| Title | : | The Atlas |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140254498 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140254495 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 496 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1996 |
The Atlas Reviews
-
THE ATLAS SHRUGGED
"I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head." [Bowie/Pop]
"He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune." [Cave]
Ways of Gazing
...but evidently this is the nature of the world in which the author/narrator construct attempts to find himself in "The Atlas", while gazing at first world lakes and mountains and grass, freebasing with pimps and whores galore, and rescuing vulnerable third world women/girls in the name of lurve. The style fluctuates from the mundane to a frequently inept parody of sub-MFA pretension, over-description and underachievement. Just when you think it's done, it repeats itself, like some (in-)digestive (re-) flux (26+1+26=no limit).
Trashing the Aesthetic
Vollmann manages to trash two favoured aesthetics in this compendium - that of the encyclopaedia and the atlas.
He strips the encyclopaedia of all significance (e.g., a digest of diverse knowledge, experience and insight) and leaves us with a rump of maximalist offcuts and outtakes (i.e., where it is enough that the work be big and fat, unedited and undigested, upsized and unappetising). The reader is left to ask: is this all there is? Does it get any better than this? Could he try a little harder, or are we meant to be satisfied with his first draft? Enough of the typing. Where is the writing? Where is the rewriting? Whoops, Vollmann has already moved on. And on and on.
Equally, the atlas is just a wall label, a peg upon which to hang Vollmann's one-dimensional landscapes and self-portraits from diverse locations around the world, united only by their origin in the indulgent mind of the author/narrator construct seated comfortably numb at his Schreibtisch in some Californian study or studio, bar fridge close by and ready to hand.
Tales of Vollmann
For all the geographical diversity of this omnibus of disparable tales, for all the worship of the "mystery called motion" (i.e., travel), the one unifying factor is that we see the world through the eyes of a contemporary narcissistic American journal-keeper, working away in darkness and in gloom, convinced that every word he has typed about his latest vacation is not just a private record, but is literature of the order of Hemingway, Steinbeck and/or Dos Passos. He's self-consciously trying to join a tradition, for which, if it won't welcome him, he'll construct a substitute, a balm for an army of followers who are seeking a source of differentiation from their antecedents.
Pungent Liquid Irrelevancies
Perhaps one of the women, a lover, a wife (but here that is just somebody with whom he has had sex), has the greatest insight into the narrator. She protests his "exhibitionist possessiveness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies."
This captures how I've increasingly begun to feel about Vollmann's writing. He marks ownership and builds empires with his words. The more words, the larger the books, the greater the literary imperialism. Occasionally, there are moments of lonely, desperate tenderness, but even these can be (and are) interpreted as imperious or "imperialist intimacy". He's rarely managed to convince me of his sincerity or his authenticity. It's all so faux. His loving hands too often become the "filthy love claws" of possession. (As a lover, he would scare the shit out of me.)
Not in the Palm of Your Hand
Vollmann asks a lot of the relationhip with the reader. Frequently it's just too much. There's too little payout for time spent, too little return on investment. It's like living with a junky artist or musician. You come home each day to find something missing. How much should we endure in order to experience a few occasional, fleeting moments of beauty? And it's not as if the other options lack beauty.
After a while, the travelogue/slide show becomes repetitive, the colourful descriptors empty of effort, meaning and elegance, the scope of the project reveals itself as ambitious without necessarily being accomplished, the presenter renders himself as just another ugly American sex tourist ("I see that you like Oriental women") pretending to reveal his sensitive side. If only Graham Greene could have lived long enough to invent or describe this character. If only there was more to this world and this life than pimps and johns and hangers on. If only these Kawabata-derived "palm of the hand stories" didn't try so hard (or hard enough) to define some new autoerotic norm, some new jizz standard.
But perhaps we should let the author/narrator construct speak for himself. You will know soon enough whether he is your cup of verbal tea.
A SAMPLER OF VOLLMANN MAGIC AT ITS BEST:
[More Songs about Blue Crystal Skies, Participular Trees and Brownish-Greenish Grass]
"'Sno Country like Snow Country"
I
Once life had been
As mysterious
As a Sierra lake
At dawn.
The sky was a ceiling
Of blue crystal held up
With white pillars of birch
Carpeted so richly
With evening ferns.
Passing down the deep
Brown railroad ties,
They reached
The forest's end.
Wet fields of pale green
With trees between the rows,
Trees as woolly
As German participles,
Pale green.
II
Dead trees among the live ones,
Long blonde grass
On the knolls
Between the pools.
The ground was pale
With lichened tussocks.
The atlas opened
As he entered
That morning
Of birds.
III
In a field of gray ponds
And grass-haired water,
He saw
Three little ducks.
Then the train was vibrating
Across a flatness
Of dark brownish-greenish grass
Under a dark slate sky
With power towers
Making tall black skeletons
Of interlocking triangles
And a radio tower flashing
Like lightning far away
Under the night's thunderhead.
IV
They came into Churchill,
Where the land was
Spongy brown and green,
With so many indigo
Swiss cheese holes,
With flat olive-colored trees
Along the river's bank,
Ocher sand-islands,
Small infrequent
Patches of snow
Like crusty flakes of dryness
In the soggy boggy ground,
And ahead the sharp
Cracked white ice
Of the bay forest
With patches of bog
Eaten out of them.
The atlas closed.
He was in the snow country
Now.
VFrom the long tunnel
The train pulled out,
Across the border
Into the snow country.
VI
The snow country was
For Kawabata's protagonist
The end of this world
And the beginning
Of another,
The country of pure mountains
Of sunset crystal
Which all tunnels
Are supposed to lead to,
The zone of that
Uncanny whiteness
Hymned by Poe and Melville,
The pole of transcendence.
VII
Life lay outside the windows;
It throve only
Where the sunset's rays
Struck snowdrifts,
Everywhere nowhere everywhere.
VIII
He got off the train.
IXWhat then?
X
His penis burst out of
The crown of her skull
The bone of her
Snowy like a birch.
She screamed.
He held her
More tightly
And kissed her;
How could he disturb
Or disappoint her now
When she was coming?
XI
And now he wanted to shout:
What lesson am I to learn
From these screams?
XIIThis was the soul of it.
XIII
He lay at the center
From which the world
Rotated round
And round and round.
XIV
Presently the snow
Began to fall.
The tussocks on the hill
Became white fairy mushrooms.
XVI'm alive; I'm alive.
SOUNDTRACK:
David Bowie - "China Girl"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8IX...
Lead guitar: Nile Rodgers
"I'm feeling tragic like I'm Marlon Brando
When I look at my China Girl
I could pretend that nothing really meant too much
When I look at my China Girl
I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head
Plans for everyone
Its in the white of my eyes
My little china girl
You shouldn't mess with me
I'll ruin everything you are
I'll give you television
I'll give you eyes of blue
I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world."
David Bowie - "China Girl" [Live on October 20, 1996 at The Bridge School Benefit]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdOC-...
Featuring Reeves Gabrels on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass.
Iggy Pop - "China Girl" (Live at the Olympia, 1991)
[From the DVD: Iggy Pop - "Kiss My Blood. Live at the Olympia 1991" - A film by Tim Pope (2004)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq0kC...
Lead guitar: Whitey Kirst
China Girl
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/...
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN: A CRITICAL COMPANION
****
The Rainbow Stories (1989)
****
The Ice-Shirt (1990)
****
Whores for Gloria (1991)
****
Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
***
The Atlas (1996)
*
The Royal Family (2000)
****
Rising Up and Rising Down (2003)
*
Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (2004)
*****
Europe Central (2005)
***
Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
Un-rated
Last Stories and Other Stories (2014)
***
The Dying Grass (2015) -
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021... -
Video review:
https://youtu.be/KzgwV45aFAw -
“Esas noches vivía en la calle Mission porque en aquella zona se movía tanta gente que cabía la esperanza de que alguien rompiera el delicado y plano cristal de su alma y le matara o le liberase, aunque en vez de ello la gente se limitaba a fluir por el vidrio como grises gotas de lluvia”.
.
El otro día hablando con una amiga de ‘El Atlas’ de Vollmann le decía medio en broma que podría usar el libro como los cuáqueros, creo, o los mormones o los que sean, utilizan la Biblia cuando abren al azar una página y leen unos versículos para vislumbrar el futuro. Porque ‘El Atlas’, como los evangelios o un libro de consulta, admite lecturas parciales, sosegadas o poseídas y febriles, depende. Me sigo adentrando en sus más de 50 historias y he pasado por la parte central, ‘El Atlas’, que el mismo texto define como el núcleo incandescente de la Tierra, un espejo que parte la novela en dos mitades que se reproducen como un palíndromo de viajes en tren, chutes de heroína, prostitutas y francotiradores serbios. Hace un rato oía en Radio Clásica que la sonda Voyager navega por el espacio con un disco de oro en el que hay grabaciones de música representativas de la historia del planeta por si se la encuentran otras culturas extraterrestres. Aunque supongo que no será así, me he imaginado el aria de ‘La flauta mágica’ y la chacona de Bach que han emitido sonando en el silencio del espacio y me ha parecido que la lectura, al menos la de algunos libros enciclopédicos é inabarcables como ‘Las mil y una noches’, son como esa sonda que de repente se encuentra con un extraterrestre que puede vislumbrar cómo de absurda y a la vez de bella es la vida en este atlas azul y marrón del Sistema Solar. -
Vollmann's Map of the World. Can you descry what territory it describes? Cosmic loneliness. May the Angel of Forgetfulness quickly cloud all of our eyes before we reach the other shore.
-
Vollmann is, famously, impervious to editing. He’s gone on record as saying that he is willing to endure a lot of lugubrious assignments to ensure that his books are untouched. The Atlas shows this, both to its advantage and detriment. There are no two ways around it: if some of the stories had been culled, this would be a perfect book. But with so much breadth and span—53 stories!—some are bound to fall short of the mark.
But the ones that hit, my God. Thousands of pages of Vollmann read and my heart broken many times over by his writing, nothing prepared me for “Under the Grass.” It’s my favorite piece of writing that he has ever done (that I have encountered so far). An absolutely horrific retelling of the real-life drowning of his sister, this hurt deeply. It simply defies my pathetic attempt at criticism and I urge you to read it and, hopefully, be transformed by its tragic beauty. There are more than a few others. “Houses” and “A Vision” are equally capable of laying you out.
The Atlas could just as easily have been called Pain; that’s the theme here. Almost every story ends with a line that’s the equivalent of a mic-drop (‘try and top this’). The homage to Kawabata is a nice touch, and the logical rising up and rising down (puns, the last refuge) from the central story only heightens the proceedings in terms of ambition. The other side of the tunnel (metaphorical and actual, the rising down) in the book is brimfilled with incantations decoyed as stories; phantasmal fairy tales for an age where Grimm isn’t grim enough any longer (more fucking puns!)
Spleen-venting: I read peoples reviews of WTV books on GR and am consistently enervated by the caterwauling regarding his treatment of women, or 'how he treats female characters in his books' as the phenomenon should be regarded. (Let us not forego the fact that these books are published as Fiction and that their author doesn’t exactly shy away from honesty, so there’s every reason to suspect a forking-off from fact.) I say, who are we to judge? Vollmann certainly doesn’t. There’s a consensus on GR that he actively tries to ‘protagonize’ himself into a hero of sorts. Are we reading the same books? I can’t think of another author more willing to admit his many flaws time and again. Is it that he doesn’t apologize for them that makes him less noble a human being? I say hogwash. I say phooey. If I wanted to read apologists, I’d be swimming in shallower waters.
I know a few authors that are more successful than WTV (in terms of sales) personally and, as different as they are from each other, they have one thing in common: their exploitation of women. (I know them via work; they are reprehensible and their writing is shittier than mine.) Both men have turned their book tours into virtual sex circuits to literally fuck their female fans, going so far as to have a new one lined up in each city far ahead of arrival. Their public images are as happily married men and fathers, something that one of them writes into his own work! The other is consistently praised with writing 'fully-realized' women! I include this anecdote only to illustrate the error in confusing the author with the work, as the human and the written-page are oftentimes entirely different propositions. That Vollmann shares his inner-dialogue (remember: we can’t assume where fact and fiction diverge) about the way that he has engaged with the opposite sex is laudable in my opinion. If you can’t see the incredible empathy that Vollmann has towards women, I wonder what you find so compelling in him that you read on. Is it only to continue to detract? Is he our circus geek against which we can judge our own benchmarks and declare ourselves betters?
Meh, I’m grasping at straws. I’m not a literary critic nor do I play one on TV. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions of course. So, with no further ado, I leave you with this beauty from “Under the Grass:”
“They told me to take care because you were littler, but I forgot. Brawny ropes of water captured you. The fishes asked to drink your gurgling breaths. The mud asked to kiss your eyes. The sand asked to fill your mouth. The weeds asked to sprout inside your ears. Outside the night skull, a tunnel of blue light led you to India. Inside the night skull, your blood became cold brown water.” -
The Vollmann Atlas, circa 1996 (unauthorized abridgment)
Mount Aetna, Sicily
Afghanistan
Agra, India
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario
Allan Water, Ontario
Madagascar
Avignon
Bangkok
Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand
Battambang City, Cambodia
Battle Rock, Oregon
Beograd
Berkley, CA
Berlin
Big Bend, CA
Bologna
Boot Hill, Nebraska
Boston, USA
Budapest
Cairo
California
Capri, Italia
Charlevoix, Québec
Chaing Mai, Thailand
Churchill, Manitoba
Southampton, Northwest Territories
Cornwall, Ontario
Delhi
Diesel Bend, Utah
Elma, Manitoba
Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories
Frankfurt am main
Goa, India
Grand Central Station, NYC
Great Western Desert, Australia
Guildwood, Ontario
Hanover, NH
Herculaneum
Highway 88 & 395, CA
Ho Mong, Shan State, Burma (Myanmar)
Home
Hong Kong
Interstate 80, CA
Inukjuak
Jaipur Province
Japan
Jerusualm
Joshua Tree National Monument
Karenni State, Burma (Myanmar)
Key West
Distrito Federal, Mexico
Limbo
LA
Lutton, OK
Madagascar
Mae Hong Song, Thailand
Mauritius
Malachi, Ontario
Marakooper Cave, Tasmania
Masada
Mendocino, CA
Mexicali
Mexico
its city
Mission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, Ontario
Mobile, AL
Mogadishu
Mont-Pellerin, Switzerland
Montréal
Nairobi
Napoli
Nevada
New Orleans
New South Wales
NYC&S
The Nile
North America
Omaha, Nebraska
Orillia, Ontario
Ottermere, Ontario
Pacific Palisades, California
Paris
Philadelphia
Phnom Penh
Pickering, Ontario
Poland
Pompeii
Pond Inlet, Baffin Island
Pot Hope, Ontario
Puako Bay, Hawaii
Reddit, Ontario
Redfern, Sydney, New South Wales
Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island
Rice Lake, Manitoba
Deep Springs Valley, CA
Roma
Sacramento
Samuel H. Boardman State Park, OR
San Bruno, Diego & Francisco, all CA
San Ignacio, Belize
Sarajevo
Savant Lake, Ontario
Sioux Lookout, also Ontario
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island
The Sphere of Stars
Split
State of Vatican City
Sudbury, Ontario
Sydney
Tamatave, Madagascar
Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico
Thailand
The Pas, Manitoba
Tokyo to Osaka
Toronto
Virginia Beach
Wailea, Maui
Washago, Ontario
Winnipeg
Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma)
Yukon Territory
Zagreb
Alternately his atlas is a series of palm-of-the-hand stories ; a stack of short-stories, simpliciter ; multiple moments of meditation ; tableaux of persons and places ; a novel, organized and unified thematically, palindromically ; a soporific for your drowsing and dreaming. -
Sweet Reader,
Allow me to corral this stampede of kittens. One Blind Billy was so in love. Then his "wife" left him. There wasn't a ceremony as such, he just knew it. This was love for Lifetime movie Network, it lasted as long as he bought her drinks and paid for the hotel room. She was gone. Blind Billy then had horrific heartache in his penis. He had to win her back. Traveling through more time zones than a Jim Jarmusch film, Blind Billy discovered some indelible truths. Clean water and being exempt from shellfire are overrated. The quest isn't too bad when carrying hard currency. Prostitutes are wonderful creatures, dreamily lost and not suffering any issues from prior trauma or violation. Blind Billy also finds opportunities to digest and extrapolate history. He interweaves such with bad poetry about whimpering sunsets and ocher teardrops. -
Ostensibly a series of tenuously connected short stories, The Atlas reads like an assemblage of Vollmann's fractured recollections and imaginings from throughout his travels, mingled and stewed together into a single stream of undifferentiated consciousness until the former are indistinguishable from the latter. The influence of surrealism, of Lautremeant is palpable.
Vollamnn's voice is incredibly unique, managing to sound at once naive and world-weary. Despite the incredible horrors on display in each of the numerous locales visited throughout each of these stories--from war zones to brothels to ghettoes and Indian reservations--Vollmann somehow manages to retain his empathy, not only for the victims of these horrors but also, for the perpetrators.
Vollmann is a man who seems at home among junkies, murderers, pimps and, especially, prostitues, like Christ without the pretense of perfection, like a libidinous Buddha.
The Atlas functions almost like a Vollmann reader. Many of the stories seem to be seeds or leftovers from one of his other books. For instance, the hopelessly tragic Reepah, Vollmann's suicidal alcoholic Inuit girlfriend from The Rifles, makes an appearance. As does his Cambodian "wife" from the Butterfly Stories. But instead of feeling recycled, the inclusion of this material in the Atlas only testifies to Vollmann's prolific imagination. That he could write thousand page tomes about a subject and still have original material left over for inclusion in a 450 page short story collection is pretty impressive. -
The only wisdom is to drift - Francis Bacon (the painter)
This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through - Tom Waits
It's kind of a cliche to say this, but honestly who would expect the author of this book (published in 1996) to still be alive 20 years later?
Here travel mainly appears as a way to aggressively court death. In the past half century or so novelists with serious artistic ambitions have become more sheltered and insular, lifelong denizens of the artificial world of college campuses - at least in this country... right? Vollmann's adventures are all the more shocking for how completely he bucks this trend.
Has the man mellowed or settled down in the last twenty years? I noticed these early books are studded with philosophy, sometimes in the form explicit citation (an epigraph from Leibniz!), sometimes in the use of categories and abstract language. In recent years his style seems much more folksy and plain-spoken, his ideas at times surprisingly banal (see this disappointing op-ed in which he bemoans the "un-Americans"
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/l...). While he still does a lot of really crazy things, he's now a property owner and the father of a teenage girl. Does this represent some kind of conciliation with reality?
I wonder if it ever occurred to Vollmann to think he was handsome as a young man. At first it's a little hard to see past the veneer of weirdness, but he was.
*
At his best, Vollmann is a kind of new-and-improved beat generation unto himself. I love the fact that, for all his exotic travels and highfalutin allusions, this book ends in a cheap diner in Sacramento. -
«¡Y que tu alma revolotee libre por el mundo!»
Me rindo completamente ante William T. Vollmann. Para leer este libro seguí la recomedación que viene en la "Nota del compilador". Disfruté de casi todos los cuentos en un estado intermedio entre la vigilia y el sueño. Viajar así al atlas particular de Vollmann es encontrar una doble realidad. Por una parte, la inmensa dimensión de la experiencia: guerra, amor, lucha contra o admiración por la naturaleza, tristeza, soledad... Por otra parte, la variedad de paisajes, culturas e individuos. Resumir cada una de las cincuenta y tres historias que forman este libro sería traicionar su espíritu y sus conexiones internas, las cuales solo se revelan en la lectura. En consecuencia, solo puedo reflexionar de forma un tanto difusa, acaso con el infortunio de no asir lo más bello de la escritura, que siempre es concreto. Como un ritmo compuesto de latidos, el conjunto de relatos es una maravillosa apología de la vida: de la lucha por ella, de la valentía y de la cobardía, y de ambas como formas de sobrevivir. Existe una melodía, además, a manera de contrapunto: una elegía compuesta por las sucesivas contemplaciones de la muerte y de sus huellas, ángeles o fantasmas. Dice Vollmann: «El centro está donde estamos nosotros; de ahí que al viajar solo cambiemos nuestras periferias. Un viajero puede gobernar (o ser esclavo de) muchos, muchos mundos». Leer "El atlas" es desplazar la mirada, y con ella el pensamiento y las emociones, hacia esos mundos. -
Está por ver que este año lea algo mejor que esto, y eso que estamos en febrero. Tremendo Vollmann.
-
"This was the soul of it, this rushing and swooping in winged or wheeled tombs, always straining toward some beauty as remote as the sun."
What I hold here, is a piecemeal Atlas of the world Vollmann thinks in; a book that I personally believe is the gateway drug to drawing in a wealth of unprepared readers into a mind who’s genius is a woeful combination of both under-read, and undervalued. I don’t throw around the word “genius” with ease, mind you. The only contemporary (read: living) authors to whom I could confidently ascribe an adjective as loaded with expectation as this would be Laszlo Krasznahorkai and that other guy I never shut about it (you should know who by now).
‘The Atlas’ is a truly unique combination of disparate ingredients. Like its predecessor ‘The Rainbow Stories’, it’s a collection that is immediately and proudly hostile to gentle classification. Consider it’s constituent elements: a kaleidoscopic combination of reportage, memoire, wish-fulfilment, straight fiction, and alternative history. A text as diverse in form as the content that fills it’s (somehow slim) 450-odd pages.
That diversity is what makes it an experience that returns continually with the arrival and passage of each consecutive story nestled within. Whatever expectation or assurance you think you have going into each subsequent tale will be undercut with a dissonant combination of perversion, epiphany, or melancholy reflection. Vollmann’s mind operates on a frequency that - even four books into my reading of him - I’m still struggling to nail down. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to his writing. He never ceases to surprise me.
‘The Atlas’ is a brilliant collection and one I would recommend to any reader - seasoned or incumbent to his work - whose looking for bite-sized substantive, reflections on a world that is as deep as it is wide. A favourite author was established within these pages.
Side note: it was touching to read the inclusion of both the city I hail from and the one I now call home. -
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
"Abrió el libro y la invitó a entrar. Con ternura, le alzó la cabeza y le colocó el libro debajo. Un rocío de lentejuelas de sangre impactó en las páginas, convirtiéndose en palabras de nuevo cuño. La sangre se expandió rápidamente. Su pelo arraigó entre las palabras como hierba, subrayándolas y embelleciéndolas con florituras aromáticas. Sus ojos y dientes se convirtieron en signos de puntuación...".
Realmente no sé si me siento muy capaz de reseñar a Vollmann, ni siquiera de enrollarme un poquito así que comentaré por encima mis impresiones sin profundizar porque estoy convencida de que la única forma de profundizar de verdad en sus textos, es leyéndole y dejando que fluya. Vollman es un autor que me agarró y me sacó casi sin esperarlo de mi zona de confort con la primera novela que leí suya, La Familia Real, y me lanzó a una nueva experiencia como lectora. A partir de Vollmann veo las cosas diferente cuando me tengo que enfrentar a ciertos textos : es complejo y sencillo al mismo tiempo, es totalmente sórdido en algunos pasajes y cuando menos te lo esperas, después de toda esa sordidez, te puedes encontrar un párrafo que puede estar en la cima de la narrativa: poesía pura y dura. En La Familia Real me emocionó esa sensación del protagonista de estar continuamente buscando algo que quizá nunca había tenido, desamparado por una sensación de pérdida en una cicatriz que nunca podía terminar de cerrar. Y aquí he vuelto a encontrarme con un autor perdido, desamparado con momentos en que la piel se te eriza, brutal en su sensibilidad, momentos a flor de piel donde se expone totalmente, y aunque también es verdad que Vollmann viene de vuelta de todo, si que es cierto que hay párrafos en los que sabes que es tan vulnerable como cualquiera.
"Qué fuerte era, qué capaz en este mundo de dolor. La policía había abatido a tiros a su padre; sus dos madres, no podían ayudarla, alquilaba su cuerpo para vivir y vivía. Alimentaba a su bebé y a su hermana. Nada podía con ella salvo la muerte. Era pura y se llamaba Rose."
Es complicado definir qué es El Atlas: una novela formada de pequeños relatos, una autobiografia obsesiva de los lugares y personas que conoció, un ensayo sobre la condición humana en sus horas más bajas, o quizá es el diario de alguien donde simplemente y llanamente se desnuda hasta donde puede, y ya digo, que cruza muchos límites...¿buscando qué exactamente?? no sé, lo cierto es que he visto aquí de nuevo al Henry Tyler de La Familia Real: puede que Vollmann se exponga en todos sus textos. El segmento formado por los cuatro microrelatos, Bajo La Hierba, me ha cautivado completamente. La hermana de Vollmann murió muy pequeña ahogada en la piscina, y supuestamente él tenía que haberla estado vigilando. Para comprender un poco más a Vollmann hay que remitirse a esta pérdida: En Bajo La Hierba exorciza de alguna forma su dolor y su sentimiento de pérdida. Una belleza.
"Mis letras de sangre te han desenterrado, pero ojalá fueras aún mi hermana, bailando sobre la hierba."
(...)
"Y ella nunca me contesta. Salvo que a veces, cuando sopla el viento, oígo algo que casi parecen palabras."
Vollmann explica en un prólogo compilatorio que las historias están organizadas en una especie de palíndromo, osea que de las 55 historias, la primera está relacionada con la última, la segunda con la penúltima, y así hasta llegar al centro, un relato titulado El Atlas, donde se compilan todas las historias, en una mezcla fantasmagórica y realista al mismo tiempo, donde Vollmann expone su mente y sus obsesiones, un relato excesivo y surrealista en muchos pasajes y en otros totalmente emotivo.
No puedo añadir mucho más solo que he disfrutado leyendo estas historias poco a poco, casi a paso de tortuga pero la anticipación de saber que estaban ahí esperándome ha sido uno de los placeres del día a día cuando las retomaba. Vollmann es un autor que si conectas se puede convertir en un lujo. Uno de los grandes.
"Cuando salí era de noche y vi un canal de de crecientes aguas grises aseteado de gotas de lluvia. Vi chicas con uniformes amarillos apuradas por llegar a su trabajo en salones de masaje, y a un anciano empapado vendiendo periódicos en bolsas de plástico entre coches detenidos (ocho en fondo bajo la lluvia, atravesados por motocicletas lanzadas). Y pensé: da igual quién eres o qué haces, la vida es una guerra."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021... -
from jungle trails, river sides of the far north, war torn streets, bar alleys, bullfights, riding in cars, buses and trains, drinking and eating, sex and traveling.
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Despite indeed being a collection of globetrotting adventures, The Atlas still comes across as a misleading title. There are certainly many tales told, each set in familiar or exotic locales spanning this great wide world of ours, but much of the time this matters little. Each segment spends more time in the head of the author than the places they’re named after, the diversities of the settings invariably obfuscated by the author’s tendency towards tedious, gratuitous descriptiveness. The breadth of his vocabulary, while perhaps impressive, is unleashed upon the audience with a torturous lack of restraint, presumably for the pleasure of Vollmann alone. Perversity, misanthropy and humiliation seem to be his game though, which are natural enemies of restraint. Inherently, this is all fine and well and intermittently used to great effect here, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, and Vollmann repeatedly runs headfirst into that wall with gusto which dovetails with the foremost reason that these stories fail to coalesce into the promise of its title. So many of them are about grubby sex tourism. All the novel ways found to elucidate and protract endless mundanities seemed to have produced a cap on imagining unique scenarios to house them in! The world through these eyes is nothing but a flesh pot dressed up in variable superfluidities. Be it a rain-drenched city, a seedy hole-in-the-wall or a sweltering jungle, the nexus of each of them is discovering which poor, terminally foreign wretch will pretend to profess love in broken English to another. Not so much an anecdotal collage of the world, but a cum-stained itinerary of where to get the best poontang. It’s looking at a Robert Crumb world taken seriously, aided by the rocky sophistication that a too-smart guy whose nose is stuck in a dictionary might pick up. It’s as vexing as it is sluggish because there actually are flashes of clear, realized brilliance that are hard to forget, but they’re only ever glints of diamonds, buried under the weighty detritus of unpolished ambition. Vollmann famously elects to have total control over his publications, free from an editor’s influence, but it’s likely that all parties would benefit from a critical intervention on the topic of hubris.
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Some of the most magnificent prose I've ever read -- short, staggering pieces assembled from long, beautiful sentences, like poetry without stanzas. Truly incredible. Bill does have an over-the-top obsession with prostitutes -- and I, knowing this reputation, thinking that he was just upset about the nature of the sex trade, had no idea that he was a frequent customer. Vollman himself reminds me, to a certain degree, of that really annoying indie rocker who's partied with all the great bands and loves to talk about it, but in that removed, I-don't-really-care-but-listen-to-me-anyway manner that can drive other people crazy. Still, his apparent death wish (traveling to Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Cambodia and the like) makes for gripping stories about the world's most horrifying circumstances. I admire Vollman greatly, though I doubt we'd make good company for each other.
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En el centro del atlas está el escritor. El mapa que nos propone Vollmann es, por supuesto, literario. Relatos breves en una estructura palindrómica, dice, piramidal, digo, que recorre los temas de todas sus obras quizás bajo el motivo recurrente y unificador del amor. Un amor muy peculiar y subjetivo, voluble e itinerante, inconstante y pasional.
No es un drama, salvo sobre el papel.
Vollmann, como siempre, inclasificable y sublime. -
This one takes a bit of reflection given the wealth of material in here.
It is an eclectic mix of reportage, short stories and deeply personal experiences which are often tragic and suffused with the feeling of listlessness and an inability of the author to commit.
I enjoyed it but I think I still prefer Vollman's fiction so far. -
William Vollmann writes stories on similar themes of war and sex for sale, set all over the world, but with a few focused locations -- America's urban fringe, Northern Canada, Bosnia, Southeast Asia. With the constant switching of locations and characters in these stories, it's got this almost William S. Burroughs cut-up quality, especially the central, titular story, in which there's no warning about a switch in setting.
But does the actual content of the cut-up bits count for much? I'm not so sure. As a Bangkok resident, I find the parts about this particular part of the world embarrassingly bad, the worst sort of superficial tourist-lit about Southeast Asia... but other parts have a haunting beauty. The Atlas is uneven, but probably worth it. -
How can you even review a book like this? What parts of the world did he not write about in this book, what cultures and subcultures did he leave out and which human dynamics did he neglect? Looking back, the scope of this work is overwhelming.
Outside of that, this is really a big sampling of Vollmann. It contains some of his finest descriptive prose as well as his rougher, colloquially driven writing.
I gave this four stars because it also features another thematic dynamic of Vollmann’s style: dude, learn to kill your darlings. At least 20% of this could have been cropped out. Senseless filler, the same old prostitute stories and page long “stories” that leave you feeling cheated in the middle of an otherwise masterpiece, wondering, “Wait, what was the point of that one?” I swear, his biggest, if not only, flaw is his apparent lack of an authoritative editor. -
not sure what it says about his 500+ page novels that he’s able to condense a few of them here into ~10 page stories. but whatever, i feel like i’m getting my head around Vollmann’s whole “deal” now. turns out he’s a bit of a misanthrope! not sure i necessarily agree with his declaration that life is war, but i think it certainly can be if you want it to be. for me life is more often like being an NPC in Skyrim
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diz-se que vollmann detesta a edição e revisão dos seus textos. a escrita sai de si assim, jorrando como uma nascente, e as palavras ficam gravadas em pedra. isto, para o melhor e o pior, faz dele um escritor raro. claro que algumas destas histórias (contos? episódios biográficos? nem uma coisa nem outra?), são mais de cinquenta, talvez não merecessem estar ao lado de pérolas como "casas", "uma visão", "encarnações do assassino" e "por baixo da relva" (magnífico texto sobre a morte da irmã), mas um atlas é isso mesmo: há sítios melhores do que outros para viver ou visitar.
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This book is filled with wildly different vignettes from Vollmann's life around the world.
These are superb, essential vignettes, which you must read:
That's nice
Exalted by the Wind
The Atlas
A Vision
Disappointed by the Wind
Incarnations of the Murderer
Outside and Inside
Browse the other chapters in accordance with your tastes, however I recommend you skip all the stories focussed on prostitution and on junkies. These are very unpleasant. -
She was dressed in a kimono and she spoke English like a Japanese. When she haltingly sang a karaoke love-song, she sang wirging.
Oh, are you a virgin? I said.
Nit noy. Little bit.
This is the rawness that the 53 stories of The Atlas pursue. I am reminded of a burnt-out detective, running the beat in a hopeless town, roused to arms (in the loosest sense of the word) by a mild opiate. You get to peek into his past when he utters some slipshod phrase as you top-up his mug with tar black coffee. You have seen enough renditions of the cliché to know that it is your turn to ask him what will he be having, hon, but instead, you take a seat. You know what he wants. Might as well lend an ear.
Pity the poor biologist who had to prove (I never found why) that caribou in the Canadian Barrenlands lose a pint of blood a week to the mosquitoes. Of course caribou have more blood to spare than we; perhaps it is not as bad as it sounds, to pay a pint a week for the privilege of living.
You have no idea what is fact and what is farce. You let him speak. There is something addictive about the tales he regales. You smell on him the lingering scent of an old drug/an old friend. You listen. You are breathe in the stories. You are told to get the bearded man’s order, and the woman in the nice suit’s, and the party of teenagers’s, and the old couple’s, and when you fail for the fifth time, you are told that you are on thin ice, asshole, then ignored, then informed by the manager of your termination, then ignored again, which you welcome as an opportunity to listen.
It was not my intention to have a vision, which must have been why I had one.
When he reaches the end, you notice on the nightstand it is four o’ clock in the morning. Your eyes are red. Your breath tastes like sin. Your stomach roars from neglect. The book beside you is sleeping sound. You feel small and exposed, laid bare, made prone. You know so little.
To understand, you will forge an atlas of your own. -
I just wrote a great long review and then it disappear when I tried to enter it. Arggggg. This is one of my favorite books ever. My life changed the day I bought it for one dollar from a B&N bargain bin and I have since happily bought many other copies at full price for other people. The range of writing styles, feelings, themes, and global places covered here is very rare and amazing. This is the perfect intro to Vollmann too. 53 perfect little stories (52 little ones actually and one really big one at the center).
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I met Vollmann once after a reading and he recommended this as the best place to start with his large body of work. It’s a collection of stories and sketches from his travels. Themes include loneliness, prostitution, addiction, the harshness of nature, and indigenous peoples in the modern world. Ventures into surrealism are hit and miss. My favorites were “Under the Grass” and “The Prophet of the Road”.
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vollmann is a writer with great humility. it seems like the writer's task to process the world and create a perspective, some kind of an angle that makes sense for the reader, but Vollmann is all circles and air. he's difficult to understand, but he is incredibly honest and his incomprehensibility is delivered directly from the world which is his inspiration to the person holding the book.
also, vollmann's introduction reminded me very very much of the sentiment of leonard cohen's preface for Beautiful Losers, written for the translation of the book into chinese. considering the relationship between the two writers yields some interesting similarities. anyway, here's cohen's note to the reader. their kinship is not one of words but of candor:
"Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor, and a surprise, to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.
When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. Much later, during the years when I practiced as a Zen monk under the guidance of my teacher Kyozan Joshu Roshi, the thrilling sermons of Lin Chi (Rinzai) were studied every day. So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.
This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer, an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.
Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.
Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time. " -
The Atlas is a collection of essays written by William Vollmann during his travels as a journalist, many times in war zones. The places written about include the following; Sicily, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, various parts of the United States, Madagascar, France, Canada, Thailand, Cambodia, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Hungary, Egypt, India, Australia, Burma, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Mauritius, Tasmania, Somalia, Switzerland, Poland, Belize, Bosnia and Croatia.
These are not happy traveling essays. Rather they depict the underside of society, the poor, the ill, the desperate. Most of the essays took place in the early 1990's and there was war in many places. AIDS was the epidemic that was sweeping the world and the people Vollmann associated with were most at risk for it; poor, sex workers and those willing to do anything to stave off the boredom of their lives. He spends a lot of time with prostitutes as they seem to be his love interest but the women tend to cheat him of his money and leave him after false promises. It is a life where one can expect little of others and even that little tends to be too much to expect.
Vollmann is an interesting writer with books such as Europe Central which won the National Book Award. This collection is a glimpse into his mind which is an uncomfortable place to visit. He seems to seek out the dregs of society and make his friends among those who society chooses to ignore. It is a place of depression and anxiety where hopes are crushed and life is brutal and short. This book is recommended for nonfiction readers and those interested in Vollmann's life and thoughts.
