Word: vollmann
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...that his focus could ever be questioned. Vollmann toils under the hot Imperial sun and sails through polluted and abandoned rivers, risking dehydration and disease. “I was worried about two possibilities,” he writes. “The first and more likely but less immediately detrimental one was that we might get poisoned by the New River... The second peril, which seriously concerned me, was dehydration.” In spite of such ubiquitous danger, Vollmann’s devotion is unflagging; “Imperial” is a work that leaves little...
...Vollmann also fully indulges an impulse to make himself the frame for his book. Just as much as “Imperial is America,” as he writes, “Imperial” is William Vollmann. He devotes large parts of the book to his favorite prostitutes and strippers, and one particularly memorable but puzzling chapter to the break up with his girlfriend. Other chapters are written from the perspective of a Mexican farmer, and others still are collections of quotes from previous pages...
...There is something strangely poetic about “Imperial.” The passion with which Vollmann overflows for his subject infects the (patient) reader. The seventh reiteration of some Imperial resident’s saying “I can’t help believing in people” is infinitely more touching than the sixth. “The Desert Disappears. Water is Here”—which originally appeared in a headline of a newspaper from which Vollmann quotes—is more heartbreakingly ironic and more beautiful for its rhythmic prose each time...
...seems the best way to approach “Imperial” is precisely the way Vollmann approached Imperial. Its disjointed structure is a service to the sheer volume of time it takes to finish the book. After a decade of research, in a 1,300-page book, Vollmann is still doubtful that he has really covered the entirety of Imperial. He often defends himself by claiming that Imperial is ultimately “unknowable.” And “Imperial,” too, teems with such limitless detail that no reader could possibly absorb...
...Imperial is also “whatever you want it to be.” Vollmann goes further: “books are whatever we want them to be.” It seems to be an open invitation to take what you will and leave the rest for another time. It is this freedom that renders “Imperial” at once a deeply personal and deeply resonant labor. “I am where I want to be, in Paradise. Let me now commence the history of Paradise...