The Ice-Shirt (Seven Dreams #1) by William T. Vollmann

Sep 05, 2012 Geoff rated it it was amazing

Shelves: seven-dreams

Here in the American Mid-Atlantic the winters seem to be getting shorter and milder. I remember great ice storms in my youth, walking on what seemed ice a meter high, ice pelting the roof all night long, like a hundred cats’ nails clacking on a chapel floor or millions of insects hitting the window; I remember the creaking and groaning of limbs heavy with ice up there invisible in the unending darkness of a pitch black winter night as I walked out against my parents' warnings; I remember the bri Here in the American Mid-Atlantic the winters seem to be getting shorter and milder. I remember great ice storms in my youth, walking on what seemed ice a meter high, ice pelting the roof all night long, like a hundred cats’ nails clacking on a chapel floor or millions of insects hitting the window; I remember the creaking and groaning of limbs heavy with ice up there invisible in the unending darkness of a pitch black winter night as I walked out against my parents' warnings; I remember the brief thunder of their crashing through the other ice-heavy limbs as they plummeted over-laden, and their black limbs emerging upright from the snow piles where they speared themselves- they pointed back upward from where they dropped, maybe longing to be reconnected to that mother-trunk. I remember ice inches thick on cars and we would be stuck in the house for days, logs hissing in the fireplace. This happened numerous times. Maybe I remember the snowfall as higher because I was smaller; maybe the ice-clothing on the trees and the porch seemed more armor-like and thicker because I was young and more easily awe-struck. Today and yesterday, the 30th and 31st of January 2013, it was in the mid-sixties in Washington DC and my sleeves were rolled up and I ate lunch outside in the unexpected warmth and pale light. The trees are still bare. Strangely, three days ago work was delayed because of ice. Three days ago ice did rain down and once again percussed my roof (a different roof, a different habitation, a different ice-pelting than the one earlier thought of) and the wind screamed at my windows and the walls of my house trembled as if their blood too was freezing. The Frost is still in Vinland, but it has changed. And it was never like it was in the Flateyjarbok anyway, because that was all a myth- but what do we know of those dark centuries that came before we were born other than myth? All history is myth and dream.

My memories of the ice storms of my childhood are lies. I am remembering them now decades later and hundreds of miles away, through a mind greatly altered by years and situations. Yet my mythology is my only history, it’s all I have; my memories are my own skin-bound book that tell my fiction, on which one day the final page and end cover will be closed up forever.

So it goes with all of history. In retelling the Norse and Icelandic myths, the Greenland sagas dealing with the discovery of North America (in this first of his Seven Dreams) Vollmann is simply taking the reins from centuries of storytellers and recounting again, as generations have by the fireside, an origin myth. His prose alternates from landscapes painted in overwhelming detail of flora and fauna, Eden-like descriptions of primitive pastorals, where lichen grows like rainbows on stones and grass waves like women’s hair in the wind, and some sad-eyed reindeer disappear over the horizon and a gull screams and circles over indifferent tides,and there a human is lost among the rocks, out hunting- to the vast oblivion of oceanscapes, where sky is no different from sea, and mists roll in from unknown and unseen lands to clothe everything in a dream-vision- to hellish underworlds and rivers of blood carrying worm-eaten corpses pecked at by ravens whose feathers are coated in flesh-filth and walls of snakes drip venom on the unfortunate dead cast there. Oh, there is a wealth of imaginative detail spilling out of the pages of this book; how much of it is Vollmann’s and how much of it comes from the Viking sources I don’t know and frankly don’t care; the experience is all.

Throughout the telling of the Viking-dream, holes are pierced into modern days- Vollmann the author in Greenland, Iceland, the east coast of North America, observing these lands today. A few purposes are served by these sections. One is that the intervening years disintegrate instantly, and we are standing on the ruins of the houses which a moment ago were inhabited by our mythic characters; we feel the centuries in their quick absence, we see how far we have come and how much has been lost. A kind of mysterious sadness pervades these modern sections, as if something abandoned the earth long ago, or as if men’s imaginations have become only more impoverished by the years, or as if in giving up our more wild Shirts and modes of life we have sterilized something about what it is to be viscerally alive and believe in our ability to shift forms (change our fundamental selves) and imbue objects with power (the lifeless technology we are ever more beholden to, which lessens our autonomy) or to have faith in something other than a life of materiality, function, and habits bent toward stale progress (the businessman’s homogenizing garb and dead tongue). Who doesn’t at times feel the urge to take to the road and plunder? Who doesn't long at certain hours to go a-Viking across unknown deadly seas in search of new lands? (Well, the unfortunate answer is “the vast majority of us”)... Which brings me to another function of these brief sojourns to modern times- they illustrate that we haven’t changed that much at all, that we merely repress more, that the extreme violence and chaos (believe me, this book has much extreme violence) of the warrior races of myth is still pulsing through our veins- it just erupts more strangely, less often but in spectacular explosions, in mass killings, in wars hidden from view (so that we might more easily believe ourselves to be civil), in the stylization and sterilization of our banal entertainments that are dishonestly lascivious, in our perversions, in the banal veneer we uphold of the normalcy of our lives that is always and ever anything but normal. We are still kin and relative of these pagan Vikings, we still go a-plundering and bring the Frost-Seed wherever we venture, only the death we bring is in vapid forms- pollution and exploitation of foreign workers and convenient backing of despots when it benefits our bottom line. We don’t tell ourselves honest stories. The stories we tell ourselves now, for the greater part, are lies of gentleness, lies of beauty, lies of heroism, lies of order; at least the sagas of the Vikings recognized our ugliness and brutality and gave them the place they warrant; and when beauty and goodness does bloom in this savage and spellbound tale (Gudrid), it stands out all the more against the background pallor of death, and is thus elevated to its rare and proper place. True beauty comes into fruition at moments when all beauty is under threat.

Much of the earth is wastes of stone and depthless seas.

Vollmann dreams of a first aborted colonization of North America; he dreams of Europeans first coming to America clothed in the mantle of war and armed to the teeth, in search of wealth and set to plunder and manipulate and murder and rape to obtain that wealth; he dreams of a past steeped in blood lying down at Hell’s mouth; he dreams of two sisters, one the thrall of Evil and one the daughter of Good. They are still at each other’s throats, they are still fighting their fates out in our days, in our lives; the Frost-Seed is planted deep in Vinland’s soil; the ice always returns. ...more

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Dec 01, 2013 Lisa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nordic, favorites

How skewed a vision of distance you can develop from looking at our standardized world maps. Geography is such a malleable, unfathomable thing. I can take a beach ball globe of the world, deflate it and make all of the continents touch and overlap and commune with one another. I can spin it around and pick any dot and call it the Centre of the Universe, erase all the political lines we've scarred the landscape with and focus on the dreamy blue of the sea.

Who says the ancient peoples were isolate How skewed a vision of distance you can develop from looking at our standardized world maps. Geography is such a malleable, unfathomable thing. I can take a beach ball globe of the world, deflate it and make all of the continents touch and overlap and commune with one another. I can spin it around and pick any dot and call it the Centre of the Universe, erase all the political lines we've scarred the landscape with and focus on the dreamy blue of the sea.

Who says the ancient peoples were isolated from one another? There are so many islands in the Northern reaches of the Atlantic, with vulnerable human beings plying the unmarked and stormy way from one to the next in frangible wooden ships.

There were islands as numerous as stars, so that men went dreaming from archipelago to constellation, wind-blown and wave-tossed to flowery little coasts where they were deafened by the booming of waterfalls that no one had ever heard before.

One thousand years ago, these wooden playthings were swept far off course and driven to the unknown coasts of a landmass formerly known as Vinland, not once but twice in a decade. Suddenly the distance between two continents is foreshortened and the "discovery" of the Americas in 1492 hardly seems impressive. Greenland was settled, but gradually creeping frost and frigid relations led to its abandonment by white folk. We have records of all these long-ago voyages in medieval saga literature, a window into the lives of those first adventurers. William the Blind draws on The Sagas of the Icelanders to revisit this violent age, when so many men were burnt in their sleep, and weaves in elements of Inuit lore and his own travels to the Arctic. Shunted abruptly to the present time, we look at the same places through the lens of today, but are they really the same? Greenland is colder and bereft of driftwood, rivers braid and change course incessantly, and glaciers bear down on mountains at formidably slow speeds. By revisiting these places, the impermanence of our short human lives is brought into sharp relief.

The meeting of two peoples: the Norsemen (Icelanders, Greenlanders... it is difficult to pin a nationality on people that flit across the map, then as now) and the First Peoples, the Inuit, the Skraeling. William the Blind blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, bringing paint and colour to the lives of historical figures who really did walk this earth. Is it his use of primary sources that makes this story uneven? We are always telling this story from a white person's perspective, and I was hungry for a deeper plunge into the Inuit or Micmac experience of this first encounter, but such is not Vollmann's project. Alas, saga literature is vast and reams have been written about these characters, a mound of riches for Vollmann to excavate. By comparison, much of Inuit lore remains oral history, and the cultural recollection of these millennium-old happenings is scant at best. Another way of knowing the past, insofar as it is possible, is through its material record - and clothing is a recurrent motif. How can we know anything of history that is not superficial? Does clothing really define a person, in the way the bear-kings channelled the power of the beast by donning their bear-shirts?

I know the robes better than the people, for I have seen photographs of the clothing excavated from the frozen graves at Herjolfsness.

But oh, William the Blind, how you drew me in with your worlds of ice. The story came alive for me when Freydis and her wicked heart scaled the craggy heights of Blue-Shirt. The terrifying truth behind the failure of that first settlement, its vivid other-worldliness, the inner frost that chills the core of this novel - my words cannot do justice to the artistic genius behind this first Dream.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Brian rated it it was amazing

“A man is whatever room he is in right now.” - Japanese proverb

“Who do you want to be today?” – Oingo Boingo

William T. Vollmann is going to tell me a story, and he’s going to tell it long. Unlike a Homeric hymn, he’s going to begin at the beginning. He’s warned me that what I am about to read is unreliable. What do I have to lose? Everything.

Am I a product of my environment? Or am I a patchwork of genetic coding, living out the program created by the haphazard joining of thousands of generations ...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Aubrey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1-read-on-hand, reviewed, r-goodreads, 5-star, r-2014

It was all unspeakably grand and beautiful. The world was still being created here.

Let's consider story for a moment. Let's consider the beginning, where belief has not yet turned to mythos and faith is sequestered by time, place, and persona. There is heat, and cold, a micro view of the inevitability of history birthing conflict through contact. Right now, there is the diaspora of culture, centuries of mixing and melding that the modern world can now afford to hazily view as all having occu

It was all unspeakably grand and beautiful. The world was still being created here.

Let's consider story for a moment. Let's consider the beginning, where belief has not yet turned to mythos and faith is sequestered by time, place, and persona. There is heat, and cold, a micro view of the inevitability of history birthing conflict through contact. Right now, there is the diaspora of culture, centuries of mixing and melding that the modern world can now afford to hazily view as all having occurred under a single people, a single label, a single story. Right now, for now, common knowledge has not yet self inoculated with fear of the Other.

Right now is not our now; to know, we must dream.

There's a great deal of fact here, amongst all the 'artistic license' and 'personal experience' and all those other words the realm of objectivity and of effective argument would be caught dead wearing. Effective argument, you say? This is a story, not a debate. Here, we can relax, take off the lens of fact checking and put up our feet on the highly decorated pedestal of Fiction. But sit up for a moment. Take up that mobile unit of comfortable padding, and take off the gilt. There's carving there, for '... carving itself had still some sacredness, as on Thorvald's bench-boards, where the wood-rings and ring-spirals met each other in splendid confusion upon the plain of wooden darkness, so that each bench-board seemed to depict a night-lit boneyard: - the unsprung wood bones of Eirik's grandfathers, frozen in their clatter even though snakes and hoops and vertebrae pierced each other through; and these bones were loam for the new, as figures of birds and warriors sprouted from the wood.'

All of that? A smidgen of fact, and a whole lot of lies. Think back to your nonfiction, with its bibliographical lists (by what means), its accredited writers (how much is that piece of paper really worth), its systematic inclusion and far weightier exclusion throughout the millenia of just what we are willing to do to make ourselves believe. The authors are objective? Better to disprove the concept of entropy. We are calibrated and in turn calibrate, but not that much.

The world-circle was embroidered on it, from Jötunheim to Wineland the Good, so that upon going into his bed King Harald felt as if he were clothing himself in the whole world (for he did not think that that was also what dead men did, when they were covered in earth).

What do the walking dead and Vikings have in common? Along with a burgeoning slice of the entertainment market, a predilection for death, the death, the flesh of humanity cowering in one festering corner and Ragnarök mounting the other. No undead here (or maybe a few, you never can tell), but what with the Inuit and Skraeling, Jenuaq and Norse, Amortortak turned Blue Shirt turned Hel turned, turning, turn. Today's audiences crave a defined mortality, while I desire a thought of women as people, men as people, the Other as people, all crafting a mortality out of their own concourse. Not always nice, these people, but always a history, always a culture, always the ties that bind of their own formation. Never a label.

You have your age old manuscripts, you have your personal interactions, you have the land. Somewhere in there is the winner, the loser, and the blood. The Dream Shirt you'll have to weave on your own.

But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.

...more

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Feb 25, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it

Shelves: vollmann, reviews-4-stars, read-2014, reviews

Prelude to a Review

This book was my first introduction to WTV and means a lot to me personally.

I met my wife, F.M.Sushi, in 1990 and we got married in 1993. She was originally from Hobart in Tasmania, and in 1992 she suggested we go there for a quick trip. It was the first time I'd ever been to Tasmania and she was proud to show me around.

Tasmania is the smallest state in Australia, but it has always had an amazing literary culture. It might be the cold climate that is good for reading in wint ...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Jonathan by: Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

T. S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets.

Still from Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil"

My paternal grandparents owned, for most of my father's life and for all of mine (or at least, until their death in my mid-teens), a slate-roofed cottage deep in the mountains of North Wales. It passed to my father in their will, and only left the family once m ...more

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Jun 04, 2016 Paul rated it really liked it

Shelves: vollman

4.5 stars
The first of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series about the American people, landscape and continent, and about the relationships between Native Americans and those moving to the continent. This novel charts the movement of people of Norse origin to Iceland Greenland and finally to the coast of America. It reads like a saga and Vollmann has used contemporary sources and has drawn from the Heimskringla and especially the Flatyjarbok (a saga from a fourteenth century Icelandic source).
There is 4.5 stars
The first of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series about the American people, landscape and continent, and about the relationships between Native Americans and those moving to the continent. This novel charts the movement of people of Norse origin to Iceland Greenland and finally to the coast of America. It reads like a saga and Vollmann has used contemporary sources and has drawn from the Heimskringla and especially the Flatyjarbok (a saga from a fourteenth century Icelandic source).
There is a certain fantasticalness about it and the New York Times review describes it thus;
“Imagine a performance of Wagner's ''Ring'' cycle directed by Sam Peckinpah, with a new libretto by J. R. R. Tolkien and occasional music by Aaron Copland.”
The saga follows refugees from the Norse lands like Eirik the Red who settled initially in Iceland and focusses on two of his daughters Freydis and Gudrid. There are demons and trolls and lots of magical occurrences but underneath are age-old and modern tensions. The human impetus to explore and to colonise and to spread; the effects on native peoples and tensions between the two. Vollmann indicates that the peoples from the Old World took with them to the new world greed and the will to power and also the frost and ice. He seamlessly weaves together scraps of historical information and narrative fiction and then intersperses it with snapshots of his own experiences of travelling in the areas in question for his research. The end of the novel skates over several hundred years of history and mistreatment of the peoples of the lands. There is a sense of old myth; Cain vs Abel if you will. An unspoilt idyll ruined by those from outside/overseas. It’s possible the arrival of the Norse peoples can be seen as the Fall, original sin. Vollmann does refer to the Norse visits and explorations as the beginning of a process of degradation.
There are lots of references and an extensive glossaries, but the whole is rather effective. One of the things I like about Vollmann, from the limited amount of his work I have read, is the way he looks in difficult places and gives a voice to those who have no voice. I found the ending a little unsatisfactory, but that’s my opinion. However if you like myth and saga this may appeal, but as always with Vollmann there is more to it than meets the eye.

...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Nick Craske rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Imagine an ärkāik, ornate and elaborate mosaic, each intricate facet symbolising a story-fragment of the Greenlander's quest to North America. Twist your imagination further, if you will, and see the mosaic start to turn'n'twist; rotate'n'tumble, shape-shifting in undulating Rubik's transformation.

For therein lies William The Blind's sprawling, Tolklien'esque travelogue; his reshaping, retelling of the Icelandic histories; the medieval Norse sagas and of the Viking's habitation of North America. Imagine an ärkāik, ornate and elaborate mosaic, each intricate facet symbolising a story-fragment of the Greenlander's quest to North America. Twist your imagination further, if you will, and see the mosaic start to turn'n'twist; rotate'n'tumble, shape-shifting in undulating Rubik's transformation.

For therein lies William The Blind's sprawling, Tolklien'esque travelogue; his reshaping, retelling of the Icelandic histories; the medieval Norse sagas and of the Viking's habitation of North America.

The Ice Shirt is a fantastical smelting pot of history and fabulist tale telling writ large; writ epic and panoramic with shifts-in-time from 900 to 1985 in time-twisting moments of travelogue. The landscape comes to life as character; character's lives shape-shift from primal beings to bear, wolf, crow and horse; witches plunder men's hearts and family bloodlines bleed out across the craggy anarchic prose.

It's the first novel in William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams series. As far as I am aware there are a two medieval epics, Erik's Saga and the Graenlendinga Saga which both tell the tale of Viking landings upon Vinland - I've yet to actually read the Greenlander Saga.

Amid the violent flux of shape-shifting story telling, of violent and panoramic landscapes, are two women Greenlanders. Freydis and Gudrid. To quote the inner sleeve jacket:

'Freydis and Gudrid rivalry is implacable. Daughter to The bastard Erik the Red, Freydis wants supreme power in the new country, and will stop at nothing to get it. Some call her a witch. Gudrid is Christian, and so must put distance between her and the shape-changers of the Norse past. Having mastered the art of marrying well, she aches to seize the richest treasures of the land ahead, which shimmers in a perpetual summer of wild grapes. And Freydis is ready to stop her with magic frost'

Freydis and Gudrid's grisly feuds in Norway spill Westward to Iceland and onto Greenland, and stake a territory across the horizon - and into the next volume… Fathers & Crows: the conflicts between French Jesuit missionaries in New France (Canada) and the native Huron and Iroquois peoples in Canada and present-day New York state.

WTV's stylistic reforging of these nomadic Icelandic folk begins with each character's inner dreams and perceptions. Their inner worlds are as rich and visceral as the lithe, grisly and gargantuan landscapes; the tumultuous seas and monolithic mountain sides. Family histories and folklore are woven through disorienting moments of sleep and waking.

WTV's descriptive style of writing paints vivid apocalyptic scenery, sculpted and decorated with intricate character details and projects the narrative across a lush living dreamscape, landscape and historyscape©.

This is a book to climb into, to drink-up, to gorge and feast on; a place to inhabit and revel in.

It's spirited folklore and history interwoven and mingled with epic vistas of beautiful, scraggy violent landscapes; giants, bears, changelings and skraelings, Kings and Queens, brothers and sisters, kinfolk and stranger - all of this swept up in a gushing, tugging, clawing, windswept, screeching elemental saga. Glorious sensory overload...

...onward and Westward into Fathers and Crows. ...more

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Dec 02, 2014 Tony rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: autographed, u-s-lit, seven-dreams

(Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? I say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized.)

Bill asks me this early, on page 9, in the Ice-Text, also known as The Book of Flatey 1382 and also known merely as A Historical Note, which is after the Preface but a bit before 1, THE CHANGERS, or, How the Bear-Shirt was lost, and the Ice-Shirt was found.

But I didn't answer Bill right away. I don't so easily dismiss the self-indulgent, being, well, gen ...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Garima rated it really liked it

Shelves: it-is-ok-to-feel-dumb, my-2-cents, sui-generis, miles-to-go-before-i, channeling-challenge, to-re-read, testing-patience-1-2-3

He was considered a man of foremost reputation. There he stayed for the remainder of his life, telling the story of WINELAND THE GOOD to all who asked to hear it. His listeners marveled at his luck and courage, and said that they had no wish to journey to such places.

However, I’ll continue my journey towards the next dream or Europe Central; or to meet The Royal Family.

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Nov 10, 2013 E. G. rated it it was amazing

Shelves: north-america, own, fiction, 5-star, vollmann, seven-dreams

Preface
List of Maps
Ice-Text: The Book of Flatey (1382)

--The Ice-Shirt

In the Ice (1532-1931)
Note
Orthographic Notes

I Glossary of Personal Names
II Glossary of Dynasties, Races and Monsters
III Glossary of Places
IV Glossary of Texts
V General Glossary

A Chronology of the First Age of Vinland
Sources and a Few Notes
Acknowledgements

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Apr 02, 2013 Larou added it

Among the saga-inspired novels I have been reading for my project, William T. Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt manages to be simultaneously the one closest to the original sagas and the most contemporary one; it also is by far the most original and innovative and promises to be the beginning of an outright masterwork.

The masterwork in question is Seven Dreams, a series of seven novels (four of which having been published as I am writing this) dealing with the encounters between native American Indians a ...more

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Apr 27, 2018 Dax rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Another excellent experience with Vollmann's Seven Dreams series. Majority of this one is in the 4-5 star range, although there are a couple of stretches that go off the deep end into the world of Vollmann's weird imagination. Freydus' venture down Yggdrasil and the short chapter on the history of the Greenland Skraelings were not really to my taste, but those were just short detours.

The history of the Old Kings in the beginning chapter was a lot of fun even though it requires keeping track of ...more

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Nov 14, 2013 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: bedrock, flawless-then-flawed

“Any shirt, be it of ever so many colors, is but a straitjacket, which is why I see no beauty, nor hear of any, except among the the naked. The clouds are as hard as stones, and we all dream one black dream.” Says our narrator William the Blind. Then, after adding that he will now dream seven, he admits this first, The Ice-Shirt, “is no more than a pack of lies”, from which I infer that it is by the blinding of our own serk (shirt) that we believe that the world we see, the “one black dream”, is ...more

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Feb 13, 2016 Cody rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bill-vollmann

The Anytime Ogres...Play Yesterday's Hits!

I’ll admit that for the first 150-pages or so, The Ice Shirt wasn’t doing anything for me. Chalk it up to my inner (read: Teutonic) killjoy: any time ogres and trolls come up, I just check out. There were flashes of brilliance, but I was exasperated by the seemingly endless cataloging of Nordic names and associative deeds, none of which were having any affect on me. It started to feel like, what I imagine, a lot of those fannypackers in the Fantasy ais ...more

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Aug 19, 2021 Kevin Adams rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This Seven Dreams thing WTV has going on is just the best! More on this to come…

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Feb 26, 2020 Sentimental Surrealist rated it really liked it

If you looked at all my Vollmann ratings, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I found all the work of his that I’ve read (dispiritingly little, considering the sheer number of pages this dude has generated) equally satisfying. The fact of it is, I find most of them equal parts compelling and infuriating, for different reasons. If we lay aside the nonfiction Rising Up & Rising Down (the abridged; you know I’d read the 3,000 pager, but I don’t have the estimated $10,000,000 of disposable income If you looked at all my Vollmann ratings, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I found all the work of his that I’ve read (dispiritingly little, considering the sheer number of pages this dude has generated) equally satisfying. The fact of it is, I find most of them equal parts compelling and infuriating, for different reasons. If we lay aside the nonfiction Rising Up & Rising Down (the abridged; you know I’d read the 3,000 pager, but I don’t have the estimated $10,000,000 of disposable income required to buy it), I tend to find Vollmann’s work lacking in either cohesiveness or development. You Bright And Risen Angels had enough thrilling passages to eke its way out of four-star purgatory, but it’s so laden with “is there an editor in the house?” moments that about a third of it was a chore for me to read. On the other hand, both the lengthy Europe Central and even Whores for Gloria (far and away the man’s slimmest work) had pages upon pages that just seemed like more to me. They both have a lot of astute and evocative writing, but Central could’ve probably gotten by as a five, six-hundred pages novel, while Whores made for a fine longer short story.

Yet there’s a lot to recommend about Vollmann. He has a strong sense of the currents of history, plus he can really make a sentence dance. On top of that, he can weave quite a tale, as long as his loom isn’t jammed up. It doesn’t get jammed up at all over the course of this novel, nor do things spin out of control. No, The Ice-Shirt is the tightest Vollmann novel I’ve had the pleasure of reading. And what a story it tells. This novel concerns the first meetings of the Vikings with the indigenous peoples of North America; where all the tragedy with colonialism began, one might say. The bulk of it concerns two big migrations: the movement of Erik the Red (Eirik in the novel) and his supporters, first from Norway to Iceland, and then from Iceland to Greenland. The second part concerns the Vikings’ failed settlement Vinland (New Brunswick to us modern folk). It hones in on the power struggle between Freydis Eiriksdotter (no points for guessing who the Eirik in question is), a pagan, outsider, and all-around badass, and the Christian Gudrid, an ostensibly sweet pillar of the community capable of some serious machinations. The novel’s major subplot features Vollmann (or maybe a fictionalized Vollmann; it’s hard to tell with him) living with some indigineous Greenlanders, whose continued bitterness toward Denmark is understandable given their circumstances.

But Vollmann is Vollmann. He likes to sprinkle a lot into the stew. Sometimes, as in Angels, he ruins the flavor by trying to include a little too much of everything. Here, I’m happy to report the stew tastes good. Vollmann is liberal with the mythology here. It takes Vollmann a while to even get us to Erik the Red, let alone Freydis. Vollmann first treats us to a half-story, half-legend about the ancient kings of Norway, who wore the “bear-shirts” and could allegedly turn into bears. He also gets into a terrifying Greenlandic creation myth that gets into questions of gender identity and power structures. There’s also the late-’80s Greenland timeline. The cool thing is, all of these tie together pretty nicely. The myths have particular resonance as the story goes on; Vollmann being Vollmann, he takes substantial liberties with the history, and some of Freydis’ later actions seem to imply that the Norse and Greenlandic gods had power in this universe. Which is, y’know, really fucking cool, and which lends the proceedings the flavor of myth (helped along by the porse), but which also deepens the story. This is, make no mistake on it, Vollmann’s take on the Norse saga, and he does pretty well for himself.

Am I ready to quite give this five stars? Well, I’d like to leave that door open. I’ve still got quite a few unread Vollmann books on my shelf and on my tablet, and now that black plague 2.0 has us all locked down anyway, I’ve got plenty of reading time. Which is kinda what happens when your nine-to-five follows the school schedule and every school in your home state (metro Detroit goodreaders where ya at) shuts down. So we’ll see. But this is the closest I’ve come to giving a Vollmann book full marks, and it brought my interest in him back big-time, an interest that had flagged over the years. I still have four more of the Seven Dreams to read and he’s still got two to write; I’ll now be awaiting those with the same eagerness that fantasy fans are waiting for the last two Song of Ice and Fire books. I can never quite count this guy out.
...more

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Oct 25, 2014 Amanda rated it it was amazing

4.5 rounded up.

Usually when I give a book 5 stars (or 1 star) I feel the need to justify my reasons. The problem is I don't know why I loved this book so much. I didn't even like it at first. Here's how my reading went:

OMG so excited to start this book!
Part I and II WTF am I reading and why do I care about all these meaningless kings this is a possible DNF
Beginning of part III - Ok this is getting better and making more sense and reading more like a novel.
Halfway in part III - Holy shit this go ...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) added it

My review was erased. Just as well. It would not be fair to give the book a star-rating since in the end it turned out to be not my type of book. Vollmann is a great writer. My own tastes-obsessions are in literary fiction where the interiority of characters and their development are explored. History, and as it turns out historical fiction, fall flat. It is a genre problem for me and is no knock on this writer or book. Obviously, it is very well written and for anyone who is interested in a uni ...more

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Aug 23, 2013 George rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: seven-dreams

Experiencing The Ice-Shirt was like listening to a grandpa tell his stories of an adventure he had traveling through some uncharted, icy lands filled with monsters, warriors, and gods(many, many gods). As a reader of the history you are hooked and believe all the words that are told. WTV can definitely make you believe anything he writes; Of course the Inuits are created from two boys, one turning into a women(this was one of my favorite parts). The comparison to men transitioning into women was ...more

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Sep 15, 2020 sean rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020

The only kind of historical fiction that makes sense to me—a dream grounded in the real. Vollmann's method of storytelling here is classical, oracular, not postmodern or metafictional. I loved The Ice-Shirt for its material qualities as much as its narrative ones: it's a beautiful, chaotic object, cluttered with William The Blind's hastily scribbled maps and portraits that closely resemble Raymond Pettibon's drawings. Its exhaustive indexes, glossaries, and footnotes are of as much importance as ...more

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Dec 17, 2015 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing

The Ice-Shirt is the first Dream/Volume of Vollmann’s “Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes” series. It covers from roughly 200CE to 1430CE, and is primarily concerned with the interactions between the Vikings and the native North American people. It is a combination of historical fiction and myth, weaving together the myriad myths and sagas of the Vikings with the myths of the Inuits and the Mi'kmaws (Micmacs in the book). The subtitle of the series “A Book of North American Landsc ...more

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Aug 08, 2014 Marc Kozak rated it really liked it

Shelves: classics

Don't read this book unless you're prepared to spontaneously grow a beard.

Christopher Columbus and his impeccable PR agency have successfully infiltrated the American consciousness, becoming the name most people immediately think of when asked who first discovered America. However, many have recognized the Norseman Leif Erikson as being the one who first discovered what is now Newfoundland, hundreds of years before Columbus was ever born. Why hasn't Erikson's name become as ubiquitous as Columbu Don't read this book unless you're prepared to spontaneously grow a beard.

Christopher Columbus and his impeccable PR agency have successfully infiltrated the American consciousness, becoming the name most people immediately think of when asked who first discovered America. However, many have recognized the Norseman Leif Erikson as being the one who first discovered what is now Newfoundland, hundreds of years before Columbus was ever born. Why hasn't Erikson's name become as ubiquitous as Columbus? Is it because he technically discovered Canada, and Americans are contractually obligated to view Canada as inferior? MAYBE.

At any rate, this book mixes historical fact with Vollmann-ian fiction, telling epic Norse tales of the times when Christianity and expansion were in, and the belief in gods like Thor and Odin were on the way out. That being said, Vollmann starts off by spending a good deal of time on the mystical aspects of Norse history. In the beginning, Gods roamed the Earth, demons lurked in everyday objects, and great Kings could turn into wolves.

Slowly, the age of Gods transitions into the age of Men. The bulk of The Ice-Shirt tells of Erikson's immediately family, who tried to create the first settlement in this new strange land. The narrative is colored with wonderful imagery -- ice and snow, purples and grays, a world fully alive and realized due to Vollmann interspersing the story with jumps in time to his own travels of the region in 1987. It's an effective technique. Vollmann clearly spent a lot of time in the area where most of these legends reportedly took place, and the story is all the better for it.

Vollmann's reimagining of these legends is great fun, and reads like he's right there with you, sitting by a fire, telling stories of times past, much in the way that people must've told stories back then. His enthusiasm for the subject matter is contagious.

This is essentially Wolf Hall for the Norse time period. If you have any interest at all in that era, or saw Marvel's Thor and thought it was pretty cool, you should definitely check this out. ...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Drew rated it liked it

Shelves: boulder-public-library

Pretty engaging, when it was talking about Freydis and co. in the 1200's, but the 1987 travelogue portions really didn't feel like they had a place, and they distracted from what I considered to be the main story. Also, the ending disappointed; you could call Vollmann a master of anticlimax, and maybe you'd be right...or you could say The Ice-Shirt falls apart at the end. Which I do. ...more

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Jan 13, 2019 Rayroy rated it really liked it

"Will you tell the Museum" I said
He shook his head. "It's better here."
- from the frist dream, The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollman.

...more

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Jul 21, 2020 AB rated it really liked it

My first Vollmann and I have to say Im impressed. I thought the writing and the story good. The saga at the beginning not only drew me in but made me interested in a genre I had little success with in the past. It was with Freydis' trips to see Amortortak, Kluskap, and Hel that I thought the writing was at its peak.

Where the book really shines is with its great depth and structure. It was mesmerizing. There was no part of the book that lacked that quality of research and care. There was so much ...more

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Jun 03, 2018 Aiden Heavilin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

I tend to find William T. Vollmann's writing enjoyable on a visceral, emotional level, lacking the focused intellectual vigor of a writer like Pynchon or Gaddis. His books are explosions of words and images, furious, dissonant jazz solos. I find much of his work enjoyable in the moment, sometimes even blissful, but when I return to analyze it, to say why it is good, I often come up short. And I am left unsure whether this is the sign of a great artist or a bad one.

Vollmann was right to label th

I tend to find William T. Vollmann's writing enjoyable on a visceral, emotional level, lacking the focused intellectual vigor of a writer like Pynchon or Gaddis. His books are explosions of words and images, furious, dissonant jazz solos. I find much of his work enjoyable in the moment, sometimes even blissful, but when I return to analyze it, to say why it is good, I often come up short. And I am left unsure whether this is the sign of a great artist or a bad one.

Vollmann was right to label this book a dream, for it rambles across timelines and histories with the unfocused, erratic nature of a stupefied hallucination. Much of it entertained me, yet it left me unsatisfied at the end. The uncontrolled nature of his writing grows tiring, and in the tide of digressions and tangents, his obsessions with certain characters and events seem less like anchor points than occasional whirlpools. Much of the book concerns Freydis, yet by the end of the book, I felt no more connection to her than the many other Vikings scattered throughout the story.

Ultimately my immersion in the land of Vikings presented here was broken up consistently by Vollmann's choice to sprinkle in strange flash-forwards to 1987, as he, the author, travels across Scandanavia. Returning suddenly to contemporary times destroyed the spell that the story had cast. These 1987 sections are, in my opinion, a disaster, and they nearly ruined the entire book.

If I ignore that terrible decision, I can enjoy certain parts of this book. Freydis's journey to the ice mountain and her journey to the underworld are spectacular, beautifully written, vividly evoked. The nightmarish opening chapters are terrific. But these jewels amount to about a hundred pages, and they are nested in interminable pages of dull conflict between Vikings, repetitive descriptions of ice, and generic medieval battle scenes, not to mention the aforementioned sections set in Modern Scandanavia.

Three stars is generous here. There are some extremely good passages in "The Ice-Shirt", but it is overall a repetitive, rambling, frustrating book that I would not recommend to anyone. ...more

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Mar 28, 2020 Christopher Robinson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-and-kept, favorite-books, very-favorite-novels, read-2020

Here I am, finally, at William T. Vollmann. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to him. I have no good excuses, really, aside from being busy reading other great works by other great writers. But at the time of this writing, I’m 31 years old and the world at large is busy coping with the increasingly out of control COVID-19 situation. I’ve always been highly conscious of my own mortality, but that sense has been amped up as of late. And so, all this in mind, I took a long hard look Here I am, finally, at William T. Vollmann. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to him. I have no good excuses, really, aside from being busy reading other great works by other great writers. But at the time of this writing, I’m 31 years old and the world at large is busy coping with the increasingly out of control COVID-19 situation. I’ve always been highly conscious of my own mortality, but that sense has been amped up as of late. And so, all this in mind, I took a long hard look at my bookshelves, asking myself “if I died soon, what would I regret not having read?” I saw my few Vollmann books, all of them unread, there toward the end of alphabet, those imposing and daunting tomes. I’ve always felt judged by them. And so I felt it was time to give one of his novels a shot, and I picked The Ice-Shirt because it was the smallest of the Vollmanns on my shelves, let’s be real. I figured if it somehow didn’t work for me, at least it wouldn’t take that long.

But it worked for me. Goddamn did it ever work for me. The writing bowled me over. Everything was so vividly rendered as to be hyper-real-seeming, bordering on the surreal. On top of that, there is great poetry on display here. I read many sections aloud to myself just to appreciate the rhythms, the sounds.

Most importantly, perhaps, is to say that I had no real interest in any of this Vikings and Greenlanders and Skrælings and etc. stuff before I started reading this. I’m no great history buff. And so it’s a testament to Vollmann’s abilities that I came out the other side of reading The Ice-Shirt absolutely fascinated by these peoples; by their daily lives and beliefs and egos, by the early explorations, by the first encounters and clashes between North American natives and outsiders... Vollmann managed to make me, a reader indifferent at best toward these subject matters, into a fascinated appreciator. If that’s not the mark of a great writer, I don’t know what is.

All this is just to say: I didn’t expect to love The Ice-Shirt, but I loved The Ice-Shirt. It makes me want to read more of the Dreams and more Vollmann in general. And so I shall.

Recommended. ...more

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Oct 18, 2014 Paula rated it it was amazing

Within these pages, Vollmann has woven a vast, glittering Song of the North. It is a song so eerily stunning, it eludes my abilities to capture in a review. The Song includes the most gorgeous of dreams and the most harrowing of nightmares. It scales the sharpest tip of the highest ice mountain and descends to the coldest, iciest regions of a Hell you won't soon forget. It has joy and it has sadness. It has everything.

Oh, just go ahead and read it. You will probably either love it or end up thr ...more

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May 01, 2008 Eddie Watkins rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-fiction

I've heard Vollman compared to Pynchon, but I don't see it, besides maybe their ambition and their interest in and compassion for marginal people. In style they're worlds apart. Pynchon precise and poetical. Vollman shambolic and sprawling. But I do find it odd that both came out with books relating to Vinland (Vollman directly, Pynchon allusively) at nearly the same time. I find it very odd. ...more

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