Charles Haynes wrote, [on 8/7/2009 12:47 AM]: >>>> http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/58062/
> It's a bad review for a simple reason. Is the reviewer praising it or > panning it? I can't even tell if they liked the damn book. It appears that the reviewer isn't very sure, but on balance, seems to like it (extra irony points for the "too long" complaint): <quote> Imperial inevitably raises the big question surrounding much of Vollmann’s work: Is it too long? It probably is. About halfway through, I felt my patience begin to flag. I’d been carrying the book around for a couple of weeks, wrestling it onto trains and out of bed, and my wrist and lower back had mysteriously started burning. I grew suddenly hostile toward WTV’s formerly lovable quirks: the clumsy sentences, the digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors (“the alfalfa fields, fresh-shorn like a tropical girl’s cunt-stubble”), the never-ending sarcastic exclamation marks. I found myself wishing that he would redirect some of the massive energy he puts into legwork and note-taking and poetic haunting to the less obviously heroic, more social challenges of writing: synthesizing, pruning, polishing. But that’d be like asking Keats not to get so carried away with the music of vowels, or Dickens to stop writing about orphans. Excess, for Vollmann, is exactly the point. I can’t help but read Imperial’s epigraph, from the 1909 yearbook of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a sly little meta-statement, a confession and a boast: “As long as a farmer has an abundance of water, he almost invariably yields to the temptation to use it freely, even though he gets no increased returns as a result.” That’s the problem of Imperial, and the problem of Imperial: to get arid land to bear fruit, you’re going to have to waste some water. “I write my heart out on everything I do,” Vollmann has written. It’s a very rare quality, and it should be subsidized, whatever waste might come along with it. </quote> BTW, did you actually read the entire review, or are you reacting only to the excerpt I posted with the URL linking to the entire thing? Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
