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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Come into the cartoon,
By A Customer
This review is from: You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American fiction) (Paperback)
In the way the best caricatures can tell you the truth in corrective-lens fashion--to distort the view against your own distortion so you see it plain--Vollmann's first book--which he calls not a Novel but a Cartoon--caricatures the outlandish oppression & cruelty of the human being: especially the human male, especially the American. Seeing where Vollmann's career has taken him--on a nightmarish reporter's journey through the 3rd World, into the ragged world of the San Francisco Tenderloin, deep into an ambitious 7-novel project recounting the history of the New World--it's no surprise to see his concerns with power & preterition set up here in his first work. A tale of America's dream of the bullying, Protean, endlessly inventive, heartless power of money, this Cartoon pits the authoritarian powers against the scrappy underdogs: Electricity(Power) vs. Bugs(the little guys). If this reminds you of Thomas Pynchon's fabulist (& fabulous) Gravity's Rainbow, there's good reason. Vollmann's the next ecstatic drop running up that literary vein. Along with all this, there's the metafictional struggle to tell the story throughout, as 2 narrators (at least 2) wrestle over the helm: 1) a lowly employee with subversive tendencies & sentimentalities whose affection for the characters & obsessions about his ex-girlfriend sneak into the telling, and 2) the being who gives him dictation, the shapeshifting, immortal, amoral Big George, whose exaggerated accounts of his own adventures are a pastiche of every Big Fish tale ever spun in America's history, but who nevertheless is in the service of the kind of truth that only comes with the heartlessness of the fact that everybody (else) dies. Lodged, of course, in the best sort of eyebrow-raising fiction. I, the reviewer, am trying to tell you that I liked this book, and that I am a picky reader. But I, the writer, keep getting mixed up as to how to get you to buy it. For the sake of postpostmodern literature--for the sake of the longevity of the love of literature--read this insane, awkward, gorgeous thing.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's worth the effort,
By A Customer
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American fiction) (Paperback)
The first 50 pages took me almost three hours to read. I was worried I made a big mistake in reading this book. And then Vollmann's world captures you. By the end my opinion had changed: this is the best book I've read.
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favorite novel,
By Laura Mabee (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American fiction) (Paperback)
I wish more people knew W. Vollmann. I have read this book 4 times and it is better with each read. The first time through you may not know what is going on for the first hundred pages or so, but keep reading; it is worth it.
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