William T. Vollmann, shape-shifter. Our "most crazed, suicidal romantic visionary since Poe and Melville." Unreconstructed adolescent attracted to doomed causes "because he hasn't matured enough to realize the futility of the ideals he's based his life and work on."
Seems about right. Especially with an almost suitable-for-framing "Portrait of the Artist as Young Man With a Beretta" – a photograph of Vollmann with a gun pointed to his own head – prominently featured at the beginning of Expelled From Eden, a wonderfully off-kilter anthology and scrapbook miscellany chock-full o' Vollmann, winner of the 2005 National Book Award in fiction for Europe Central.
And there's more than enough to go around, with photos, plot summaries, biographical confessions, letters, poetry and journalistic essays; excerpts from his odyssey through the history of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down; passages from published fiction such as You Bright and Risen Angels and Rainbow Stories, as well as excerpts from not-yet published novels. Also along for the ride are such curiosities as a Vollmann-centric timeline of world history and an eclectic list of books – many obscure – most admired by the unusually well-read author.
All writings are well organized, covering such essential required-reading material in chapters dedicated to background and influences, travels and "On Writing, Literature, and Culture." For extra credit, you can tackle "On Death, War, and Violence" and "On Love, Sex, Prostitutes, and Pornography."
Vollmann knows more than a little about all of these things, as the discerning and refreshingly irreverent editors of Expelled From Eden, Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson, make clear. But while Vollmann has a reputation for having one foot in the grave and the other in the gutter, a wide-eyed reader of this compendium will come away with a fuller understanding of a complex writer still lingering by those gates of Eden: "Part sinner indelibly stained by the mark of Cain, Vollmann is also part saint who in Christ-like fashion embraces everyman and everywoman, lays his hands upon their scars, and forgives them their sins."
Article comments
1 - Mace Price
...About this this Vollman fellow...My initial impression of him, and his work[s] are that he has thought far too deeply, for far too long and is consequently at 48; too aware of the realities of human condition for the sake of his continued grasp upon sanity in the legal regard of the term. It prompts me to wonder precisely what pathology--imposed, congenital or both--has convinced him that he has done something very terribly wrong in existing. Even if he has managed to transpose this burden into a protracted species of what I would name a malevolent brilliance...As he ages I am admonished by instinct alone that he is gradually transitioning into a personality with the psychic balance of a Colonel Kurtz, or a less pretentious and more intelligent Hemingway. I get the idea such profundity has already begun to confront him with impossibility of being human.
Thus you might, if you have the opportunity to tell him for his sake, that to be such a creature, just isn't worth the effort...let alone the risk...That the most credible enlightenment, like all things, has its boundaries...and the questions that lie beyond can only be addressed with, in his case, educated conjecture. Even so, I predict he will continue his obsession to reconcile those standard redundant issues of "Darkness and Light."
Suffice it to say the truth of life is mendacity and death...which he seems over acquainted with, and in any case comes soon enough of its own accord. If one can take a lesson from the animals. It is I think, that in the end one cannot continue to exist as both a fatalist, and an evolved martyr to madness and the cruelties of the world...To which are indifferent to the best of human answers; even those as incisive and sapient as his.