Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs - Hardcover

Vollmann, William T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679404392 ISBN 13: 9780679404392

Publisher: Pantheon, 1991

Synopsis

A collection of stories by the author of Whores for Gloria, You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, The Ice Shirt, and An Afghanistan Picture Show features tales of pimps, tramps, pornographers, and witch doctors.

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Reviews

The prolific Vollmann has made his career mining two veins: the mytho-history of the settling of North America ( Fathers and Crows ; The Ice-Shirt ) and the dark margins of contemporary life ( Whores for Gloria ; The Rainbow Stories ) . This collection of stories and short meditations on death is of the second type. As always in Vollmann's work, the line between fantasy and reportage is blurred. Here, the pimps, prostitutes, skinheads and weapons enthusiasts familiar to Vollmann's readers are subjected to some wild literary pyrotechnics. In "The Ghost of Magnetism," the narrator, existentially distraught about the impermanence of human relations, visits the four points of the compass radiating from San Francisco--Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico and Las Vegas--and at a casino magically produces coins imprinted with the faces of his friends; as he drops them into the one-armed bandits he sees icons of his past roll up on the machine, a weird but affecting symbology of loss. Unfortunately, Vollmann's other devices do not work as well; for the first time, literary pretension has crept into his work--e.g., a raid on Edgar Allan Poe texts ("The Grave of Lost Stories") falls flat. Still, Vollmann's walk on the wild side of world culture--there are stories set in Vietnam, Thailand and Belize--confirms him as one of America's most intrepid fictional frontiersmen.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Boisterous as ever, Vollmann continues to revel in quixotic moments of human experience similar to those in his other tales (Fathers and Crows, etc.), yet this collection is far less successful in providing a solid basis from which his anarchic vision can flourish. With San Francisco as a point of departure and the crisis of parting from it as a catalyst for reflection, Vollmann's narrator ponders a m‚lange of colorful but troubled acquaintances, tracing their individual journeys to dissolution and despair, as well as his own tortured experience. Tragic figures all, some of them manage at least to eke out a marginal existence, while others, like Elaine Suicide, are dead from the outset; the somber saga of her affair with handcuff-haunted Abraham in all its sadomasochistic splendor is the centerpiece here. From a father obsessed with dogtags stripped from a German soldier he'd killed in the closing moments of WW II, Abraham inherits a fetishism that becomes fully formed in his relationship with Elaine, as the two feed each other's fantasies in Gun City, U.S.A. Voyeurs and sorry dreamers of all kinds occupy other pieces--from hapless Ken, whose passion for Asian women prompts a string of disappointing liaisons, to failed operative Nicholas, whose enthusiasm for covert life in Latin America makes him unable to abandon it after his removal from US government service. Stitched between these tales are short, savage epitaphs for a range of dead heroes and objects, including a fierce jaguar hunted down in the jungle of Belize and, finally, the book itself. Energetic and witty if unfocused--but, still, this shows the prodigious talent that has been better realized in earlier work. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679404392
• ISBN 13: 9780679404392
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318