Imperial (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009: How do you describe a 1,300-page book in 150 words? Start with adjectives (some of them opposites): vast, intrepid, passionate, and yes, sometimes dull, illuminating and infuriating, satirical and confessional, exhausting and exhaustive, dirty, fertile, and dry. William T. Vollmann, legendary for his huge, all-consuming books of fiction, history, and reporting, has spent much of the past ten years returning obsessively to one of the harshest but most contested territories in North America, the desert borderlands of southeastern California and northern Mexico he calls Imperial. Wading through water-use arcana, agri-booster archives, and centuries of colonial history; listening to lettuce farmers, motel clerks, and dance-hall hostesses; and crossing the border hundreds of times (while meeting those who cross via other means, and those who try to stop them), Vollmann has written an intensely personal fever dream of an encyclopedia that makes a strange, northern companion to last year's giant borderlands masterpiece, Roberto Bolano's 2666. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Michael CoffeyThis is an exasperating, maddening, exhausting and inchorent book by the stunningly prolific Vollmann, who has really outdone himself. Eleven hundred pages plus endless endnotes about a single county in California is as perverse as Vollmann has dared be—which is saying a lot for a guy who has written a massive collection of tales about skinheads (Rainbow Stories), a seven-volume history of the settling of a measly continent (Seven Dreams) and another seven volumes on the history of violence (Rising Up and Rising Down). But a big book about one county? Well, it's not just any county. Imperial is the southeastern-most county in California, bordering with Mexico to the south and Arizona to the east, across the Colorado River. Is it a place deserving of this seemingly disproportionate chronicle? Today, it is a hot spot for illegal immigration, law enforcement action, drug trafficking, prostitution and sweatshop labor in maquilladoras, fetid border factories. It is a place, sure enough, where imperialism has made its mark. Over the past centuries, a lot of bad things have happened in El Centro, as the region is also called, and very little good, as Vollmann's excessive data-dump demonstrates ad nauseam. The Spanish came, murdered, plundered, left; America annexed; land grabs ensued and Colorado River water was illegally diverted westward to render a temporary agricultural paradise and make a few fortunes. As with most of his books, Vollmann has performed mind-boggling feats of research, gobbling up obscure and arcane texts about the Spanish conquests, hydrography, citrus cultivation, immigration, poverty rates, desalinization, drug use, human smuggling and exploitation of the weak by the wealthy in all its guises as it applies to this benighted, once beautiful desert region. If Vollmann has a point of view here, an axe to grind, it is that he is appalled by the power inequities and the subsequent suffering of the Mexicans, and he is moved by the latter's simple desire to have a better life. But gouts of a bleeding heart make for some viscous prose, and, as seldom happens with Vollmann, his emotions overcome his cool and his positions fray into incoherence. Vollmann's normally reliable narrative voice veers between tour guide–speak and backpacking sociologist, with the occasional lyrical paean to a lady of the night. As a result, Imperial County is a place that few will have the stomach to visit, and Imperial a book few will be willing to read. (powerHouse is publishing a book of 200 photographs Vollmann took during the course of his research: $55 [200p] ISBN 978-1-57687-489-9.) Photos, maps. (Aug.)Coffey is executive managing editor at PW.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1344 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (July 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670020613
• ISBN-13: 978-0670020614
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,656 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #5 in	Books > History > United States > State & Local > Southwest
  #18 in	Books > History > Americas > Mexico
  #24 in	Books > History > United States > State & Local > California

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vollmann's , August 2, 2009

By	Michael A. Duvernois (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

William T. Vollmann spent a decade trolling through the underside of the nation, the California-Mexico border with an obsessed eye for the grime, excess, love, blood, and sex that is his meat. Heck, that makes for much of the interest in any work of fiction or nonfiction. Here's it revealed in 1300+ pages that read as though they were pulled directly from the travel journals of a crazed obsessive. But it probably wasn't that simple. Behind the flowing stream of consciousness is an author ruthlessly and efficiently dissecting the contradictions in American-Mexican relations, in late capitalism, and in a failed environment. (The Salton Sea is California's biggest lake, but it's also a massive failure caused by too many diversions of the Colorado River. Pollution and decay flow in, but nothing flows out. So it is with Imperial County.)

It's a big wasteland, and this is a big book that tries to look at the big issues in the wasteland. It's a product of an author who is interested in everything. It's a book I'd love to think of myself as writing, but I'd be too scared to dive so deeply. So this massive Moby Dick, an albatross about Vollmann's neck lands on our desks for us to live, vicariously, through his exploits. Yep, there are strip clubs, prostitutes, and illegal laborers, but there are also farmers, ranchers, folks striving for a better life. But the failures of Imperial (the county not the book) match and mirror the failure of America overall, and we're in the mood for some critical examinations today.

What's a book review without criticisms? Well, Vollmann is a sloppy investigator, a sloppy fact checker, and a failure as a journalist. This is a work of passion, not of careful investigation. We learn all about his breakup with a girlfriend, but are never clear on exactly what is produced agriculturally in Imperial. But such criticisms are missing the point. We endure this mass of pages for the excitement, for the energy, for the look at the underbelly, and not for clinical analysis. Someone could write "Imperial: A legacy of decay" for the University of California Press and a dozen copies would be sold.

I'll pass on yet another mention of Vollmann's excesses, but instead mention an excess of the publisher. $[...]. Sure, it's discounted here, but what about independent bookstores? Is this really intended to be sold for that price? Or only at discount? Compare with the pricing of Infinite Jest or Against and Day.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Editing would have helped, August 12, 2009

By	Kevin Clark "Brahmacharya" (Cincinnati) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I understand Vollman's strategy but this book fails in this form. Some chapters are one sentence long and convey no information whatsoever. Some are many pages yet equally convey no information. Some convey a lot of information which may or may not be true. Vollman is the sloppiest researcher I have ever read. Any other author would have pared this down to a 500 page book, and it would have been great. As a Southern California resident I enjoy a lot of this book, such as the chapters about the formation of the Salton Sea, but the size and scope force one to skip a lot. People edit books for a reason.

20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars yes, but..., August 12, 2009

By	jrossa (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I will preface this review by saying that of course I have not finished the book yet- I only got it last week. And to suggest that the book is shapeless or digressing is not to understand Vollmann's all-encompassing tactics. But I have some quibbles which are not related to the text but to the production of the book. The previous reviewer questions the price, as do I, but for a different reason. A book this large should at the very least have a sewn binding and cloth boards. To have paper boards and a glued binding means this book is going to fall apart under any circumstances which involve actually reading it, let alone toting it around anywhere. At this price point, Viking really should have invested in making a better physical product. Also, my preliminary excursions into the book have turned up a disturbing amount of copy-editing errors- typos, basically. I know that Vollmann insists on editorial control, and I applaud him for it, but again, when you're creating a monument such as this I wish that Viking (or Vollmann as the case may be) would hire someone to simply read the manuscript as Vollmann wishes it to be and correct spelling errors and typos. I realize this is all nit-picking, but it does distract from Vollmann's considerable achievement, and in some ways is almost disrespectful of his creation.