Customer Reviews

Poor People

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Vollman begins his book by subverting what he calls the Marxist paradigm of speaking about the poor....assuming what they want or need. Vollman speaks instead directly to his subjects...asking them quasi-naive questions. I read this book a few months ago and what has remained with me is a sense of something not quite achieved. I think Vollman approaches his subjects with compassion, but the way that he writes about them, the questions he ask are tainted in a way he never quite acknowledges....

when you pay someone for an interview, someone who is significantly less powerful and important than yourself, then you are stuck with two problems.

The first is that they will likely tell you what you want to know, instinctively reconfirming whatever your own prejudices or ideologies are....

I'm not saying that Vollman should not have paid his subjects, but that he should expect that they shared details of interest to him, not necessarily to themselves. It is not as if they are writing their own narratives. In fact, although Vollman in the beginning talks about speaking directly to his subjects, a lot of the book focuses on his arguments with them on the page, if not in person, and explaining to the reader in his own words why they are poor. The story of the Chernobyl victim comes to mind. Most of Vollman's sentences are descriptive and do not have his subjects speaking in their own voices.

Two, the primary question he focuses on, "Why are you poor?" perhaps ends up an embarassing question to ask over and over to people who may feel ashamed of the need to answer that question. Why does Vollman assume that his subjects know the answer to that question, or if they do know, that they will be able to tell him? If a poor person came to him to ask the question "why are you rich?" how would he answer?

If Vollman explains why he is rich, I've forgotten it. Yet nature of the relationship between rich and poor is the deeper narrative Vollman seems to be grappling with. Are the rich rich because the poor are poor? Marx would say yes. Vollman doesn't ask the question.

Vollman writes beautiful sentences , and yet in the end he seems a little too remote, too isolated from his subjects' experience to connect or to understand poverty on the level he seems to reach for. Some critics have accused him of having a poverty fetish and I think this points to a weakness. Is he writing about people who are poor or "poor people"?

There are a lot of people that don't like to read Vollman, insisting that his focus on the seedier sides of life color his observations in a way that makes them unaccessible to average readers. His tendency to write long books keeps another group on the bench.

For those that are willing to work a little and not expect to be entertained Vollman is something completely different, we see him as this generations Joyce, Dickens or Melville.

Poor People shines a harsh light on another area that makes regular folks uncomfortable, and let's the people tell their story. Not in straight prose as we wish they could, but in the mutterings and actions that is all that their deprived lives provided them to work with, depriving the critics in tunr of the plots and meanings that are usually spelled out for them by the mainstream authors.

Once again as in Whores for Gloria, Rising Up and Rising Down, Europe Central and Royal Family that preceded Poor People, I find myself thinking of the nuances and implications of this book and the hard answers that Vollman refused to supply like another Chopra or Thomas L. Friedman sermon on how we should feel and what a great future we have if we don't look into the rough spots that aren't so clean and orderly.

Vollman's writing is like a bad accident in some ways, you feel guilty if you look and as if your missing something if you don't. In this case you are missing something if you don't look, one of the most important writers and thinkers of our times.

You may assume that this book is meant to be a cultural or social study of poor people, with an economic analysis of their hardships, and that seems to be the approach taken by most of the reviewers. But the book could be considered a work of modern philosophy, and if you look at it in this fashion, Vollmann's writing is strangely compelling and surprisingly effective. It's true that his style is difficult to penetrate, as he frequently goes off on dubious rhetorical tangents, obsesses over obscure and rambling literary references, and talks about himself way too much. Many readers will be reasonably turned off by Vollmann's very personality, but I propose that he has positioned himself as the comfortable "everyhuman" who knows that poverty is a problem but does not know how or whether to do anything about it. Thus he is a philosophical stand-in for the typical western reader of his book.

And while his questions toward his subjects are presumptive and occasionally condescending, Vollmann also deftly avoids the scientist's trap of self-defined observation and lets the humanity of his subjects shine through. Vollmann also pulls off some fairly impressive journalism here as he strolls through fearsome world locations where anthropologists fear to tread, including the mobster-infested alleys of Tokyo and an array of bars and brothels. Another treasure of this book are the 128 photographs of Vollmann's subjects, which are often unflattering, but also unassuming and brutally realistic. I am particularly haunted by many of the photos of children. If this book were a strict cultural study of poor people that attempted to propose idealistic solutions to endemic economic inequalities, I would side with many of the other reviewers here and give it the thumbs-down for its rambling and immodesty. But as a work of philosophy, in which Vollmann explores why we don't have the answers and probably never will, the book is oddly powerful and incredibly thought-provoking. [~doomsdayer520~]

The author of this book, William T. Vollmann, has won the National Book Award, the Pen Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writer's Award. He describes his own life in the kind of degraded neighborhood he so assiduously explores in POOR PEOPLE, an area of Sacramento where people have tunneled under the modern city into the beehive of the 19th-century sub-city. They break holes in the walls of the pawnshops to re-steal stolen articles and resell them to buy drugs. Vollman's apartment windows have "mesh over the bars," and before the mesh he was unable to take tinfoil off the window panes without being encroached on by his ever-watchful neighbors.

This experience, which of course he takes on by choice, has not sullied his view of the poor, with whom, throughout this long, lyrical and often tortured look at what makes people poor, he is always sympathetic. Vollman describes an encounter with an "armless man who knelt beside the topmost step of a pedestrian overpass in Bangkok...using his teeth for his hands, begging submissively." When he discovers that the man has cleverly folded his arms behind him, Vollman could feel cheated of the coins he'd been dropping in his cup; but he realizes that the man needs the money more than he does. "I continued to pay the tithe, and with a cheerful heart."

Vollman uncovers every sort of poverty as he ranges through the urban and rural byways of the world. Some, it seems, is systemic, generational; other poverty has come by the bad luck of political upheaval or through personal misjudgments. Many poor people have a belief system that allows them to accept being poor; others lash out in anger at their fate. Consider "the old man in Tokyo who sat on the sidewalk reading a comic book and stinking of urine." The author asked him his perennial question: Why are you poor? The old man "threw his comic book on the ground and shouted: It's my fault! Nobody else's responsibility!"

A prostitute guide led him through the backstreets of Nan Ning, China, and introduced him to a group of dispossessed farmers who had been given property deeds by Mao and now, under the new regime, have to buy new ones at a price they can't afford. There is a picture of one such man (the book is enhanced by black-and-white photographs) holding his old deed, and on his face is an expression that hides, to the Western eye, the fury he expressed. The prostitute's wise advice to the poor: "Everything you should do by yourself."

But how can that advice help the California squatter who had to go to court to answer to the charge of cracking a windshield and came home to find his dog choked to death on its leash? Vollmann opines, "A mansion, a new Mercedes and a professional dogwalker would have almost infallibly prevented these particular ills."

POOR PEOPLE is a slow, subtle travelogue through the world of poverty that lies just beyond the parts of our planet that surround our airports, car rental agencies, safe houses and decent eateries. Vollman has included a list of probable wages of the people he encountered, ranging from $1.00 a day (or less) to his own salary of approximately $100.30 per day. He considers himself rich, defining poverty as "lacking and desirous of what I have; unhappy in his or her own normality." He writes without an agenda but not without feeling. His book is courageously conceived and deftly executed, and deserves, for its author, another prize.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

As I sat down to write this review my cat interrupted me, asking for her dinner. The reading of Vollmann's book heightened my awareness of the seemingly innocuous choice of keeping pets at a time when the world's impoverished population increases. [Business Week magazine estimates that Americans spend $41 billion a year on pets; that's higher than the GDPs of all but 64 nations] Vollmann's book affords a look at what most of us who live in at least a modicum of comfort don't like to see: those who live without. Even though this book-mediated confrontation spares us the difficulties of actual contact -- the smell, the begging, the guilt of rejecting a demand for help -- it is still an arduous encounter. At the back of the book are 128 photos taken by the author as he pursued his worldwide quest to meet and understand the poor. It's hard to look at them.

Vollmann concedes that some readers find his writing difficult, and some reviewers on this page agree. I didn't find the narrative hard to read in that sense. The pace is frenetic, going back and forth to different areas of the globe, establishing commonalities among the poor; but therein is one of the book's strengths, reflecting the frenetic historical attempts to understand and solve world poverty, picked up and put down. And the poor themselves have varied notions of their circumstances: some say it's their own fault, others blame the government, others think it's karma, and on it goes. Vollmann often allows the language of his interviewees to seep into his own, which is another potential source of confusion. Since most of the book is an account of his close contact with the poor, there is little of an academic nature apart from Vollmann's citing of a UN report that -- briefly stated -- calls for more aid, better directed. Twas ever thus, even before Jonathan Swift satirized attempts to solve the problem with his Modest Proposal. Vollmann similarly has little faith in existing remedies and doesn't offer his own; after all, he admits near the end, "I don't believe that most of us know what anything means." Thus, no simple answers like one of Mother Teresa's: people just don't want to share. But Vollmann gets off some sharp insights and, scholar that he is or was, includes many pertinent references from Thoreau, Montaigne, and others who've studied the problem in the past.

The poor that Vollmann meets have moments of gladness amid their sadness, and some of the rich he knows are sad because they want more than they already have.

In this book Vollmann travels the world, asking people why they are poor and getting them to explain their lives. It's an interesting perspective. We so often talk about poverty as an abstraction. Vollmann wants us to meet real people, not abstractions. The stories are sometimes inspiring, sometimes horrifying, sometimes just bizarre. Vollmann makes clear it's not easy to love the poor. They can be smelly, nasty, and violent. They are also each of them different and endlessly fascinating.

When it comes to what to do about poverty, Vollmann realizes there are no easy answers. He says that the United Nations has recommended that the poor receive "More aid, better directed," then goes on to say "Couldn't we all use that? And what if the universe enacts less aid, more poorly directed?"

Vollmann next states that he supports the other standard U.N. suggestions on poverty, including economic growth, environmental protection, education, and reduced family size. I would like to point out that some of these goals are incompatible. Economic growth sounds great for the poor--a rising tide lifts all boats--but it is necessary to keep in mind how it is calculated. Economic growth is generally measured by GDP, which as a measure of well-being is so inaccurate as to be almost laughable. GDP is measured by counting up what is spent on various items. This works more or less OK if you're counting food bought by hungry people, but very poorly indeed if you're counting money spent on bombs or automatic rifles, or on parking garages for rich people's cars. GDP is not corrected for increasing population, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, or declining quality of life. More accurate measures of economic growth, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare or Genuine Progress Indicator, tend to show that there has been far less genuine economic growth than the official statistics suggest. For more on this, see McKibben's book "Deep Economy," Daly's "Beyond Growth," Brian Czech's "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train," or Donald Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking."

I would also like to make a gentle reminder that when it comes to worldwide poverty, the indications are that we ain't seen nothin' yet. In my opinion the worldwide population of today is at least twice the number that can be sustainably accommodated on our planet over the long term. The next few decades is likely to see some very bad times indeed for the world's poor. The fossil fuel binge we've been enjoying over the past 150 years is finally running its course. Climate change may well turn this problem into a one-two whammy. For more on this, see Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency."

POOR PEOPLE is a collection of Vollmann's experiences and interviews with poor people around the world over a number of years (principally, 1999-2005), along with Vollman's ruminations on their plights in life and the proper moral responses from the haves of the world, primarily himself. Accompanying the text, and constituting a signficant addition to the book, are over a hundred photographs that Vollmann took of his interviewees. Vollmann's most frequent question is "Why are you poor?", and not surprisingly he gets a wide but not very informative array of answers. In general the book is basically bereft of causes and solutions, and alas for many poor souls poverty is nigh inevitable and intractable.

Vollmann obviously is a very smart man, who scorns conventional thinking and insists on working through things for himself. That characteristic is admirable, and on occasions his idiosyncratic outlook or approach is instructive. But to me POOR PEOPLE seems to have been written primarily for William T. Vollmann, a sorting out of things for himself. After reading the book, I skimmed the review by Walter Kirn in "The New York Times Book Review" (March 18, 2007), which contains a rhetorical question that expresses my thoughts in this regard better than I could have done myself: "Is this is a serious, legitimate inquiry, or does it betray a certain faux-autism that might be better suited to performance art?" Whichever, POOR PEOPLE is an oft-annoyingly self-indulgent meditation.

It also is an overly difficult book to read, with frequent abrupt shifts in perspective or topic, total eschewal of quotation marks in the excerpts of interviews, numerous parenthetical asides (often sardonic or sarcastic), and far too many awkwardly or ambiguously constructed sentences. At times I fear that Vollmann is being willfully difficult; other times I am willing to believe that the explanation is rapid drafting with minimal self-editing or re-writing. (Of course, comprehensibility presumably is less of a problem for Vollmann himself, so it would not be surprising that others find overly difficult to read a book written more for the author than for them.)

Withal, POOR PEOPLE was worth reading, principally as a reminder of the wretched lives so many of our fellow humans lead. But surely there are many other books, better written and not burdened with such obsessively introspective commentary, that would serve the same purpose. This is the first of Vollmann's books that I have read. I had intended to read others, particularly "Rising Up and Rising Down", but it is now somewhat less likely that I will take the time to do so.

This is the first one of Vollmann's books I've read, and I really like the way he writes. He's like a cross between John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson. His style is clear and highly readable, and occasionally he throws something outrageous in there, just to make sure we're still paying attention. He does talk about himself a lot, as one reviewer mentioned, but that's part of the point of the book. Poor People is partly an objective study of poverty, but it's really more about the author's attempt to explore his own attitudes about poor people. He's a complex character, so he doesn't wrap things up nicely with all the proper conclusions and a recipe for doing away with poverty, as one reviewer seems to believe he should have. In some ways, he concludes that there isn't much any of us can do about poverty, except perhaps spring for 750ml of decent booze for our favorite bum from time to time. I was disappointed that he never discussed the topic of untreated mental illness, which is rampant in the homeless population of this or any other country, and was clearly evident in many of the subjects he interviewed (yes, smarty, I AM an expert on the subject). He writes nearly as well as McPhee, but then he unapologeticly fires up a bowl of meth, ala Hunter S. Thompson. His style is definitely not for everyone, but for those who appreciate good gonzo, he's the genuine thing. Dude IS obsessed with whores.

Molly Ivins once described her goal as "Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted." William T. Vollman accomplishes that in spades in this profound exploration of poverty around the globe. The reader is by turns affronted, disturbed and turned inward, to consider and reconsider attitudes and assumptions about the state of humanity in the modern world. Many of us are fully aware of the vast gulf between haves and have-nots, without anything like a meaningful awareness of what not-having means where the rubber hits the road.

No reader is likely to come away from this work unmoved, or without deep introspection. The author is willing to look and keep looking, to not turn away, to not pretty things up. I've read that some find his style off-putting, whereas I found it nakedly refreshing as he injects insight, personal experience, gut-reaction and profound empathy as he places his subjects under his writerly microscope. This one will stick with you, perhaps longer than you'd like.

I am glad to have read Vollmann's book, although reading it saddened me. I have a slightly better sense for poverty, and that slightly better sense leaves me feeling slightly depressed. Reality bites.
Vollmann takes an unflinching look at poverty around the world, including "rich" countries such as the United States and Japan. The book comes complete with 128 black and white pictures. These are haunting images of poverty. Young, old, happy, sad. Very poor and "are they poor?"

Vollmann does a fantastic job of exploring the confusion that is both the experience of poverty, and even the description and categorization of it. He expresses his bewilderment at what he observes, and also at his reactions to the poverty he finds.
I found the chapter on oil extraction in Atyrau to be particularly jarring. Vollman travelled to a very remote area, probably off-limits, and interviewed scared, sick people were being poisoned by the way the oil was being extracted. The sky was strange colors, and in certain towns, pretty much everyone was anemic. And yet the official Tengizchevroil literature cheerily states "Tengizchevroil and all those working for TCO are very proud in operating its facilities in a safe and environmentally responsible manner, consistent with national environmental regulations." Apparently not.

This chapter on Atyrau got me thinking that perhaps I had been terribly naïve in believing the visions of corporate responsibility that I heard in business school. But then maybe the messages were there in the classroom--I had just attributed those as anomalies, like the wall-street minded classmate stated proudly that if he was running a company, and he could get away with polluting, he'd do it! "After all, isn't my job to maximize shareholder value?" Maximize according to whose perspective? And at whose expense?

I think what I appreciate most about this challenging book is that Vollmann, in line with his plain writing style, unflinchingly comments on what he says in ways that some might find "insensitive" or politically incorrect. And more often than not he proceeds to then comment on this very dynamic, of how he might have written something "wrong" that wasn't supposed to be stated.
But let's face it--what could be more wrong then the largely unaddressed phenomenon of poverty in today's world? Poverty is uncomfortable--so is this book.