the extent that we probably have cause to call the novel experimental. An opening fragment tells of a man who drank his athlete’s foot medicine and died a horribly unpleasant death. A cryptic clue: Gloria, the woman he would seem to have loved. A bit of hazy syntax makes it not so clear whether “real” and “fictitious” are to be considered in their standard oppositional dialectic. One might reflect upon philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism: Virtual + Actual = Real. Also: it is always important to note, especially as regards literature born of lived experience, that facts are one thing, truth something else entirely. Later in the novel: “I’m not lying I never lied to you I haven’t told the truth for so long now that I’ve given up lying.” After this somewhat inscrutable introduction we are dropped into a street scene. Laredo. Police decoy. She walks the street. Walking, talking entrapment of the kosher variety. Her partner Leroy is surveilling the street scene, concealed in a dented van. There is a man. The man in question is talking on a payphone. He talks too long to be engaging in any kind of standard criminal payphone interchange, characterized as these are by briskness and brevity, hit it and scram. The man on the payphone is animated. He appears to hector, cajole, plead. He is crying. Laredo experiences a revery. She is snorkeling, beholding a universe of alien fish, an interloper. Now, suddenly, we are closer to the man on the payphone. Laredo and Leroy can see that he is crying. But his voice is even and steady. No interlocutor on the other end of the line would be aware of tears. The man addresses Gloria. Hectors a bit, cajoles a bit, pleads, though making it suitably playful. There is the likelihood or even probability that Gloria is pregnant with the man’s child. He makes another call. Tries to book Gloria an airplane ticket. Makes repeated overtures of a sordid nature toward the woman on the other end of the line. He asks her age and when she apparently tells him he informs her amusedly that she is old enough to be his mother. He hustles. “Aw, come on! Hey, I’m clean—you just ask any whore in the Tenderloin! I’ve never cheated on any one of my women even when I was goin’ out with all three of ‘em at the same time.” Beat. Pivot. “The man laughed. He hung up. He winked at Laredo and sauntered off whistling. But Laredo was no fool. She knew that the pay phone had been broken for weeks. And she knew that the man was still crying.” The man, we will quickly come to discover, is Jimmy. He is fairly elderly, clearly somewhat psychotic, a Vietnam vet collecting disability, most of which he spends on the desperate women working the Tenderloin. Gloria. Who is Gloria. Does she exists? Well, there is nothing that we can imagine that does not then instantaneously come into some kind of existence. Is the Gloria that Jimmy carries around with him born of a real world referent out there somewhere? One would imagine so. Certainly, at least in some sense. It is not especially crucial that we know. What is crucial is that trauma has a tendency to shatter psyches and that Jimmy’s is a shattered psyche. He is pieces in search of reconstruction. Gloria is one of the pieces (or a category of fragments in search of incorporation). Jimmy is also an alcoholic. He lives in a disreputable hotel, no doubt one of the many “trick pads” in the vicinity. Jimmy interacts with a multitude of sex workers. Dinah, Classic, and Candy, for example. And Phyllis, a “transvestite.” That latter term has lately fallen out of favour, but it is certainly one that would have been circulating in the milieu in question; it is a term Phyllis would at the very least have come to grudgingly accept. There are other attendant terminologies: “Transformer” is a term for a trans woman, “Decepticon" a term for a trans woman, such as Phyllis, who is able to “pass” especially well. Jimmy does pay women to engage in sex acts. But primarily he is using these women in order to reconstruct Gloria. “OK he said all those whores out there are for me but they also each have something to give to Gloria if I can just find out what that is and help Gloria along like a splash of light on the ocean and everything moving and rocking and shining in the sun so God help me now because Gloria is the great sea those whore-fish swim in; God help me to give up food so I can spend more of my SSI checks on whores and find what I need to find and God let Gloria grow right with me because I sure don’t want to die alone.” What he primarily needs from these women: stories and memories—he increasingly wants them to be sad ones—and hair. He is building a “patchwork face.” Jimmy has not only lost himself and Gloria. He has lost a world and he desperately needs one. WHORES FOR GLORIA is a grim novel of mounting pathos. A prostitute defecating behind a closed door invokes in Jimmy's mind something he once read about freshly shaved women evacuating their bowels in terror as they awaited the Nazi gas chambers. Women’s sexual organs are compared to wilting lettuce or sausage casings, the word “cunt” is used with regularity, emphasis placed on its unfeeling crudity. A great many of the street prostitutes are intravenous drug users, so there is naturally some attention to abscesses, track marks, and bruisings, bodies in a condition of abject deterioration. Jimmy has visions or premonitions involving sexual mutilation. There is no surprise that it is a grim and desperate world. The woman like to believe that they retain agency, but are all too aware of the surrounding dangers. There is mention of the Green River Killer, at large up in Seattle. Phyllis recounts leaping from a moving car to escape a trick gone wrong. The AIDS epidemic is a constant ambient reality. Some will detect misogyny in the ghastliness, especially as pertains to the depiction of the female body and the things to which it is asked to yield. Perturbation on that end is understandable and I would not tend to hold in against a person. That being said, Jimmy himself discusses a passage from having as a young man seen the female body as a kind of abstracted ideal to having progressively come to see it in naked light, unobstructed by fetishization. At first the female body is perhaps his only anchor— “when only the pretty shapes of women have integrity”—but it ultimately becomes a site of vulnerability upon which hurt is and has been routinely visited. Think of the word fetish. For Karl Marx, commodity fetishism means that you see the commodity without seeing the exploitation of labour that brought about its production and distribution. It is the same for the body of the sex worker, especially the street prostitute. To fetishize that body, to frame it as an altar or a receptacle or some kind of abstraction, is to suppress any knowledge of the exploitative conditions that brought about its presentation in the context whereby it comes to be presented. Jimmy is Vollmann's surrogate in coming to these women to hear them, in need of what might well be the only meaningful fellowship he believes available to him. Still, what Vollmann and Jimmy are engaged in is still unambiguously transactional. “I never have dreams so I’m gonna memorize yours if you don’t mind which somehow I have the feeling you won’t because here’s five dollars.”
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Romanzo d'amore e squallore. D'amore ossessivo per una donna perduta, una puttana che altre sue simili possono solo malamente surrogare, e di squallore da bassofondo, tra alcol, droga e corpi in vendita, con appena qualche guizzo di luce nel grigiore durevole: dal letame, si sa, nascono i fiori, ma se annusi la puzza decisamente sovrasta.
Vollmann è, certamente per scelta, monocorde e assai crudo: come il mondo che efficacemente descrive. -
The Gospel According to William, kind of. I don’t want to spend time in my own city’s red light district, but Vollmann makes me want to want to. At least the so-called down and out recognize and embrace their need for salvation – and I could learn a thing or two from them about that.
Also, Vollmann is such a simp.
