It’s hard to imagine that the reductive minds of the FBI could have produced anything as interesting or compassionate as a too-long novel by Vollmann. Indeed, two-thirds of the way into the book, after hundreds of pages of tongues gliding, organs throbbing, nipples hardening, bodies rutting, lips opening and mouths guzzling, the narrator invokes a letter — apparently real, addressed to Vollmann from his longtime editor — saying: “To be honest, I do wonder whether some readers will simply tire of, for example, all the climaxing.” To be honest, this reader did. Having read Royal Family and Butterfly Stories, I am not sure this volume adds too much to the prostitution-focused body of work. Everything about William T. Vollmann is writ large. It is a telling detail that the prevalence of cash routinely caught my attention. . Jerry Brown discusses a new biography on his California political life at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. By the time we get to it, there can be no mistaking that Richard is not anything like a blasé sociopath snide in his disavowal of empathy, but rather all too empathetic, a man waylaid in a collective purgatory of traumatized and discarded souls whose anguish he cosigns and thereby co-owns, a lower depths fellowship, “all of us,” as he summarizes much earlier, “who had ever been spat on.” The “false consciousness” inherent to the brief ironic fragment quoted above is less malice than symptom, expression of pervasive hurt and hurtful rationalizations, the habitually spat upon person’s sense of the everyday violence endemic to the social field, the violence to which marginalized people are always vulnerable and which they all too often internalize, learning to do cruelty to themselves and to their habitually spat upon fellows. Within the novel, Neva, whose originally mysterious origins are elaborated in detail, is likened to, in her transformed incarnation, a bodhisattva. Molly Stern announced Thursday that she is starting Zando, an independent publishing company that will team up with influencers and brands to promote books. Devastating. Like many Vollmann novels, “The Lucky Star” is too long. I never have cash unless I am going to a book sale. For instance, the narrator describes a session with Neva that transports him “into the rosy hazy caverns of dream”: “It seems to me now that when I was playing with her soft breasts, stroking and squeezing them as carefully as a trained retriever dog fits his mouth around the fresh-killed game bird to bring it intact to the hunter, the pleasure most definitely did not originate in my fingers themselves, although I certainly felt it there; rather, it came out of her, passing into me like a tingling warmth; my hands merely completed the circuit; I could almost see it rising up out of my darling, the loving light of life itself.”. We’d love your help. I've never read anything like this. “There may only be perhaps one or two moments that you feel proud of,” as Wood is quoted in one chapter’s epigraph, “and these can be easily missed if someone gets up to buy a bag of popcorn.”. What the lesbian offered was the second.” If Neva arrives to give herself sexually to all who may need palliation (men, women, and other), doing so as a willed act, those who come to her for palliation come with their hurt, their loneliness, and a destabilizing overflow of utterly insatiable appetite. OTHER BOOKS. 3.5 stars--I'm not sure there's anything here we didn't already get in TRF and WfG, but it's still good. Neva has been initiated into a coven of island witches and begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Not exactly. It seems clear to this reader, a recovering drug addict and alcoholic himself, that much of this business has to to with the tragedy of diminishing returns, the progressive nature of an illness which finds the solution in time achieving for the original problem that the, ahem, solution ineffectively treats, its comprehensive surreptitious triumph. . Various deadly sins are excited, various sinners suddenly at direct odds. . The Lucky Star William T. Vollmann. I suppose it is notable that I don't frequent pubs all that often any more. But Vollmann earned his literary prominence in part through a much narrower lens — specifically, one trained on the tragic lowlifes who inhabit a handful of blocks at the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
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