Butterfly Stories (Signed First Edition)

A cradle-to-grave search for love takes a suburban kid as far away as the killing fields of Cambodia, where he falls in love with Vanna, a prostitute from Phnom Penh

The prolific Vollmann weighs in with at least his third hyper-realized meditation on female prostitution. But whereas Whores for Gloria had an imaginative conceit worthy of Borges and Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs teetered provocatively between a Baedeker and a Book of the Dead, his latest effort falls a bit flat. The "Butterfly Boy" grows up as a nerdish American kid who is routinely abused by bullies at school. His adolescent trials, configured against a backdrop of American atrocities in Vietnam, are relieved only by the affections of a particularly plucky girl who then moves away. This sets the stage for the protagonist's adult explorations of love and violence in the Far East, where, as "the journalist," he pals with "the photographer," and together they insist on developing relationships with a series of prostitutes. As always, Vollmann's style--gritty detail stirred with hallucinated fancy--perfectly serves his investigation of the profane, which in this case includes the vile horrors exacted by the Khmer Rouge. However, the heart of this darkness is not convincingly evoked, and readers may begin to wonder if the exoticism of the Orient and its women is not just a handy occasion for Vollmann to act out a forbidden fantasy.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The prolific Vollmann, fresh from a sadomasochistic survey in Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (p. 258), makes another savage thrust into society's sexual fringes with this fractured tale of Southeast Asian prostitutes and a journalist who couldn't say no. The ``Butterfly boy,'' first seen at school, has no friends among his male peers, instead being terrorized by them and by a bully until he is saved by a girl admirer. Ever the outcast, as an adult he travels with a photographer to Thailand and Cambodia on assignment, but the two spend far more time with the prostitutes than gathering material for a story. Unlike the photographer who uses his women without becoming interested in them, the journalist approaches them sympathetically, with an earnestness that both attracts and embarrasses them. By the time he returns to San Francisco, he's fallen in love with a Cambodian woman and become HIV-positive; he wants only to divorce his wife, however, and bring Vanna and her child to America. Unable to locate her from a distance, he begs another assignment, eventually reaching Bangkok and crossing clandestinely into Cambodia, but language difficulties and social differences keep him from achieving his goal. Under the corrosive influence of his callous fellow traveller, he allows himself to be tempted by other flesh--but in the fevered state brought on by various sexually transmitted diseases, a bottle of Benadryl is ultimately his only consolation. The flesh-peddling and sensory overload of Southeast Asia fill every page, but they're given such a weak lead that the story has nowhere to go: scenes of decay and corruption rule in unchallenged succession. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is not a collection, as the title suggests, but a novel. The main character, known as "the butterfly boy" in grade school but now simply called "the journalist," travels to Southeast Asia to investigate the prostitution problem, accompanied by a photographer. The latter proves to be an impeccable sex tourist, but the journalist is inept. He forgets to use a condom the very first night and suffers from an ever-worsening barrage of fevers and infections thereafter. Then he falls in love with one of the prostitutes and decides to marry. Typically, Vollmann is more interested in the sordid aspects of his tale than in its erotic potential. The tone is sober, almost scholarly, complete with bibliographical notes on source material ranging from Tacitus to Nazi aviator Hanna Reitsch's memoirs. Shorter and more focused than the "Seven Dreams" sequence of novels, this title presents Vollmann's trademark obsessions in a new light. For larger fiction collections.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.