Customer Reviews

Butterfly Stories: A Novel

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Not for those with faint hearts or correct politics, William Vollman's "Butterfly Stories" is a surgically accurate portrayal of a man's search for the one person who can capture his heart for keeps, as this will prove that he actually has one. A cautionary tale about the dangers of chasing experience and affection with a demagnetized moral compass, the novel describes one character's slide from a lonely, girl-crazy and ill-adjusted childhood (as the Butterfly Boy) to a lonelier and girl-crazier adulthood (as the journalist) in which he is gainfully if dubiously employed but has little else going for him, it seems.

Except that he feels, and he needs. Driven solely by emotion, this boy-cum-journalist spans several continents, a failed marriage, the BBC, STDs, and a rogue's gallery of prostitutes, drug addicts and hotel clerks on his way to the killing fields of Cambodia to find his true love. Old-fashioned, boy-meets-girl story? Yes, of a sort. Hackneyed? Hardly. Through Vollman's raw (some might say base) observations, we see the twinned horror and joy the journalist finds in love and power and the modern consequences of a lack of restraint in both areas. The view is a dim one, but worth a good look.

Possessing a painfully acute self-knowledge, Vollman's journalist does not fall prey to the common afflictions of the rest of us at the end of the milennium. He is not unsure of his own desires, or his place in the world, or the worth of a soul defined by advertising slogans. But while he knows exactly what he wants, he is strangely bereft of the will to survive. Ironically, it is this pervading sense of helplessness that makes the book a compelling read.

Drawn in Vollman's inimitably fine spare strokes, "Butterfly Stories" is a worthwhile but exhausting journey through realities that many would like to deny. The sex is frank, unromantic and plentiful, the settings are sleazy, and the characters are firmly resolved not to grow from their experiences. But there is humor mixed with the sadness, and glimpses of surprising beauty that allow the reader finally to understand why the journalist is compelled to make the choices he does. It will never make Oprah's list, thank goodness, just like Phnom Penh will never be a Club Med vacation spot. But reading this book is a bit like walking through some of that tragic city's ruined neighborhoods. You wish you were anywhere but here, you wonder how anyone could live like this among the trash and the leprous beggars and the pools of raw sewage. Then, suddenly glimpsing a broad dark face with a dazzling open smile you wish, just for a second, that you could.

Although I must admit that I consider this one of Vollmann's "lesser" works, I can't dub anything he writes bad, for Vollmann at his worst still gives would-be--and most popular--novelists a seminar in writing: pages lush with imagery; his masterful prose; ingenuity in plot construction without resorting to the convoluted seamlessness of most postmodern novelists. It's just that he seems somewhat rushed in his delivery, that occasionally his ingenius metaphors are replaced with what appears to be crassness if only for the sake of being crass. (And there isn't anything wrong with this; I guess I just expect something more from Vollmann.) But then again, the life of the Butterfly Boy, the protagonist, is a vulgar and sick and sad life. The novel--yes, Butterfly Stories is a novel--is an overview of the Butterfly Boy's life, from early childhood disappointments to crossing Europe by train with an eccentric cast of characters to whoremonging in Thailand on a quest for true love, a quest that culminates in his contracting AIDs. Although Vollmann may not have reached the standard to which I am used to reading, this novel refuses to be shelved, drawing the reader in to its lonliness and desperation

William Vollman has to be read, and read more. The question is more which Vollman to read than whether to read Vollman at all. His works can be loosely divided into the historical (the Seven Dreams series and the recent philosophical work in violence, Rising Up and Rising Down) and the journalistic fiction (including Butterfly Stories and Atlas and Whores for Gloria). But the work of cultural archaeology that Vollman is performing can be located in all his works. He is bringing that which has been buried by long years of cultural blindness and prejudice into the light. With great patience we will learn to think "person" when we hear "prostitute", instead of just shaking our heads at what we know only as some abstract category of social depravity - a prejudice that many might protest but secretly be a party to (myself reluctantly included).
In the introduction, honest Vollman makes his plea for suspension of judgment on his blatantly controversial cast of characters:
"In case any of you readers happens to be a member of the Public, that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow-terrors, I beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book, like one or two others of mine, is partly about the most honest form of love called prostitution - a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought - or, better yet, no thought at all - but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the Public (and I think you know what I mean by members). Shall we pause to admire them all...?"
And from there, Vollman plunges into a heart-wrenching story of alienation, desparate love-seeking, and reality-smashing encounters with a tumultuous underworld of eager and elusive women. We follow the protagonist, the journalist, from his school days, to a trans-European train ride, to the brothels and discos of Thailand and Cambodia, returning to an estranged home, and the subsequent delirium of desire and uncertainty.
Here is a story about love and loneliness, ethics and humanity, pleasure and pain. It is a story about willful self-destruction and about grabbing for assurances on the way down. It is what you will let it be. Either way, Vollman is a master.

As my introduction to the vastness of Vollmann's work, Butterfly Stories: A Novel served me well.
Though seemingly a short story collection, each involving an unnamed protagonist, they all make up the arch of a life lived in pursuit of instinctual desire, mystery, passion and rebellion. The bulk of the book is two stories, one about two men who seek debauchery while on assignment in Thailand and Cambodia, and the second about the journalist's journey to find the woman he met there and is infatuated with.
Vollmann's style is quite dense, his imagination pointedly connected to flashes of impulse, as if his eye has caught something random and his pen infuses that into his previous thought. Maybe stream-of-consciousness is more to it, though there is a distinct feeling, and environment, especially in the central story "More Benadrin, Whined the Journalist."
This is a very sweaty, putrescent, fecal, oozing world. There even were times I was remined of William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.
I would recommend this for people curious about Vollmann. It is relatively short, for him. On occasion it is graphic and even shocking. But I found it viscerally charged, passinately bold, with a vision of Southeast Asia that delves into it's muck and mire and manages to accomplish a transcendance.

'Butterfly Stories' is a unique literary endeavor by one of the most underrated writers of our times, William T Vollman. Many people may have moral issues with this book since the protagonist'and from what I understand, Vollman himself'is an enthusiastic whore chaser. But moral issues aside, one can't ignore the quality of Vollman's prose, the gripping honesty and lyricism of his story, and the fact that his is a novel of ideas.

The story begins with a young boy who calls himself the butterfly boy, living an odd and tormented life in the American suburbs. Sensitive and appreciative of women at a very early age, the butterfly boy is scorned and rejected by his peers. His childhood is characterized on the one hand by the brutal treatment he receives from the school bully, and on the other hand by his remote sense of beauty. One morning the butterfly boy observes a beautiful butterfly whose image remains with him for the rest of his life. It is presumably for this reason that he calls himself the butterfly boy. When he reaches adulthood, each successive phase of the butterfly boy's life is characterized by a new appellation. For example, he becomes the boy who wanted to be a journalist, the journalist, and finally the husband. As the boy who wanted to be a journalist, the narrator travels through Southern Europe with an odd group of people and no prospect of getting laid. As the journalist, he travels with a photographer through Thailand and Cambodia pursuing prostitutes with a sportsman's gusto.

The journalist and the photographer plug their pray with an odd code of bravado that prohibits the use of condoms and practically embraces its suicidal consequences. Shortly before returning to America, the journalist falls in love with a beautiful Cambodian prostitute. Once at home his becomes singularly obsessed with returning to Cambodia and joining her, at which point he refers to himself as the husband. The novel concludes with the would-be lovers reunited but hardly with the cliched happy ending that one might hope for.

Intellectually navigating a novel about prostitution is as tricky as cruising the red light district itself, and Vollman does his best to steer us to the right places in his story. In the preface of the book Vollman acknowledges the stigma of prostitution and challenges the reader not to fall pray to mere public opinion. In other words, if you're going to have issues with this book, don't do so just because it is about [prostitution] and [prostitute] chasing. Fair enough.

One of the central themes of this book is an examination of the nature of power and the will to torment. When he is repeatedly brutalized by the school bully, the butterfly boy considers the possibility that he is something of a problem-solving element in the bully's life. The bully has no sense of self and can only grasp his identity by examining the results of the actions he perpetrates on his subject. The goal isn't so much to hurt the butterfly boy as to study the results of his tormenting actions. He sees himself in the butterfly. Years later, the butterfly boy behaves in an identical fashion during his whore chasing romp through Southeast Asia. As victims of economic and political oppression, the prostitutes have little choice but to have sex with the butterfly boy (now called the journalist). The butterfly boy uses his power over the prostitutes essentially to study and learn about himself. Instead of charging at his subjects in the schoolyard, he is selecting them from the stages of various gogo bars. As a child, the narrator calls himself the butterfly boy. As an adult his life is characterized by promiscuous behavior, which in Southeast Asia normally earns a man the sobriquet of 'butterfly'. In other words, regardless of the various titles the narrator assigns to himself in his adult life, he is still the butterfly boy. This identity is the thread that traverses and essentially explains the entire story. The sensitivities and circumstances that made the child into the butterfly boy have ironically made him into a butterfly in the Asian sense that such a name is assigned.

Although his roles may have altered between childhood and adulthood, the butterfly boy is defined by the same psychological mechanism. Having been the victim of the school bully, he has become something of an economic and sexual bully himself (After all whore chasers really are just amateur rapists.). He can now see things from the bully's perspective and he can use other people to examine his own life. Vollman is telling us that if we're going to judge this book we have to get past the mere stigma of prostitution. The truly frightening and interesting part of this book is the psychological mechanism that forms and propels the butterfly boy. But to understand this, we have to accept him and accompany him on his torrid journey.

After reading the preceding paragraph, one might begin to think that the butterfly boy is an awful human being. After all, how could he after so much bullying and tormenting in turn pray upon destitute young girls in Southeast Asia? But moral judgments are never so simple, as Vollman goes to great lengths to tell us. The narrator of these stories is not without his sensitivities. When recounting his childhood misery, he draws a timeline between those events and the genocide in Cambodia. His own horrors are vastly overshadowed by those of the Cambodian people he will later meet and they are also forming the circumstances that will draw them together. Despite the fact that he is exploiting people in other countries, the butterfly never has any illusions about his own repugnant quality or about the fact that these are real human beings, not mere props for his amusement. His attitude is less offensive than seemingly more egalitarian individuals who view citizens of foreign countries as mere components of their new cultural experiences. It would be easy for Vollman to sensationalize his subject matter as a less skilled writer would surely do. But Vollman writes with lucid, mature prose that reads like an ironic documentary of sorts. Occasionally, he teases the reader with philosophical musings to remind us how smart he is. At one point, when the butterfly boy meets a man whose entire family was massacred by the Khmer Rouge he asks, 'if this man's suffering is greater than mine, does this mean that he is greater than I am?' 'Butterfly Stories' is challenging to say the least and is well worth the read. Regardless of your perspective be it moralist, intellectual, or a reader of smut, you will not find this book entirely comfortable.

If you are looking for a fun and easy read then skip this book. If you are interested in well written prose and a novel of ideas than you may find it worth accompanying Vollman to the dingy hotels in the red light districts of Bangkok and Pnom Pen.

Butterfly Stories is pretentious and overwritten creating a writing style that presents the reader with prose that is obscure for obscurity's sake. This was a most annoying and unfulfilling reading experience. Similar to some of Vollman's other work - this novel is primarily about a man developing unhealthy attachments to prostitutes with Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as background. Unfortunately the writing style is so overblown it gets in the way of good story telling.

This book is a sordid collection of junk. I picked it out at random from a library shelf and did not enjoy/like/sympathize with even one thing about it. Don't waste your time.

A totally worthless piece of garbage.