Word: vollmann
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AUTHOR: WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN...
...novelist William Vollmann displays the exasperating immaturities of a precocious teenager. He is a self-mythologizer who refers to himself with heavy irony as "William the Blind." He is utterly and humorlessly self-absorbed and believes his own sensibility to be unique. He rolls out for display every nut and grain that he has squirreled...
Given this, and a good deal more that is off-putting, Viking deserves much credit for taking on the titanic seven-novel cycle that Vollmann calls Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. The theme is mighty -- the repeated collisions between European and Native American cultures -- and perhaps no one with a realistic view of what is possible would have attempted it. But Vollmann's long and relentless chronicle is worth the patience it requires...
This gloomy and roughly powerful novel is not a politically correct sermon on cultural diversity. There are no heroes of tolerance here, native or otherwise, although Vollmann grudgingly admires Samuel de Champlain, the stodgy soldier who founded Quebec. French lay explorers craved beaver pelts. The priestly black gowns wore hair shirts and spiked girdles in self- mortification, and lusted to harvest souls. They strove to break down native sexual and religious customs, but, as Vollmann tells it, were more tolerant of the Indians' prolonged and joyous ritual torture of captured enemies. Tribes sold their souls (literally) as dearly as possible...