Something bugs me

When he saw how much power a little air and water could have, he decided to become a revolutionary.

- from You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann

It's like, the dude types and types and types, and every now and then can't help himself, can't stop himself from dropping some bomb of a gorgeous sentence. (Or entire passage. There's a few. I ought to be marking them more diligently and quoting more liberally. But.)

I'm a third-or-so of the way through Angels. I'm not going to sugar-coat it: the beginning of the book is intriguing but rough. Like he wants to scare you off so he can preach to the choir. There's some point when you realize you've got two narrators, both in the first person, who duck in on the narration seemingly at random, that makes you sort of want to give up and go take a hot bath and perhaps eat a pound of chocolate. That with the typically Vollmann-ish language (i.e., more than is often strictly necessary) makes for a slow start.

But now I'm into it and I'm finding a narrative flow and it's working for me. This book seems to reward a slow, patient reading, one in which--as I, the blogger, am convinced is required of any engagement with Vollmann--it is sometimes, if not often, necessary to simply ignore a passage, because he likes to let the speaking get in the way of the spoken, to the detriment of sense. (Though I've yet to find an instance in this book quite so bad as a certain instance of B.S. that I, Big Darby, quoted back here-a-ways.)

The politics of the book are pretty plain, or feel pretty plain, and aren't unexpected, given a reading of some of Vollmann's other work. (There's power, see, and some gots it, and some wind up on the gun end of an extended metaphor, see?) What's interesting about the book is really the sort of "comic" style of it. Its essential nature as a fiction with only cursory reference to Vollmann's own life. I've only read three of the guy's books beside this one but this sort of feels like the Vollmann we might have wanted to have seen more of later on, being the one in which we see the least of him. Though curse me now for not doing my research, because now I can't remember how much or if any first-person stuff there was in Europe Central...which with its dependency on historical figures (albeit novelized) kind of loses on that front, anyway. Not loses. Shouldn't say loses. Good book, worth reading.

But there is some difference between talking about Shostakovich and talking about revolutionary insects, after all.

...Newt was an inventor, not an end user, so many of his motions were symbolic and ritualistic, designed (if there was any conscious design to them) to pad his activities and fill out the time until he had solved whatever problem was eating him...

- from You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann