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Imperial
From the author of Europe Central , winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.
For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.
1200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
86 people are currently reading
1609 people want to read
About the author
William T. Vollmann
99 books1,456 followersWilliam Tanner Vollmann is an American author, journalist, and essayist known for his ambitious and often unconventional literary works. Born on July 28, 1959, in Los Angeles, California, Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and daring writers of his generation.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
September 13, 2013
Imperial is…
...an entity spreading from Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean eastward to the Colorado River where the Hoover Dam lords over arid America and extending southward down past the border wall into Southside and oblivion beyond the trickling beginnings of the fetid Rio Nuevo and pale mountains purpling in the desert dusk; it is the “center of all secrets, and therefore center of the world”; Imperial is lettucescapes and orangescapes and lemonscapes and grapefruitscapes and onionscapes and cantaloupescapes and broccoliscapes and skeletal twisting vines (as if all the dried bones of the earth were extending from the dirt) swollen at the tip with ripe grapes and the men and women and children beaded with sweat stooping to the earth and rising from the earth with bundles in their soiled hands across all these MONEYscapes; Imperial is the sore back and the puffy eyes and men drinking beer (or shooting heroin) on a bus at 2 am waiting for the frost to melt off the crops so they might begin their stooping and rising, working until it is dark again (by the way, you don’t get paid for the waiting); Imperial is flooding fields to temporarily alleviate over-salinization (the salinity levels are rising anyway); Imperial is two men irrigating hundreds of acres by hand and then wondering if they will even be paid their meagre salary for the that long labor; Imperial is farmland consolidation, dreams of dimes flowing like water, spouting from sprinklers over dusty fields, glinting in the hot sun; WATER IS HERE, THE DESERT DISAPPEARS-MOISTURE MEANS MILLIONS; citrus groves, palm, eucalypti, and roses; the remembered scent of oranges on the hot wind-remembered because lost to the years; Imperial is César Chávez speaking at a farm worker’s rights strike and the police closing in with their batons raised in adrenaline-fueled anticipation (the sheriffs are farm owners too- funny thing that); Imperial is Union-busting laws and cracked skulls and deported activists; Imperial is canals and battles for water and the thievery of water and the pollution of water and the commodification of water and fish dying in the water and diseases born and carried in the water and the agricultural and industrial runoff in the water and the strange neon foam on the water and the water which acts as a poisonous border and must be sealed away in a concrete tomb and the water that smells like decaying flesh and the water Mexicans risk their lives crossing for the privilege of picking broccoli in Northside’s fields for scant dollars a day (I guess we just feel sorry for ‘em); Imperial is the Depression and migrant farmers from dustbowl states being sold a pipe dream; Imperial is naked braceros being sprayed with DDT; Imperial is a fifteen year-old whore making eyes at a grim old man; Imperial is women being murdered in Ciudad Juarez and environs; Imperial is proof by way of a bloody tampon presented to the all-male management of a maquiladora so that the young single woman might keep her job (and even if this is a myth, it speaks of a reality); Imperial is William T Vollmann strapped with surveillance equipment whose covertly stashed and unfortunately warm battery pack is searing his penis while attempting to infiltrate a maquiladora; Imperial is money wasted on incompetent private detectives; Imperial is six thousand metric tons of illegally abandoned lead slag; Imperial is the black cough and acetone-discolored skin; Imperial is prohibited drug ballads, drug fever, the wish to become wind so that we might fly free of the prisons that life erects while we aren’t looking; Imperial is the War on Drugs; Imperial is narcotics convictions, methamphetamines smuggled in body cavities, the long waterless death march across the desert to salvation mountains beyond; Imperial, like everywhere else in the world, is DEATH; Imperial is infinite; Imperial is a series of questions answered by more questions; Imperial is impoverished Indian reservations; Imperial is a dog’s stinking corpse in a gutter in Mexicali; Imperial is garbage blowing down a lonely vacant street in Calexico while the stars stutter and try to illuminate the world in vain; Imperial is a disappeared sea; Imperial is the Salton Sea; Imperial is a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe; Imperial is lost love; Imperial is green, blue, orange, brown, red red red, white; Imperial is Jose Lopez from Jalisco; Imperial is a tunnel beneath a restaurant in Chinesca that once upon a time housed mahjong players and freshly arrived dreamers of better futures; Imperial is exclusion laws and fires burning Chinesca to the ground; Imperial is the vanished American Dream (but like all dreams, it only existed in the dreamer’s slumbering mind, it was never here so it could never really vanish); Imperial is refrigerated soft drinks and air conditioners; Imperial is an eternal stock of orange juice and harvests all winter long; Imperial is the slowly swaying hips of the fat stripper at the Thirteen Negro; Imperial is another five dollar beer; Imperial is a desperate prayer to the Ministry of Capital; Imperial is the browning tips of leaves on dying trees; Imperial is artesian wells ceasing to spout; Imperial is the isolating image of hidden shadow people beneath the bloodorange desert sunset wavering in distant smog, waiting for their time to make the crossing and take their destiny into their own hands; Imperial is working your life away for someone else’s profit; Imperial is Capitalism attempting to reconcile the void; Imperial is skeletons found in the desert never to be named; Imperial is the desert slowly reclaiming its share of nothingness; Imperial is a series of pictures, but a picture is not its color, its form, or its anecdote, but an intent entity idea whose implications transcend any of its parts (Rothko); Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America; Imperial is Mexico; Imperial is America…
~~
I lived with Imperial for about two months. After all that time, it’s hard not to start seeing my world through Imperial’s specific lens- a view that makes clearer and more present in every single day and every single interaction and transaction all those abuses of labor, capital, class, gender, race, privilege (or lack of), education, environment and general power-grubbing that my country is founded on and continues to exploit. As massive and glacially-moving as Imperial is (1300 smallish-print pages, dense endnotes, repetitions and obsessions with phrases and places and numbers and charts and maps and facts and people that eventually take on incantational or symphonic qualities and are utterly delirium-inducing), I was struck by one reviewer’s description of the book as “pointillistic”; but after a brief consideration, I found that to be spot on. Imperial is a mammoth agglomeration of tiny points, pieces, shards, in the form of data, landscape, story, date, incident, name, moment, that when pulled away from and considered as a whole, coheres into a frightening (and absurd) megalith of where my country, and the capitalist model itself, is and where it has gone wrong in the 20th century. It touches on everything we have come to expect from Vollmann and more (the reviewer who makes the argument that Imperial is a summation of Vollmann’s career thus far got it right)- a book that wanders in self-generating ellipses a scorched desert terrain searching and spying out but not really arriving; a book that finds its ends in showing. A book very much about the here and now and all of us alive in the strange reality called the 21st century. If you are new to Vollmann I would not recommend this as your first foray into his world of words; it might baffle, exasperate, and frustrate you with its circuitous monomania (no wonder Vollmann calls this his Moby-Dick- he personifies that ever applicable descriptor of Ahab); but you owe it to yourself as a lover of literature to grapple with him- Vollmann has proven himself an undeniable presence in American letters, and Imperial might be his most vital work.
~~
Over the past weeks I’ve gathered a number of Imperial -related links and images; I’ve added a few new ones with this review (including a longish video of him reading from the book); they hang on steadily below and await you.
~~
“As I said, this book forms itself as it goes. Fields, cemeteries, newspapers, and death certificates beguile and delay me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything; Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its five-dollar-an-hour laborers…The desert is real, as are they, but there is no such place as Imperial; and I, who don’t belong here, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost. This is my life, and I love it. Books are what we want them to be. I am where I want to be, in Paradise. Let me now commence the history of Paradise.”
~~
Vollmann reading from Imperial:
http://fora.tv/2009/08/12/William_T_V...
~~
”Dear William T. Vollmann: Give Us Imperial County Back” (they didn’t read it):
http://www.thefastertimes.com/earthma...
~~
Vollmann, Imperial, and Diebenkorn:
Ocean Park No. 32
Ocean Park No. 116
”Two characteristics of the Ocean Park series, so a monograph informs us, are the hesitant-yet-defining diagonal cutaway and the half-erased boundary. Indeed, Diebenkorn writes, probably from this period, that what I enjoyed almost exclusively, was altering… Thus as his series progresses, doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes more boldly, sometimes more discreetly, subdelineation asserts itself more steadfastly in him than in its object. He enjoys the altering; he’s the William Mulholland of painting in that respect; he works and reworks his images; but his goal, unlike Mulholland’s, remains beyond expression. So, of course, does the “real” universe that we live in and feel. In a pretty essay, John Elderfield describes a typically altered Ocean Park canvas as a visibly imperfect surface that shows signs of its repair. I disagree. For me, Diebenkorn’s surface takes on an ever more “worked” texture until it approaches the infinitude of earth itself.”(pg. 687)
~~
A number of Dorothea Lange's Depression-Era photographs (with captions) of Imperial Valley & environs' migrant farmers- excellent stuff here, but where are all the BROWN PEOPLE?? methinks something is amiss...:
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedsta...
~~
A New York Times article about death in the desert (don't worry, it's short, it'll drain away only minutes from your coveted time posting FACEBOOK UPDATES!:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opi...
From the above article, a link to the Arizona Recovered Human Remains Project:
http://derechoshumanosaz.net/projects...
~~
How can an entity called DETROIT, a harrowing 2,000 miles from our dear IMPERIAL, be so coolly and nonchalantly annexed into the corporate body and belly of our beast?? Read Hadrian's review, and then read IMPERIAL by William T Vollmann, and thusly open your mind up to possibilities of PARALLELS and CORRESPONDENCES between AMERICAN LANDSCAPES-- afterward send a telegram to YOURSTRULY explaining these things to me, for such quandaries leave me baffled and mind-bruised:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
~~
Vollmann stares at Rothko
Four Darks in Red, 1958
Yellow, Blue, and Orange, 1955
Saffron, 1957
"What can I learn from these softly blended rectangles of color within their canvas plots? Is this what life is? Is this what Imperial is? Why and how can it make me feel anything? What were they made of, after all? marvels one collector. A monochrome flat ground and a few blobs of color... These boundaries between color-sectors in each field, I can't quite "understand" them, although when I think about a vacant lot in sight of the international fence, something hot and living but fallow in human terms, something altered most peculiarly by delineation, I can almost put my finger on what Rothko is trying to "say". (He knows the secret of Imperial.)"-pgs. 305-306
~~
The Virgin of Guadalupe (from pg. 148):
"In 1545, the Virgin of Guadalupe halted a typhus epidemic. In 1737, upon being named Patroness of Mexico, she stopped another plague. In 1775 the de Anza Expedition sang a Mass to her and adopted her among their patron saints before setting out to traverse the sands of Imperial. In 1810 a priest raised up her likeness as an icon of independence from Spain. Over the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by whose provisions Mexico lost half her territory to the United States, the Virgin of Guadalupe presided, gazing dreamily down into space. In 1921 she withstood a time bomb. In 1966, in his "Plan de Delano" speech, César Chávez announced that at the head of their penitential cavalcade from Delano to Sacramento, a good two hundred and fifty miles, We carry LA VIRGEN DE LA GUADALUPE, because she is ours. As I write, Mexicans on both sides of the border still rely on her to help them conceive children or cure a fright. A historian of stereotypes gives the following Northside interpretation of the Virgin Mary: As a special pleader for sinners, the Virgin offered confidence in them that they could "beat the rap.""
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The Quarterly Conversation Review of Imperial, Which Contains This Fantastic Concluding Paragraph (With Which The Author Of This (P)Review Happens To Agree Wholeheartedly):
"Many people think Vollmann writes or publishes too much, that he’s sloppy and doesn’t take enough time with his material, that his fascination with poverty and prostitutes and drugs is tasteless. Though I disagree with all of these claims, I’ll still acknowledge that if the page count of Imperial doesn’t scare away many potential readers, the $55 cover price will. [Oh, just wait four years, dear QC reviewer, and you will only be forced to spend a few dear American dollars, just two or three, plus some shipping~cover prices are like produce profits in arid America~fluctuating & unpredictable!] That would be too bad, because Imperial is a book that sustained my interest over the course of two months and that, I feel, is an intense and cohesive summation of Vollmann’s career so far. In it can be seen bits of Poor People, of Riding Toward Everywhere, even bits of the Seven Dreams series, and in a way it contains every thematic element of his prior works, which may in fact be why the “imaginary entity called Imperial” fascinated him so much in the first place. It’s a staggering work." :
http://quarterlyconversation.com/impe...
Mother Jones Interview With William T. Vollmann On His Book, This Book Titled Imperial Which I Am Currently Reading And Accumulating Links&Links About And Around:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009...
Something Lingering Around The Peripheral Borderlands Of Imperial (A Bit Beyond The Horizon But Relevant To AMERICAN LETTERS And Other Such Poorly Delineated Mysteries)- On The Road With Memère, A Mother-Son Bus Trip From Florida To Juarez by Jack Kerouac (Eventually Included In Desolation Angels):
http://holidaymag.wordpress.com/2012/...
A Piece NOT By Vollmann That Should However Be Annexed Into The Boundaries Of That Entity Called Imperial: "Death in the Desert: Is Immigration Reform Killing The American Dream":
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek...
An Author Without Borders:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/boo...
[NYTimes Sunday Book Review]:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/boo...
Moby-Dick in the Desert:
http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/5...
A Review That Attempts To Draw Comparisons To Foucault:
http://southeastreview.org/2010/10/bo...
An Interview With The Brooklyn Rail on Imperial and Imperial Photographs:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/03/e...#
Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs, an Early Excerpt From Imperial in Outside Magazine:
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-...
~~~~
April 14, 2017
Imperial is—
My backyard. Where I grew up. Where I drank beer and smoked pot in the deserts of my youth. Where my father, best friend, and I hitchhiked back after flipping our truck 800-miles from home on a Mexican expedition. Where we paid coyotes money to let us lie in the back of their truck beds, atop stacks of sundry items American’s would call ‘junk,’ and vomited backwards onto the highway for hundreds of miles as they safely took us from town to town. Where I knew true kindness. It is where I contracted dysentery and learned sickness. Where two friends and I shot powerful automatic weapons at a 5-gallon propane tank with a lighted flare taped to it. It is where my friends and I would go to drink in Mexico when we were underage. Where I went to raves on Indian reservations a million years ago and took chemicals that ruined my brain. It is where I kissed the ground. It's where I kissed girls before they were women and before I was a man. It is where a handful of my father’s ashes are left behind. I haven’t been able to return since.
Imperial is—
All of these things. And none. And so much more.
My backyard. Where I grew up. Where I drank beer and smoked pot in the deserts of my youth. Where my father, best friend, and I hitchhiked back after flipping our truck 800-miles from home on a Mexican expedition. Where we paid coyotes money to let us lie in the back of their truck beds, atop stacks of sundry items American’s would call ‘junk,’ and vomited backwards onto the highway for hundreds of miles as they safely took us from town to town. Where I knew true kindness. It is where I contracted dysentery and learned sickness. Where two friends and I shot powerful automatic weapons at a 5-gallon propane tank with a lighted flare taped to it. It is where my friends and I would go to drink in Mexico when we were underage. Where I went to raves on Indian reservations a million years ago and took chemicals that ruined my brain. It is where I kissed the ground. It's where I kissed girls before they were women and before I was a man. It is where a handful of my father’s ashes are left behind. I haven’t been able to return since.
Imperial is—
All of these things. And none. And so much more.
September 8, 2016
An important book, today more than ever. Its wide range and its willingness to explore its own faults and limitations make it even more valuable in our dogmatically inclined age.
A tale of: naivety; greed; hope; corruption; desire; freedom and enslavement; water and salt; capitalism red in tooth and claw; shortsightedness; and lettuce.
José Clemente Orozco - Cortes y la Malinche (1926)
"One of the saddest paintings I know.." WTV
UPWA Striker with California Bracero Program workers in the background, Imperial County, CA 1958
WATER IS HERE
IS WATER HERE?
HERE IS "WATER"?
Mexican migrants crossing the heavily polluted New River in 2005
An update circa 2015 https://www.revealnews.org/article/th...
"Imperial County holds the state record for asthma hospitalizations, with children younger than 5 being the most frequently admitted."
A tale of: naivety; greed; hope; corruption; desire; freedom and enslavement; water and salt; capitalism red in tooth and claw; shortsightedness; and lettuce.
José Clemente Orozco - Cortes y la Malinche (1926)
"One of the saddest paintings I know.." WTV
UPWA Striker with California Bracero Program workers in the background, Imperial County, CA 1958
WATER IS HERE
IS WATER HERE?
HERE IS "WATER"?
Mexican migrants crossing the heavily polluted New River in 2005
An update circa 2015 https://www.revealnews.org/article/th...
"Imperial County holds the state record for asthma hospitalizations, with children younger than 5 being the most frequently admitted."
June 1, 2024
4.5 stars
I feel like I have been reading this behemoth for three years: it’s actually about one year. It has 1127 pages, but with chronology, footnotes, bibliography and acknowledgements my edition reaches 1306 pages. Vollmann likes to be thorough! This is non-fiction and is a close examination of Imperial Valley and Imperial County California with an emphasis on the border. It covers history, geography, economics, industry, farming, entertainment, pollution and it is suffused with stories. The stories of those who live and work there and those who try to cross the border, those who police the border. Vollmann is essentially a journalist (amongst other things) and he does his research meticulously, especially his historical research. He is passionate about what he does: “I write my heart out on everything I do.”
This is multi-layered and mixes myth, history, folklore, fiction and inevitably because it’s Vollmann, reportage. Northside (US) and Southside (Mexico) mythologies are compared. Vollmann also explores the history of the Chinese community and the discrimination it faced. It is an area Vollmann knows well and he writes about it with feeling:
“since this southeast corner of California is so peculiar, enigmatic, sad, beautiful and perfect as it stands, delineation of any sort should be foregone in favor of the recording of ‘pure’ perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or failing that, by reliance on word-pictures: a cityscape of withered palms, white tiles, glaring parking lots, and portico-shaded loungers who watch the boxcars groan by; a cropscape of a rich green basil field, whose fragrance rises up as massively resonant as an organ-chord.”
There is so much in this book and Vollmann goes off on his usual tangents and his writing isn’t to everyone’s taste. This isn’t his longest production (Rising Up and Rising Down at 3326 pages wins that contest up to press). Prior to reading this I knew nothing about Imperial County, but Vollmann also addresses wider issues related to migration, pollution , agriculture and poverty as he goes along.
He talks about the genesis of the project:
“At first, I thought my book was only going to be in Imperial County, and then I realized that there’s a county line that goes right through the Salton Sea, so part of Riverside County is really in this whole area, too. And up there is the Coachella Valley: In Imperial County it’s called the Imperial Valley; across the border it’s called the Mexicali Valley. But it’s all one place and it’s so bizarre to go up and down the border and see on either side of the imaginary line very, very different landscapes. There are places where the US, “Northside,” is just this paradise of hay bales and fields and everything is so green and on the other side it’s just barren, and there are places where the Mexican settlements go right up to the border and on the American side is just dirt. It’s so bizarre, and it makes you think, How can this happen and what does it mean? I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.”
There is a companion volume which contains all the photographs Vollmann took during the ten years he spent writing this.
Vollmann always documents human misery and despair very well and this is no exception when he documents those who are trying to cross the border and those working for very low wages. Those familiar with Vollmann will be aware of some of his obsessions, but for me despite my occasional irritation it is a great achievement, but I suspect with a limited audience.
I feel like I have been reading this behemoth for three years: it’s actually about one year. It has 1127 pages, but with chronology, footnotes, bibliography and acknowledgements my edition reaches 1306 pages. Vollmann likes to be thorough! This is non-fiction and is a close examination of Imperial Valley and Imperial County California with an emphasis on the border. It covers history, geography, economics, industry, farming, entertainment, pollution and it is suffused with stories. The stories of those who live and work there and those who try to cross the border, those who police the border. Vollmann is essentially a journalist (amongst other things) and he does his research meticulously, especially his historical research. He is passionate about what he does: “I write my heart out on everything I do.”
This is multi-layered and mixes myth, history, folklore, fiction and inevitably because it’s Vollmann, reportage. Northside (US) and Southside (Mexico) mythologies are compared. Vollmann also explores the history of the Chinese community and the discrimination it faced. It is an area Vollmann knows well and he writes about it with feeling:
“since this southeast corner of California is so peculiar, enigmatic, sad, beautiful and perfect as it stands, delineation of any sort should be foregone in favor of the recording of ‘pure’ perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or failing that, by reliance on word-pictures: a cityscape of withered palms, white tiles, glaring parking lots, and portico-shaded loungers who watch the boxcars groan by; a cropscape of a rich green basil field, whose fragrance rises up as massively resonant as an organ-chord.”
There is so much in this book and Vollmann goes off on his usual tangents and his writing isn’t to everyone’s taste. This isn’t his longest production (Rising Up and Rising Down at 3326 pages wins that contest up to press). Prior to reading this I knew nothing about Imperial County, but Vollmann also addresses wider issues related to migration, pollution , agriculture and poverty as he goes along.
He talks about the genesis of the project:
“At first, I thought my book was only going to be in Imperial County, and then I realized that there’s a county line that goes right through the Salton Sea, so part of Riverside County is really in this whole area, too. And up there is the Coachella Valley: In Imperial County it’s called the Imperial Valley; across the border it’s called the Mexicali Valley. But it’s all one place and it’s so bizarre to go up and down the border and see on either side of the imaginary line very, very different landscapes. There are places where the US, “Northside,” is just this paradise of hay bales and fields and everything is so green and on the other side it’s just barren, and there are places where the Mexican settlements go right up to the border and on the American side is just dirt. It’s so bizarre, and it makes you think, How can this happen and what does it mean? I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.”
There is a companion volume which contains all the photographs Vollmann took during the ten years he spent writing this.
Vollmann always documents human misery and despair very well and this is no exception when he documents those who are trying to cross the border and those working for very low wages. Those familiar with Vollmann will be aware of some of his obsessions, but for me despite my occasional irritation it is a great achievement, but I suspect with a limited audience.
Read
June 1, 2022A book that's excellent because its author refuses to picture a reader
This book is 1,306 long pages, divided into 13 Parts, with a 24-page bibliography, a 17-page chronology, a list of people Vollmann interviewed, and 112 pages of notes. It is longer than 'Infinite Jest' but shorter than 'The Anatomy of Melancholy.'
I have two sorts of comments. The first are about Part One, 'Introductions,' which is 182 pages long and divided into 12 chapters. I asked myself, as I read Part One, what reasons I might have to continue on and read the other 12 parts of the book, especially because Part One is nearly the length of a small book, and it reads as a coherent, if not unified summary of the 'Imperial' as a whole.
The second set of comments are about what sort of reader Vollmann might have had in mind: who his ideal reader might have been. I don't think he had one, and that's why the book is so good.
1
After Part One, what motivation would a reader have to go on to the other 12 Parts of the book? Aside, that is, from the motivation they might have if they were treating this like James Mitchener's 'Texas' (which is incidentally 16 pages longer than 'Imperial,' a fact that couldn't have escaped Vollmann)? That motivation would be to learn about the history of Imperial County and its politics, sociology, linguistics, botany, geology, and other statistics, all arranged in a palatable fictionalized form. But I am not that interested in Imperial County (it is, as Vollmann knows so well, not exactly a picturesque or relaxing place), and I doubt that in five or seven hundred more pages I might be convinced that Imperial County is a microcosm of the United States -- especially because Vollmann flirts with that idea and rejects it.
Other reasons for reading past Part One? 'Imperial' isn't a novel, and in fact chapter 11 of Part One sets out that argument in a very entertaining fashion, imagining how Flaubert or Steinbeck might have written 'Imperial,' and reminding itself (that is, Vollmann reminds himself) that novels always end up being just what the novelist intended, that they are opportunistically assembled from minor travesties against truth. So if you were to read 'Imperial' in hopes of finding the bleached skeleton of a postmodern 'Moby-Dick' (a comparison Vollmann himself makes, as if just to stave off the inevitable reviewer's remark), you would be reading against the grain. Which is, as Vollmann might say, entirely your business.
A third reason to continue reading past Part One: to find out what new form the author is creating. Vollmann is a master of the postmodern game of authorial awareness, forever talking about the book called 'Imperial' that he hopes, hoped, and still might hope to write, and playing themes and variations with irrelevancies, digressions, apostrophes, and inappropriate but irresistible stories. So people who read Vollmann have to be interested in what kind of books he is producing -- or rather, in what ways his books might be unclassifiable, or how interesting that condition might be. I saw 'Imperial' filed in a university bookstore under 'US History,' but in those first 182 pages he tells us a lot about the 'love of his life' and how it felt to break up with her, and he gives us plenty of evidence of his interest in interviewing unreliable, uninformed, atypical people, whose 'testimony' wouldn't make the cut in any normative history text. (He also tells us about interviews with bigots and people who have suffered, and then he's making points, but I find the dull interviews the best: the ones where the 'informant' says he doesn't know, or isn't sure, or doesn't want to talk.) I like this maximalist aesthetic, but it isn't a reason to read the entire book: in fact if that's what had drawn me to Vollmann, I would happily have stopped after Part One because it so clearly frames the form-breaking ambitions of the book and so usefully samples its major voices and styles.
But I have a fourth reason to continue reading past Part One, even though it also isn't a reason to continue reading all thirteen Parts. His writing is stupendous. His prose is sharp and parsimonious. The writing continuously refreshes itself, and never, in the first 182 pages, feels like it will need the crutches of statistics or long quotations to make it to the thousand-page mark. He looks and thinks with every line. This is not a reason to read the book in its entirety, because it has nothing to do with criteria of unity or coherence, and it doesn't justify the book's exact length: but it does justify the book's relative length.
2
And these are thoughts about Part Eleven, 'Postscripts,' pp. 827-990. This is the second, and last, section of the book I expect to read. I have been wondering -- page by page, while I'm supposed to be paying attention to what he's telling me -- about what he expected his ideal reader to be thinking. And to the extent that I can understand how he imagined that reader, I realize that I won't ever really understand such a person.
One thing an ideal reader is clearly not supposed to be thinking is: This is second-rate reporting, so I'll go and read something by a better investigator. In the chapter on the maquiladores, Vollmann fails, again and again, to get any definitive information. He buys a spy camera, and tells us for pages and pages how it doesn't work; in the end he gets videos, but they are too blurry to be of much use, and he can't transfer them to his computer anyway. Over and over, interviews are inconclusive, and the people he talks to are ill-informed.
An ideal reader is not meant to think: This isn't necessarily a bigger picture, or a more balanced picture: it's just an incomplete picture. So an ideal reader must be meant to be sensitive to some gathering larger truth, one that is accumulates in narrative asides, in intrusions of expressive writing, in the often unaccountable divisions into chapters and numbered sections.
At one point Vollmann writes: 'Like most human records, this account essentially recounts failure.' (p. 905) Well, his ideal reader apparently would take that as poetry, and as an admission of any writer's limitations. But in order for such a reading to happen, it would be important not also to think that things could have been managed better, or that some failures are more partial than others: and how would it be possible not to think along those lines? What notion of maximalist writing can possibly be that capacious, that forgiving? What kind of reader could come across a tightly written story like 'German's Story' (pp. 901-904) and not wonder, in retrospect, about the possibility that there are hundreds of pages of loose, unaffecting, unpersuasive, indulgent maximalist overspill in the pages before it?
In short: I'm baffled when I try to picture Vollmann's concept of his ideal reader, but as the book proceeds I can hardly think of anything else.
On p. 887, Vollmann writes: 'like many other insane people I long to be considered 'balanced.'' 'Imperial' is balanced, in an obvious and respectable way, because he always tries to present both sides of every issue. But so do most journalists. If I think Vollmann is 'insane,' I don't think it's in the way he apparently intends, which is that he's excessive, obsessive, compulsive, and dedicated without limits.
I think he is 'insane' because his enterprise depends on not thinking in any plausible way about any plausibly reflective reader. And that is the best reason of all to keep reading his books, no matter what subjects they're supposedly about.
This book is 1,306 long pages, divided into 13 Parts, with a 24-page bibliography, a 17-page chronology, a list of people Vollmann interviewed, and 112 pages of notes. It is longer than 'Infinite Jest' but shorter than 'The Anatomy of Melancholy.'
I have two sorts of comments. The first are about Part One, 'Introductions,' which is 182 pages long and divided into 12 chapters. I asked myself, as I read Part One, what reasons I might have to continue on and read the other 12 parts of the book, especially because Part One is nearly the length of a small book, and it reads as a coherent, if not unified summary of the 'Imperial' as a whole.
The second set of comments are about what sort of reader Vollmann might have had in mind: who his ideal reader might have been. I don't think he had one, and that's why the book is so good.
1
After Part One, what motivation would a reader have to go on to the other 12 Parts of the book? Aside, that is, from the motivation they might have if they were treating this like James Mitchener's 'Texas' (which is incidentally 16 pages longer than 'Imperial,' a fact that couldn't have escaped Vollmann)? That motivation would be to learn about the history of Imperial County and its politics, sociology, linguistics, botany, geology, and other statistics, all arranged in a palatable fictionalized form. But I am not that interested in Imperial County (it is, as Vollmann knows so well, not exactly a picturesque or relaxing place), and I doubt that in five or seven hundred more pages I might be convinced that Imperial County is a microcosm of the United States -- especially because Vollmann flirts with that idea and rejects it.
Other reasons for reading past Part One? 'Imperial' isn't a novel, and in fact chapter 11 of Part One sets out that argument in a very entertaining fashion, imagining how Flaubert or Steinbeck might have written 'Imperial,' and reminding itself (that is, Vollmann reminds himself) that novels always end up being just what the novelist intended, that they are opportunistically assembled from minor travesties against truth. So if you were to read 'Imperial' in hopes of finding the bleached skeleton of a postmodern 'Moby-Dick' (a comparison Vollmann himself makes, as if just to stave off the inevitable reviewer's remark), you would be reading against the grain. Which is, as Vollmann might say, entirely your business.
A third reason to continue reading past Part One: to find out what new form the author is creating. Vollmann is a master of the postmodern game of authorial awareness, forever talking about the book called 'Imperial' that he hopes, hoped, and still might hope to write, and playing themes and variations with irrelevancies, digressions, apostrophes, and inappropriate but irresistible stories. So people who read Vollmann have to be interested in what kind of books he is producing -- or rather, in what ways his books might be unclassifiable, or how interesting that condition might be. I saw 'Imperial' filed in a university bookstore under 'US History,' but in those first 182 pages he tells us a lot about the 'love of his life' and how it felt to break up with her, and he gives us plenty of evidence of his interest in interviewing unreliable, uninformed, atypical people, whose 'testimony' wouldn't make the cut in any normative history text. (He also tells us about interviews with bigots and people who have suffered, and then he's making points, but I find the dull interviews the best: the ones where the 'informant' says he doesn't know, or isn't sure, or doesn't want to talk.) I like this maximalist aesthetic, but it isn't a reason to read the entire book: in fact if that's what had drawn me to Vollmann, I would happily have stopped after Part One because it so clearly frames the form-breaking ambitions of the book and so usefully samples its major voices and styles.
But I have a fourth reason to continue reading past Part One, even though it also isn't a reason to continue reading all thirteen Parts. His writing is stupendous. His prose is sharp and parsimonious. The writing continuously refreshes itself, and never, in the first 182 pages, feels like it will need the crutches of statistics or long quotations to make it to the thousand-page mark. He looks and thinks with every line. This is not a reason to read the book in its entirety, because it has nothing to do with criteria of unity or coherence, and it doesn't justify the book's exact length: but it does justify the book's relative length.
2
And these are thoughts about Part Eleven, 'Postscripts,' pp. 827-990. This is the second, and last, section of the book I expect to read. I have been wondering -- page by page, while I'm supposed to be paying attention to what he's telling me -- about what he expected his ideal reader to be thinking. And to the extent that I can understand how he imagined that reader, I realize that I won't ever really understand such a person.
One thing an ideal reader is clearly not supposed to be thinking is: This is second-rate reporting, so I'll go and read something by a better investigator. In the chapter on the maquiladores, Vollmann fails, again and again, to get any definitive information. He buys a spy camera, and tells us for pages and pages how it doesn't work; in the end he gets videos, but they are too blurry to be of much use, and he can't transfer them to his computer anyway. Over and over, interviews are inconclusive, and the people he talks to are ill-informed.
An ideal reader is not meant to think: This isn't necessarily a bigger picture, or a more balanced picture: it's just an incomplete picture. So an ideal reader must be meant to be sensitive to some gathering larger truth, one that is accumulates in narrative asides, in intrusions of expressive writing, in the often unaccountable divisions into chapters and numbered sections.
At one point Vollmann writes: 'Like most human records, this account essentially recounts failure.' (p. 905) Well, his ideal reader apparently would take that as poetry, and as an admission of any writer's limitations. But in order for such a reading to happen, it would be important not also to think that things could have been managed better, or that some failures are more partial than others: and how would it be possible not to think along those lines? What notion of maximalist writing can possibly be that capacious, that forgiving? What kind of reader could come across a tightly written story like 'German's Story' (pp. 901-904) and not wonder, in retrospect, about the possibility that there are hundreds of pages of loose, unaffecting, unpersuasive, indulgent maximalist overspill in the pages before it?
In short: I'm baffled when I try to picture Vollmann's concept of his ideal reader, but as the book proceeds I can hardly think of anything else.
On p. 887, Vollmann writes: 'like many other insane people I long to be considered 'balanced.'' 'Imperial' is balanced, in an obvious and respectable way, because he always tries to present both sides of every issue. But so do most journalists. If I think Vollmann is 'insane,' I don't think it's in the way he apparently intends, which is that he's excessive, obsessive, compulsive, and dedicated without limits.
I think he is 'insane' because his enterprise depends on not thinking in any plausible way about any plausibly reflective reader. And that is the best reason of all to keep reading his books, no matter what subjects they're supposedly about.
Read
October 8, 2014What is this entity called Imperial? I don’t know. I have never visited, except for a few afternoons spent in the nearby gardens of the Stone brewery. But I have spent some time with an entity called Imperial. What is Imperial? It is immense. Let us count up its size. One thousand three hundred and six pages is she. Of that number, eleven hundred and twenty five pages constitute the main narrative portion of our book. 208 chapters, all told. You will be pleased to know that chapter 208 is entitled “The Conquest of Arid America” (It’s progressing along real nice!) Those chapters are organized into thirteen (.13.) Parts (Introductions -- Outlines -- Revisions -- Footnotes -- Elaborations -- Subplots -- Contradictions -- Reservations -- Climaxes -- Dissolutions -- Postscripts -- Definitions -- Inscriptions). So, you see, in its entirety, the entity called Imperial is the saga-like or even EPIC-like rise and fall of the entity known as Imperial. And she persists even unto this day!
The remaining 179 pages (my approximation) constitute the always never-to-be-ignored backmatter. These pages may be read with pleasure. They can of course be ignored. Just like the remainder of this paragraph.
I hope you didn’t click that (spoiler) because all you really need to know about what matters re: the SIZE of the Entity called Imperial is that through the course of time Vollmann was working upon this Entity (1999-2009) he also saw through to publication the following :: a whore book (The Royal Family), a war novel (Europe Central), a Dream (Argall), a study of the question of the justification of violence (Rising Up and Rising Down), a thing about Copernicus, his book Poor People, and his rail-riding Riding Toward Everywhere.
So why all this blather about SIZE? Well, that’s the aspect of the work which will be most familiar to most people already and which might be the extent of their knowledge. Seeing its 2 & 3/8 inch (6.1 cm) spine on the shelf and hefting its 3 lb 13.8 oz (1752g) heft. Because THE DESERT DISAPPEARS!
And also because, whether we are dealing with a nonfiction EPIC/SAGA or with a fictional historical novel, there are always the two sides : Just the facts, ma’am! and, Tell me a story! Imperial will provide both for your satisfaction. What it won’t do is make either side nice and tidy and wrapped up with a bow. THE DESERT REAPPEARS! This Review, however, is incredibly one sided in being Just the facts, ma’am!
I just deleted the remaining six pages or so of this review because (a) it was nothing but preaching and ranting at a level beyond my ken. Really what you need to know is that Oil disappears! and WATER IS HERE will become (already!) the source of major contention within the arena of global politics in the years to come. And (b) because I was starting to talk too much about myself (The Reviewer) in a too personal kind of way. Know only that I, like many of you certainly, live and have lived in a region of our globe which exhibits many of the same aspects and characteristics which make Imperial the kind of Entity it is. What is at stake in Imperial is also at stake in the future and past of the lives of many (all?) of our communities. And (c) I identified Vollmann’s flaw (because every writer and every book is FLAWED!) insofar as he is a visual writer, writing from photographs and from landscapes, while I am not a visual reader.
When you read the entity we cherish as Imperial, know too that she is accompanied by another Imperial which contains Vollmann’s art, I mean his visual art. It’s really something, this pair, this SAGA, this EPIC, this ESSAY.
The remaining 179 pages (my approximation) constitute the always never-to-be-ignored backmatter. These pages may be read with pleasure. They can of course be ignored. Just like the remainder of this paragraph.
I hope you didn’t click that (spoiler) because all you really need to know about what matters re: the SIZE of the Entity called Imperial is that through the course of time Vollmann was working upon this Entity (1999-2009) he also saw through to publication the following :: a whore book (The Royal Family), a war novel (Europe Central), a Dream (Argall), a study of the question of the justification of violence (Rising Up and Rising Down), a thing about Copernicus, his book Poor People, and his rail-riding Riding Toward Everywhere.
So why all this blather about SIZE? Well, that’s the aspect of the work which will be most familiar to most people already and which might be the extent of their knowledge. Seeing its 2 & 3/8 inch (6.1 cm) spine on the shelf and hefting its 3 lb 13.8 oz (1752g) heft. Because THE DESERT DISAPPEARS!
And also because, whether we are dealing with a nonfiction EPIC/SAGA or with a fictional historical novel, there are always the two sides : Just the facts, ma’am! and, Tell me a story! Imperial will provide both for your satisfaction. What it won’t do is make either side nice and tidy and wrapped up with a bow. THE DESERT REAPPEARS! This Review, however, is incredibly one sided in being Just the facts, ma’am!
I just deleted the remaining six pages or so of this review because (a) it was nothing but preaching and ranting at a level beyond my ken. Really what you need to know is that Oil disappears! and WATER IS HERE will become (already!) the source of major contention within the arena of global politics in the years to come. And (b) because I was starting to talk too much about myself (The Reviewer) in a too personal kind of way. Know only that I, like many of you certainly, live and have lived in a region of our globe which exhibits many of the same aspects and characteristics which make Imperial the kind of Entity it is. What is at stake in Imperial is also at stake in the future and past of the lives of many (all?) of our communities. And (c) I identified Vollmann’s flaw (because every writer and every book is FLAWED!) insofar as he is a visual writer, writing from photographs and from landscapes, while I am not a visual reader.
When you read the entity we cherish as Imperial, know too that she is accompanied by another Imperial which contains Vollmann’s art, I mean his visual art. It’s really something, this pair, this SAGA, this EPIC, this ESSAY.
February 7, 2017
Maps
Brief Glossary
--Imperial
Concerning the Maps
Bibliography
Credits
Acknowledgments
(To reduce the price and bulk of this paperback edition, the author agreed to omit most of the endmatter that appeared in the hardcover edition. Readers curious about those sections---"A Chronology of Imperial," "Sources," and "Persons Interviewed"---should visit www.penguin.com/imperial)
Brief Glossary
--Imperial
Concerning the Maps
Bibliography
Credits
Acknowledgments
(To reduce the price and bulk of this paperback edition, the author agreed to omit most of the endmatter that appeared in the hardcover edition. Readers curious about those sections---"A Chronology of Imperial," "Sources," and "Persons Interviewed"---should visit www.penguin.com/imperial)
November 9, 2015
Imperial happens to be a county wherein two crises of the 21st century are playing out: illegal border crossings and dire water shortages. Vollmann's copious, sprawling, ingeniously crafted text explores these crises in the way fireworks explore the night sky.
Officially, Imperial is about "immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation", and I admit, living in California makes me a prime target for these hot-button issues...although, having read Europe Central, it wasn't going to take much to lure me into another book by William T. Vollmann. But it wasn't the subject matter itself that kept me reading. What did engage me for all 1,344 pages was the variety and playfulness of the author's approaches to the subject matter.
What can be said about a once-arid, now-prosperous piece of land on the Mexican border? Obviously, mucho!
The book follows the money over the last century. Here's the plot: the growers get richer, the farmers get mortgages, the workers get poorer. The book follows the water, too. The Colorado River can be diverted to irrigate our land! We can line the American Canal so no water is wasted! As water becomes scarcer and scarcer, the hired pickers must pay for a cup of agua.
Vollmann plucks lines from tycoons in the early years and throws them in repeatedly for the sake of irony: “We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by” and "He sold out at a fancy price" and most cringe-worthy, "WATER IS HERE."
In addition to parodies and other forms of satire, Vollmann assembles prices and wages into little stories he calls "statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, et cetera....Some may be too desiccated for your taste. If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors. As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.”
I'm already too long at this review, but there are so many ways the author entertains the reader...and himself. In one extraordinary chapter, he plays with the idea of comparing Imperial's fields to Mark Rothko's paintings. He bemoans the obscurity of abstract art, but when he thinks about "a vacant lot in sight of the international fence, something hot and living but fallow in human terms, something altered most peculiarly by delineation, I can almost put my finger on what Rothko is trying to 'say.'”
He studies newspaper clippings, official records, promotional materials. He likes to interpret old photos and bills of sale. I picture him surrounded by all these papers, then fitting everything together in his unique, subjective, empathetic, creative way.
"Upon Imperial’s blankness, which might as well be a light table, it becomes all too easy to project myself, which is a way of discovering nothing."
The book is most riveting when Vollmann inserts himself as a character into his story.
In order “to film the groping of women” at Mexican factories, he first buys ("Now I could understand why the Pentagon sometimes paid six hundred dollars for a toilet seat.") and then secrets a spy camera on his body. In another fascinating part of the narrative, he and a female companion are detained at the border for seven hours due to unjustified suspicions about his friend. During this time he is not allowed "to comfort her" or even use a pencil and paper, by border guards with whom he once sympathized and now comes to hate.
Vollmann spent ten years researching this project, during which time he interacted with many persons on their turf. He boards a Greyhound bus in order to sit next to a man being deported. He invites prostitutes into his hotel room to tell him the words to popular prohibited ballads about drug lords. He climbs into a taxi in Imperial Southside and rides around at night with "the taxi driver and Juan the cokehead". Here is a moment they share:
“Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a solo [one trying to cross border alone]. Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise, because the water belongs to America, as Juan put it."
Officially, Imperial is about "immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation", and I admit, living in California makes me a prime target for these hot-button issues...although, having read Europe Central, it wasn't going to take much to lure me into another book by William T. Vollmann. But it wasn't the subject matter itself that kept me reading. What did engage me for all 1,344 pages was the variety and playfulness of the author's approaches to the subject matter.
What can be said about a once-arid, now-prosperous piece of land on the Mexican border? Obviously, mucho!
The book follows the money over the last century. Here's the plot: the growers get richer, the farmers get mortgages, the workers get poorer. The book follows the water, too. The Colorado River can be diverted to irrigate our land! We can line the American Canal so no water is wasted! As water becomes scarcer and scarcer, the hired pickers must pay for a cup of agua.
Vollmann plucks lines from tycoons in the early years and throws them in repeatedly for the sake of irony: “We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by” and "He sold out at a fancy price" and most cringe-worthy, "WATER IS HERE."
In addition to parodies and other forms of satire, Vollmann assembles prices and wages into little stories he calls "statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, et cetera....Some may be too desiccated for your taste. If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors. As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.”
I'm already too long at this review, but there are so many ways the author entertains the reader...and himself. In one extraordinary chapter, he plays with the idea of comparing Imperial's fields to Mark Rothko's paintings. He bemoans the obscurity of abstract art, but when he thinks about "a vacant lot in sight of the international fence, something hot and living but fallow in human terms, something altered most peculiarly by delineation, I can almost put my finger on what Rothko is trying to 'say.'”
He studies newspaper clippings, official records, promotional materials. He likes to interpret old photos and bills of sale. I picture him surrounded by all these papers, then fitting everything together in his unique, subjective, empathetic, creative way.
"Upon Imperial’s blankness, which might as well be a light table, it becomes all too easy to project myself, which is a way of discovering nothing."
The book is most riveting when Vollmann inserts himself as a character into his story.
In order “to film the groping of women” at Mexican factories, he first buys ("Now I could understand why the Pentagon sometimes paid six hundred dollars for a toilet seat.") and then secrets a spy camera on his body. In another fascinating part of the narrative, he and a female companion are detained at the border for seven hours due to unjustified suspicions about his friend. During this time he is not allowed "to comfort her" or even use a pencil and paper, by border guards with whom he once sympathized and now comes to hate.
Vollmann spent ten years researching this project, during which time he interacted with many persons on their turf. He boards a Greyhound bus in order to sit next to a man being deported. He invites prostitutes into his hotel room to tell him the words to popular prohibited ballads about drug lords. He climbs into a taxi in Imperial Southside and rides around at night with "the taxi driver and Juan the cokehead". Here is a moment they share:
“Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a solo [one trying to cross border alone]. Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise, because the water belongs to America, as Juan put it."
April 1, 2012
I did a bit of checking around, and the first several professional reviews I read for "Imperial" were pretty negative--and for what I thought were pretty lame reasons. For sure William T. Vollmann's tome is fragmented and lays down a circuitous narrative from start to finish, but his meandering, idiosyncratic, almost pointless story that slowly unravels like a song about doomed love is exactly what makes "Imperial" so compelling and readable. (And I just read somewhere that the best writing should have no point.) To the detractors of Vollmann's tome I'll say I don't think "Imperial" is meant to be taken as journalism or non-fiction or biography or any kind of linear narrative. It's a messy and fractured hybrid of non-fiction, self-involved memoir and repetitive imagistic history among other things. This is his personal understanding of, as he repeats throughout his book, the "entity" he calls Imperial. Which raises the question, how do any of us relate to a landscape?
Western civilization seems to present only two options: we control the land or it controls us. Vollmann, as he depicts man's scheming, presents the landscape of the Imperial Valley as a vanquished object: originally a desert, then by the miracle of irrigation, it became a veritable garden paradise, or so the original Imperial Valley "boosters"wished it to be. For Vollmann, man's relationship to land--and we are talking about men here--is one of utility and the hubris that that relationship necessarily requires. To this Vollmann ads a second dualism: Imperial exists simultaneously as real and existing in the imagination. But, as if echoing Lacan's vague idea of the real and the imaginary, the physical reality of Imperial is reproduced here wholly in terms of Vollmann's idiosyncratic experience of the place (an experience that he himself seems at times mournfully bewildered by)--the least of which touches on an objective account of its physical geology. And this too is rendered like a palimpsest--history, journalism, geography, written one over the other, forever receding from any fixed narrative. This is not to say that Vollmann dispenses with descriptions of the landscape and its prominent features (such as the Salton Sea, Signal Mountain, the US/Mexican border--a literal wall), but his understanding of Imperial is bound mostly to his own emotional attachment to the place, one that is equally bound to history and myth, flitting like a bat between fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed, "Imperial" has the feel of a novel most of the time. Towards the end of this 1161 page book Vollmann writes, "WATER IS HERE. None of this makes any difference. Nothing can touch this marriage of land and sky, of heat and salt, this hammer and anvil, this procreating couple whose only child is a plain which unlike a rainforest, an empire or a work of art can outlast anything the planet itself can, anything, even human beings, even water or waterlessness; and if, God forbid, Imperial does someday get riddled with cities, its character will remain almost unaffected; it will go on and on, true to itself, long after such temporary superficialities as the 'U.S.A.' and 'Mexico' have become as washed out as old neon hotel signs in the searing daylight of Indio."
At one time the Imperial Valley was one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the world. Now, the desert is returning. Perhaps a useful way to think of this long, mesmerizing, beautiful, ugly, frustrating book is as a Zen Buddhist koan: paradoxical, contradictory, circular--offering some hint of a clue into the dark puzzle of the world where the desert basin represents the mind and body empty of desire. In Vollmann's book, the modern history of the Imperial Valley is revealed not so much as an examination of man's folly, but more like a long meditation on impermanence.
Western civilization seems to present only two options: we control the land or it controls us. Vollmann, as he depicts man's scheming, presents the landscape of the Imperial Valley as a vanquished object: originally a desert, then by the miracle of irrigation, it became a veritable garden paradise, or so the original Imperial Valley "boosters"wished it to be. For Vollmann, man's relationship to land--and we are talking about men here--is one of utility and the hubris that that relationship necessarily requires. To this Vollmann ads a second dualism: Imperial exists simultaneously as real and existing in the imagination. But, as if echoing Lacan's vague idea of the real and the imaginary, the physical reality of Imperial is reproduced here wholly in terms of Vollmann's idiosyncratic experience of the place (an experience that he himself seems at times mournfully bewildered by)--the least of which touches on an objective account of its physical geology. And this too is rendered like a palimpsest--history, journalism, geography, written one over the other, forever receding from any fixed narrative. This is not to say that Vollmann dispenses with descriptions of the landscape and its prominent features (such as the Salton Sea, Signal Mountain, the US/Mexican border--a literal wall), but his understanding of Imperial is bound mostly to his own emotional attachment to the place, one that is equally bound to history and myth, flitting like a bat between fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed, "Imperial" has the feel of a novel most of the time. Towards the end of this 1161 page book Vollmann writes, "WATER IS HERE. None of this makes any difference. Nothing can touch this marriage of land and sky, of heat and salt, this hammer and anvil, this procreating couple whose only child is a plain which unlike a rainforest, an empire or a work of art can outlast anything the planet itself can, anything, even human beings, even water or waterlessness; and if, God forbid, Imperial does someday get riddled with cities, its character will remain almost unaffected; it will go on and on, true to itself, long after such temporary superficialities as the 'U.S.A.' and 'Mexico' have become as washed out as old neon hotel signs in the searing daylight of Indio."
At one time the Imperial Valley was one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the world. Now, the desert is returning. Perhaps a useful way to think of this long, mesmerizing, beautiful, ugly, frustrating book is as a Zen Buddhist koan: paradoxical, contradictory, circular--offering some hint of a clue into the dark puzzle of the world where the desert basin represents the mind and body empty of desire. In Vollmann's book, the modern history of the Imperial Valley is revealed not so much as an examination of man's folly, but more like a long meditation on impermanence.
November 12, 2019
Every now and then I might get macho about reading a really BIG book. But that's not why I started this one, I swear it. I just wanted to read any book at all by Vollmann, because I kept coming across his prose in magazines or excerpts or whatever, and it's always golden to me. I could have chosen a thinner book -- for instance, every other book by him is thinner -- but I also have a passing interest in the fucked-up ecosystem/economy/history of the Salton Sea region, which lies within this book's target area of Imperial County. Though really this book is focused slightly farther south, on Mexicali and Calexico and Holtville and El Centro and all of the other tiny rural spots that have blossomed, sparkled and faded over the last hundred years of westward expansion into this inhospitably hot, border-bisected desert region that Vollman calls "Imperial". Also, the stretch of history the book encompasses is long enough that the accidental birth and agonizing slow death of the Salton Sea are just blips. But to know that, I had to read the whole thing. Oops.
But it's such a handsome hardback. It feels good in the hands. Reading it, I got to luxuriate in all the great features of real-live-paper-books: sprawling two-page map spreads, changes in typeface to indicate the voices of long-expired newspaper advertisements, plenty footnotes and tables and photos and fonts -- none of it gratuitous, either. Bill Vollmann pulled out every trick to enliven this project: describing this region from every angle he can reach, indulging his fascination with it, and trying to make the resulting tome seem organized, cogent and vibrant instead of just a sprawling, repetitive 1300-page mess.
My one sentence review, incidentally, would be "a sprawling, repetitive 1300-page mess that is nevertheless surprisingly organized, cogent and vibrant!" But don't read that yet. I could have just typed that and been done with this review but I'm not there yet. This book has collected dust on my desk, just under my monitor, for half a year, after crouching like a cat by the dinner table on a stack of books on the floor next to the same desk for the previous half-year, all the while with the photo of the rough & ready immigrant laborer on the cover staring up at me to remind me that I really do need to say something about this book on Goodreads before I pass it on to the next reader.
And it's not even about the book's contents that I want to write. Which doesn't seem fair because I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. In fact, Vollmann's special talent here is to keep the reader interested even in the dryest, most tedious of his historic sources -- like, literally, tables of census data and farm statistics. In fact, much of the book is short chapters of Vollmann saying: "I'm in a library looking at a table in an old, dusty book (insert descriptions of the book, the paper, the snotty librarian, etc), which lists the number of orange trees in Imperial County in 1782, and I'm imagining myself sitting under one of these trees and eating all the oranges (insert obscenely sensuous description of orange-eating) while dreaming of the future prosperity of my offspring, little suspecting that everything I hold dear is balanced on a thin blade of ice that's melting and/or floating on a shallow lake that's drying out and/or about to be taken away from me by lawyers via some other ominous metaphor ..."
In other words, it's deeply romantic. It's so romantic, in fact, that the entire thing could perhaps be taken as a metaphor for the breakup Vollmann describes in a single chapter about 9% of the way into the book. But the book is not really that story, or his story, or any one story. Instead it's a deeply romantic comprehensive history of this particular region, composed of hundreds of stories of residents and visitors past and present, adding up to the big story of California: irrigation, water in the desert, the Gardens of Eden that the Canal promised, all the people who had faith in that vision and came West to tend that garden -- each of them promised an equal-sized plot of arable land in a great grid of pre-fab prairie Democracy -- and how, in just a few generations, said garden evolved into, if not Hell, then at least Southern California. It's the history of a certain beautiful, antique silly Western dream, and Vollmann dreams it himself, too, just to get inside it, even though he can't really believe in it.
A large middle part of the book is concerned with the city of Mexicali, Mexico, built by Chinese immigrants & repossessed by the Mexican government, home to a kind of Mexican-Chinese culture all its own. Much of it is drawn from articles and advertisments in old newspapers, all repeating the agro-utopian salespitch that brought farmers here from all over the world. Much of it is descriptions of old photographs in those same sources: those salesmen, those farmers, those plots, those diggers of the canal that made it all work, those farmworkers who toiled for those farmers, those financiers and speculators and distributors for whom those farmers toiled -- and after whom the towns were all named.
And, and, and ... you know, I could probably spend the digital equivalent of ten pages summarizing this 1300 page book, but would that make you want to read it, or would it just help you feel okay about skipping it? I don't know. I do know this, though, and this is the point of my review:
Carrying around a four-pound book was a colossal pain in the ass! For three months of my life it was the largest, bulkiest thing on my person. For three months the shoulder strap of my bag dug into my neck, and the corners of the book bounced around on my right kidney when I biked with it. I hadn't had such backpack-blisters since high school, when I had to carry AP Chemistry and Oh, Pascal! to school and back every day ... but at least then I got weekends off! This time, it was constant; I took it everywhere, always, as part of last year's self-improvement project of spending my spare moments in Book-books instead of on Facebooks. In fact I spent some of those three months in Alaska, where I dutifully carried IMPERIAL in my backpack along with tent and sleeping bag and food and clothing and other awkward, bulky, die-without-it items. After each long day of lugging four pounds of William T. Vollmann's brains around in the humid heat, by the time I was finished staking my tent and hyperventilating into my sleeping pad I found myself too damn exhausted to read it! And each time I took this book out of my backpack, and especially every time I struggled to cram it back in, I thought long and hard about Nooks and Kindles and iPads and the lightweight, durable Future Of Reading that they promise.
Because the modern promise of e-books is suspiciously similar in utopian flavor to the hundred-year-old promise of water in the desert. I mean ... hang on, yes, sorry, I do recognize the gap in profundity between dying of famine and not having anything interesting to read. Please stop throwing fruit. But my point is, they're both sales pitches. What Amazon promises readers is what the Imperial boosters promised farmers: a new, better system in which everybody is happier, everything is easier, wealth is shared, and your feedback is important to us.
I have a Kindle. It's light, it's thin, it's digital, and I could have brought it to Alaska instead of bringing the historically pertinent boat anchor called IMPERIAL. But I couldn't have read IMPERIAL on the Kindle. It is "not available on this platform," presumably because the Kindle platform is unable to transmit or encode any of those features of books collectively known as Book Design; it offers only two fonts, only one width of page, a very limited palette of possibilities. IMPERIAL uses book design exquisitely: the aforementioned fonts, illos, footnotes, structures, spreads, maps, et cetera, plus other subtleties I might not even have noticed consciously. The book employs all of it heavily, to great and necessary ends. It's the perfect example of what you can't do on a Kindle, or on a Nook. Maybe on an iPad you could offer something like the original layout; you could even approximate the quixotic structure -- chapters, sections, dates, locations, 'deliniations', 'subdeliniations', 'reprises', and on and on, plus a massive bibliography with its own internal story structure -- in some kind of hypertext TOC, and call that an improvement. But I suspect that e-book would be a pixelly, crunchy, blinky approximation, just enough of a blurry photocopy of the real thing to remind the e-book reader what they're missing.
If you'd asked me before I read IMPERIAL how I felt about e-books, I would have said that I'm not drawn to them, but on the other hand they're sure nifty gadgets: thin, light, wireless, encrusted with delicious clicky buttons and suggestive access ports. They've got an obvious niche: mountain climbers, touring musicians, the elderly, gluttonous readers of disposable romance/western/self-help/bizarro paperbacks ... I wouldn't have said I love them, but I wouldn't have said that I dislike them either.
But it turns out that I really dislike e-books. How much don't I like them? I don't like them so much, I chose to drag this albatross of a cinderblock of a doorstop of a book around with me everywhere I went for three months, instead of using the e-book reader I already own to read one of the e-books that is apparently already waiting inside for me to read it. Thank you Mr. Vollmann, for bringing me this insight.
And I guess that's the point: I love that this book is hard. I love that it's huge and awkward, and that all its major structural indications add up to a sly wink from Vollmann to convey "let's just pretend that I organized this mess, okay?" I love its weird font changes -- even though that sort of thing is almost always annoying, almost universally the sign of a rank amateur who should never have been left alone with a copy of InDesign, let alone given access to Print-On-Demand. I guess I'm just a fan of Vollmann, but also I guess I spent enough time alternately enjoying this book's content and being exasperated by its form -- and then, at times, vise versa -- that I'm over the question of is it good or not, would I recommend it to a friend ... how may stars? Instead I just remember the journey itself, the time I spent with it on the ferry, the time I spent with it at the coffee shop, or in the big chair in the living room, or on a boat in the Sacramento Delta. I remember how, even though I often lost track of the point and questioned whether I really cared that much about Southern California history at all, I was rarely bored, usually amused, often touched ... because Bill Vollmann.
And also, I love it as an object, as a fetish, as a rectangular glue-and-paper thing. I love that its full color dust jacket is scraped and torn at the upper right corner from rough handling, such that along the edge of a tiny half-centimeter rip the glossy plastic top layer is just barely starting to peel from the white paper underneath, and it appears that the cover photograph, of a lone migrant farmer posed by an empty dust road across from a field of blurry crops underneath a blue-white sky, is actually embedded in that plastic top layer of the book cover rather than the paper beneath, such that the peeling-away plastic is sky blue and transluscent, while the paper layer it's splitting from is a rough, fiberous white, suggestive of exactly the kind of raincloud that everyone in Imperial County would love to see in exactly that corner of sky but never, ever will. I love that on the back cover the ISBN number is covered by one of Powell's Books' store labels, and that the store label seems to have absorbed all the grit and sweat and bag-filth that the glossy dust jacket has successfully repelled, so that it looks like a filthy, humble thing clinging to the skirt of a much larger, grander thing, like the intrusion of farmland reality into the fantasy of Imperial real estate. I love the back-flap photo of Bill Vollmann, and the way that he's exactly the same kind of ugly that Elliot Smith was, and how, in just the same way, once you've listened to him enough, that ugliness becomes your new version of beautiful. I even love that there is a digital theft-preventing tracker chip hidden behind that back flap, pasted to the inside of the back cover like a band-aid -- because really, what idiot would shoplift this of all fucking enormous, hard-to-sell books? How would you even do that? Stuff it down your pants? You could be crippled for life! The hardback of IMPERIAL borders on that "too large" size, the size where the very technology of books start to break down, where books get too heavy, too awkward, too difficult to construct, too easy to accidentally split in half, where the human talent for remembering the three-dimensional location of some information -- "that quote, I remember it was on the left side, 1/3 of the way down, somewhere in the last hundred pages" -- starts to get lost in the thickness. It's the sort of thing people are always telling me that people don't make any more. It's anti-futuristic. There's no money in it. Please, give me more.
But it's such a handsome hardback. It feels good in the hands. Reading it, I got to luxuriate in all the great features of real-live-paper-books: sprawling two-page map spreads, changes in typeface to indicate the voices of long-expired newspaper advertisements, plenty footnotes and tables and photos and fonts -- none of it gratuitous, either. Bill Vollmann pulled out every trick to enliven this project: describing this region from every angle he can reach, indulging his fascination with it, and trying to make the resulting tome seem organized, cogent and vibrant instead of just a sprawling, repetitive 1300-page mess.
My one sentence review, incidentally, would be "a sprawling, repetitive 1300-page mess that is nevertheless surprisingly organized, cogent and vibrant!" But don't read that yet. I could have just typed that and been done with this review but I'm not there yet. This book has collected dust on my desk, just under my monitor, for half a year, after crouching like a cat by the dinner table on a stack of books on the floor next to the same desk for the previous half-year, all the while with the photo of the rough & ready immigrant laborer on the cover staring up at me to remind me that I really do need to say something about this book on Goodreads before I pass it on to the next reader.
And it's not even about the book's contents that I want to write. Which doesn't seem fair because I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. In fact, Vollmann's special talent here is to keep the reader interested even in the dryest, most tedious of his historic sources -- like, literally, tables of census data and farm statistics. In fact, much of the book is short chapters of Vollmann saying: "I'm in a library looking at a table in an old, dusty book (insert descriptions of the book, the paper, the snotty librarian, etc), which lists the number of orange trees in Imperial County in 1782, and I'm imagining myself sitting under one of these trees and eating all the oranges (insert obscenely sensuous description of orange-eating) while dreaming of the future prosperity of my offspring, little suspecting that everything I hold dear is balanced on a thin blade of ice that's melting and/or floating on a shallow lake that's drying out and/or about to be taken away from me by lawyers via some other ominous metaphor ..."
In other words, it's deeply romantic. It's so romantic, in fact, that the entire thing could perhaps be taken as a metaphor for the breakup Vollmann describes in a single chapter about 9% of the way into the book. But the book is not really that story, or his story, or any one story. Instead it's a deeply romantic comprehensive history of this particular region, composed of hundreds of stories of residents and visitors past and present, adding up to the big story of California: irrigation, water in the desert, the Gardens of Eden that the Canal promised, all the people who had faith in that vision and came West to tend that garden -- each of them promised an equal-sized plot of arable land in a great grid of pre-fab prairie Democracy -- and how, in just a few generations, said garden evolved into, if not Hell, then at least Southern California. It's the history of a certain beautiful, antique silly Western dream, and Vollmann dreams it himself, too, just to get inside it, even though he can't really believe in it.
A large middle part of the book is concerned with the city of Mexicali, Mexico, built by Chinese immigrants & repossessed by the Mexican government, home to a kind of Mexican-Chinese culture all its own. Much of it is drawn from articles and advertisments in old newspapers, all repeating the agro-utopian salespitch that brought farmers here from all over the world. Much of it is descriptions of old photographs in those same sources: those salesmen, those farmers, those plots, those diggers of the canal that made it all work, those farmworkers who toiled for those farmers, those financiers and speculators and distributors for whom those farmers toiled -- and after whom the towns were all named.
And, and, and ... you know, I could probably spend the digital equivalent of ten pages summarizing this 1300 page book, but would that make you want to read it, or would it just help you feel okay about skipping it? I don't know. I do know this, though, and this is the point of my review:
Carrying around a four-pound book was a colossal pain in the ass! For three months of my life it was the largest, bulkiest thing on my person. For three months the shoulder strap of my bag dug into my neck, and the corners of the book bounced around on my right kidney when I biked with it. I hadn't had such backpack-blisters since high school, when I had to carry AP Chemistry and Oh, Pascal! to school and back every day ... but at least then I got weekends off! This time, it was constant; I took it everywhere, always, as part of last year's self-improvement project of spending my spare moments in Book-books instead of on Facebooks. In fact I spent some of those three months in Alaska, where I dutifully carried IMPERIAL in my backpack along with tent and sleeping bag and food and clothing and other awkward, bulky, die-without-it items. After each long day of lugging four pounds of William T. Vollmann's brains around in the humid heat, by the time I was finished staking my tent and hyperventilating into my sleeping pad I found myself too damn exhausted to read it! And each time I took this book out of my backpack, and especially every time I struggled to cram it back in, I thought long and hard about Nooks and Kindles and iPads and the lightweight, durable Future Of Reading that they promise.
Because the modern promise of e-books is suspiciously similar in utopian flavor to the hundred-year-old promise of water in the desert. I mean ... hang on, yes, sorry, I do recognize the gap in profundity between dying of famine and not having anything interesting to read. Please stop throwing fruit. But my point is, they're both sales pitches. What Amazon promises readers is what the Imperial boosters promised farmers: a new, better system in which everybody is happier, everything is easier, wealth is shared, and your feedback is important to us.
I have a Kindle. It's light, it's thin, it's digital, and I could have brought it to Alaska instead of bringing the historically pertinent boat anchor called IMPERIAL. But I couldn't have read IMPERIAL on the Kindle. It is "not available on this platform," presumably because the Kindle platform is unable to transmit or encode any of those features of books collectively known as Book Design; it offers only two fonts, only one width of page, a very limited palette of possibilities. IMPERIAL uses book design exquisitely: the aforementioned fonts, illos, footnotes, structures, spreads, maps, et cetera, plus other subtleties I might not even have noticed consciously. The book employs all of it heavily, to great and necessary ends. It's the perfect example of what you can't do on a Kindle, or on a Nook. Maybe on an iPad you could offer something like the original layout; you could even approximate the quixotic structure -- chapters, sections, dates, locations, 'deliniations', 'subdeliniations', 'reprises', and on and on, plus a massive bibliography with its own internal story structure -- in some kind of hypertext TOC, and call that an improvement. But I suspect that e-book would be a pixelly, crunchy, blinky approximation, just enough of a blurry photocopy of the real thing to remind the e-book reader what they're missing.
If you'd asked me before I read IMPERIAL how I felt about e-books, I would have said that I'm not drawn to them, but on the other hand they're sure nifty gadgets: thin, light, wireless, encrusted with delicious clicky buttons and suggestive access ports. They've got an obvious niche: mountain climbers, touring musicians, the elderly, gluttonous readers of disposable romance/western/self-help/bizarro paperbacks ... I wouldn't have said I love them, but I wouldn't have said that I dislike them either.
But it turns out that I really dislike e-books. How much don't I like them? I don't like them so much, I chose to drag this albatross of a cinderblock of a doorstop of a book around with me everywhere I went for three months, instead of using the e-book reader I already own to read one of the e-books that is apparently already waiting inside for me to read it. Thank you Mr. Vollmann, for bringing me this insight.
And I guess that's the point: I love that this book is hard. I love that it's huge and awkward, and that all its major structural indications add up to a sly wink from Vollmann to convey "let's just pretend that I organized this mess, okay?" I love its weird font changes -- even though that sort of thing is almost always annoying, almost universally the sign of a rank amateur who should never have been left alone with a copy of InDesign, let alone given access to Print-On-Demand. I guess I'm just a fan of Vollmann, but also I guess I spent enough time alternately enjoying this book's content and being exasperated by its form -- and then, at times, vise versa -- that I'm over the question of is it good or not, would I recommend it to a friend ... how may stars? Instead I just remember the journey itself, the time I spent with it on the ferry, the time I spent with it at the coffee shop, or in the big chair in the living room, or on a boat in the Sacramento Delta. I remember how, even though I often lost track of the point and questioned whether I really cared that much about Southern California history at all, I was rarely bored, usually amused, often touched ... because Bill Vollmann.
And also, I love it as an object, as a fetish, as a rectangular glue-and-paper thing. I love that its full color dust jacket is scraped and torn at the upper right corner from rough handling, such that along the edge of a tiny half-centimeter rip the glossy plastic top layer is just barely starting to peel from the white paper underneath, and it appears that the cover photograph, of a lone migrant farmer posed by an empty dust road across from a field of blurry crops underneath a blue-white sky, is actually embedded in that plastic top layer of the book cover rather than the paper beneath, such that the peeling-away plastic is sky blue and transluscent, while the paper layer it's splitting from is a rough, fiberous white, suggestive of exactly the kind of raincloud that everyone in Imperial County would love to see in exactly that corner of sky but never, ever will. I love that on the back cover the ISBN number is covered by one of Powell's Books' store labels, and that the store label seems to have absorbed all the grit and sweat and bag-filth that the glossy dust jacket has successfully repelled, so that it looks like a filthy, humble thing clinging to the skirt of a much larger, grander thing, like the intrusion of farmland reality into the fantasy of Imperial real estate. I love the back-flap photo of Bill Vollmann, and the way that he's exactly the same kind of ugly that Elliot Smith was, and how, in just the same way, once you've listened to him enough, that ugliness becomes your new version of beautiful. I even love that there is a digital theft-preventing tracker chip hidden behind that back flap, pasted to the inside of the back cover like a band-aid -- because really, what idiot would shoplift this of all fucking enormous, hard-to-sell books? How would you even do that? Stuff it down your pants? You could be crippled for life! The hardback of IMPERIAL borders on that "too large" size, the size where the very technology of books start to break down, where books get too heavy, too awkward, too difficult to construct, too easy to accidentally split in half, where the human talent for remembering the three-dimensional location of some information -- "that quote, I remember it was on the left side, 1/3 of the way down, somewhere in the last hundred pages" -- starts to get lost in the thickness. It's the sort of thing people are always telling me that people don't make any more. It's anti-futuristic. There's no money in it. Please, give me more.
March 22, 2013
I tried. Oh, how I tried. I grew up in the Imperial Valley. I write about the Imperial Valley. I know people interviewed in this book. I couldn't even get halfway through it.
I'll read the rest of the book after Vollmann decides to finish doing his job as a writer and rewrites and edits this unnecessarily long ramble. Just because a book is long, doesn't make it good or insightful. In fact, this was like reading a stack of notebooks that you'd find in an attic. Repetitive, unorganized, and so focused on an agenda that it's a wonder why he would bother to travel down there, as the book starts with clear definitions in place.
How can you write a 1,300-page book about the Imperial Valley and barely include farming?
Usually I wouldn't give an unfinished book a review, but considering that I read more that 500 pages, I'm going to call it fair.
I'll read the rest of the book after Vollmann decides to finish doing his job as a writer and rewrites and edits this unnecessarily long ramble. Just because a book is long, doesn't make it good or insightful. In fact, this was like reading a stack of notebooks that you'd find in an attic. Repetitive, unorganized, and so focused on an agenda that it's a wonder why he would bother to travel down there, as the book starts with clear definitions in place.
How can you write a 1,300-page book about the Imperial Valley and barely include farming?
Usually I wouldn't give an unfinished book a review, but considering that I read more that 500 pages, I'm going to call it fair.
April 15, 2023
No idea how I feel
On one hand with 1,300 pages I could have learned a lot more. This book could seriously be edited.
And I could have felt more... there's a lot to care about here...
Like a lot to care about. Water. People. Northside. Southside. Exploitation. Sustainability. Love. Life. The universe.
OK, I think this book is a beautiful failure...
On one hand with 1,300 pages I could have learned a lot more. This book could seriously be edited.
And I could have felt more... there's a lot to care about here...
Like a lot to care about. Water. People. Northside. Southside. Exploitation. Sustainability. Love. Life. The universe.
OK, I think this book is a beautiful failure...
July 19, 2024
"I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling."
William T. Vollmann is a border artist. From the shifting mechanized fronts of the Second World War to the arbitrary lines of Canadian reservations to the border between life and death itself, he has built a career plumbing the depths of the lines that separate, segregate, marginalize, and divide. Perhaps no border in his lifetime has grown so famous and infamous as the one that demarcates America from Mexico. But Vollmann's border is wider than the laws or maps would indicate. Vollmann's border is a state of mind, a way of life, a sunburnt face, a lead-poisoned fetus, a dead dog purpling in the dusk.
It stretches from below the southern tip of Baja California, through Mexicali and Calexico and beyond, to the northern tip of Los Angeles. It was born in a haystack in a mission in the Spanish colonial period, grew to adolescence as the boosters and farm agencies called out to hundreds of thousands of American dreamers, gained adulthood with a flourish of verdant cabbage and resplendent orange groves, hit middle age as the waters began to grow scare, and aged into dereliction, addiction, and desolation; on its deathbed, after this work's publication, it became the subject of a defining political battle that reformed the landscape of American policy and will define another election. In this regard Vollmann's vision of the future is stark, and often terrifying.
But how does he define Imperial? Imperial is more than just the landscape itself; like Mike Davis's City of Quartz or Samuel R. Delaney's Bellona or McCarthy's Evening Redness in the West or Melville's White Whale, Imperial is a construction of pure and impure bodies, faces, thoughts, quotes, prices, buildings, landscapes, memories, and recognitions. Imperial is the collective consciousness of Mexico and America alike. Imperial is California, and Imperial is Texas. Imperial is the Rio Grande, the Rio Nuevo, and the All American Canal. Imperial is William Mulholland, and his concrete canals. Imperial is also Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, and the Inland Empire, and Los Angeles, and San Diego. Imperial is the Central Valley and the San Fernando Valley. Imperial is the center of all secrets and therefore center of the world. Imperial is a wrecked and crumpled newspaper on the ground. Imperial is an inflatable raft rushing down the foul-smelling New River. Imperial is the myth of a secret network of Chinese tunnels under the streets of Mexicali. Imperial is a button-camera hidden in the shirt of a translator infiltrating a maquiladora; Imperial is the hidden battery pack for a hidden camera searing Vollmann's skin. Imperial is a Mexican cop patrolling the subterranean crossings, a Border Patrol agent in a Jeep, a sniper in the window of a barn at a ranch, a translator with a tendency towards racism, a coyote trafficking humans from one nation to another, a farm worker, an illiterate dancer, a mariachi player, a truck driver, a collective farmer, a bureaucrat, a murderer, a lover, a son, a daughter. Imperial is John Steinbeck, and his wagon train of Okies. Imperial is a socialist commune, and it is also a security state. Imperial is a Mormon genealogist who cannot, perhaps, be fully trusted. Imperial is Leonard Knight, who build and painted a mountain with his bare hands to honor God. Imperial is Mark Rothko, who slit his wrists and dreamed the moon a temple for his tortured soul. Imperial is on the news every single night, as pundits deny and justify its loss of life, while others call for its permanent obliteration. Imperial is greed. Imperial cannot sing in lyric strains of private, little woes, when greed is reaping golden gains from bloody seeds it sows. Imperial is a crashed cotton truck. Imperial is a crashed car packed with migrants. Imperial is lettuce, orange, and broccoli. Imperial is strawberries contaminated with E. Coli. Imperial is a father's last quinceanera. Imperial is the American suburb. Imperial is skeletons in the desert. Imperial broke my heart. Imperial is X; Imperial is Y. Imperial is you and me. Imperial is our future.
But Imperial is no mute Romanesque statue; it communicates, speaks to us: in a cringing, stumbling dialect of archive, memory, and old photograph. Imperial speaks to us in the voices of nameless thousands who are buried in the desert, and the millions more who staked their lives on the impossible miracle that forced the desert into retreat. Listen to Imperial before it's gone. Imperial says, "New properties, newly partitioned, designed for your prosperity, your vision, your hope, your love."
Imperial says, "Water is here."
Imperial says, "The desert disappears."
Imperial says, "Tamerlane's warriors gallop into the square."
"Some ballads are prohibited by the government."
"The New River is the most polluted waterway on Earth."
"There have always been Chinese here, but you never see them."
"You are my darling, but I haven't seen you in many years."
"They came out of those tunnels like ants."
"Maybe existence is the process of trading our hopes for our memories."
"It's the aim, no matter how fulfilled, that makes great the life."
"I'm going to cross tomorrow, and this time I'll be an American for good.
"She lives in Los Angeles; I'd give you her address but I can't read or write."
"We aren't paid for the hours when ice is on the plants."
“I used to leave out water but my fence has been torn up three times now, and now I don’t.”
"The maquiladoras have bad managers who treat them with cruelty, but what other choice do they have?"
"Our primary prerogative is to prevent terrorism and save lives."
"We've taken to calling it Salvation Mountain."
"It'll be something to tell our kids about."
"Passport and identification, please."
"God, so this is my life."
"I think we all feel sorry for 'em."
William T. Vollmann is a border artist. From the shifting mechanized fronts of the Second World War to the arbitrary lines of Canadian reservations to the border between life and death itself, he has built a career plumbing the depths of the lines that separate, segregate, marginalize, and divide. Perhaps no border in his lifetime has grown so famous and infamous as the one that demarcates America from Mexico. But Vollmann's border is wider than the laws or maps would indicate. Vollmann's border is a state of mind, a way of life, a sunburnt face, a lead-poisoned fetus, a dead dog purpling in the dusk.
It stretches from below the southern tip of Baja California, through Mexicali and Calexico and beyond, to the northern tip of Los Angeles. It was born in a haystack in a mission in the Spanish colonial period, grew to adolescence as the boosters and farm agencies called out to hundreds of thousands of American dreamers, gained adulthood with a flourish of verdant cabbage and resplendent orange groves, hit middle age as the waters began to grow scare, and aged into dereliction, addiction, and desolation; on its deathbed, after this work's publication, it became the subject of a defining political battle that reformed the landscape of American policy and will define another election. In this regard Vollmann's vision of the future is stark, and often terrifying.
But how does he define Imperial? Imperial is more than just the landscape itself; like Mike Davis's City of Quartz or Samuel R. Delaney's Bellona or McCarthy's Evening Redness in the West or Melville's White Whale, Imperial is a construction of pure and impure bodies, faces, thoughts, quotes, prices, buildings, landscapes, memories, and recognitions. Imperial is the collective consciousness of Mexico and America alike. Imperial is California, and Imperial is Texas. Imperial is the Rio Grande, the Rio Nuevo, and the All American Canal. Imperial is William Mulholland, and his concrete canals. Imperial is also Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, and the Inland Empire, and Los Angeles, and San Diego. Imperial is the Central Valley and the San Fernando Valley. Imperial is the center of all secrets and therefore center of the world. Imperial is a wrecked and crumpled newspaper on the ground. Imperial is an inflatable raft rushing down the foul-smelling New River. Imperial is the myth of a secret network of Chinese tunnels under the streets of Mexicali. Imperial is a button-camera hidden in the shirt of a translator infiltrating a maquiladora; Imperial is the hidden battery pack for a hidden camera searing Vollmann's skin. Imperial is a Mexican cop patrolling the subterranean crossings, a Border Patrol agent in a Jeep, a sniper in the window of a barn at a ranch, a translator with a tendency towards racism, a coyote trafficking humans from one nation to another, a farm worker, an illiterate dancer, a mariachi player, a truck driver, a collective farmer, a bureaucrat, a murderer, a lover, a son, a daughter. Imperial is John Steinbeck, and his wagon train of Okies. Imperial is a socialist commune, and it is also a security state. Imperial is a Mormon genealogist who cannot, perhaps, be fully trusted. Imperial is Leonard Knight, who build and painted a mountain with his bare hands to honor God. Imperial is Mark Rothko, who slit his wrists and dreamed the moon a temple for his tortured soul. Imperial is on the news every single night, as pundits deny and justify its loss of life, while others call for its permanent obliteration. Imperial is greed. Imperial cannot sing in lyric strains of private, little woes, when greed is reaping golden gains from bloody seeds it sows. Imperial is a crashed cotton truck. Imperial is a crashed car packed with migrants. Imperial is lettuce, orange, and broccoli. Imperial is strawberries contaminated with E. Coli. Imperial is a father's last quinceanera. Imperial is the American suburb. Imperial is skeletons in the desert. Imperial broke my heart. Imperial is X; Imperial is Y. Imperial is you and me. Imperial is our future.
But Imperial is no mute Romanesque statue; it communicates, speaks to us: in a cringing, stumbling dialect of archive, memory, and old photograph. Imperial speaks to us in the voices of nameless thousands who are buried in the desert, and the millions more who staked their lives on the impossible miracle that forced the desert into retreat. Listen to Imperial before it's gone. Imperial says, "New properties, newly partitioned, designed for your prosperity, your vision, your hope, your love."
Imperial says, "Water is here."
Imperial says, "The desert disappears."
Imperial says, "Tamerlane's warriors gallop into the square."
"Some ballads are prohibited by the government."
"The New River is the most polluted waterway on Earth."
"There have always been Chinese here, but you never see them."
"You are my darling, but I haven't seen you in many years."
"They came out of those tunnels like ants."
"Maybe existence is the process of trading our hopes for our memories."
"It's the aim, no matter how fulfilled, that makes great the life."
"I'm going to cross tomorrow, and this time I'll be an American for good.
"She lives in Los Angeles; I'd give you her address but I can't read or write."
"We aren't paid for the hours when ice is on the plants."
“I used to leave out water but my fence has been torn up three times now, and now I don’t.”
"The maquiladoras have bad managers who treat them with cruelty, but what other choice do they have?"
"Our primary prerogative is to prevent terrorism and save lives."
"We've taken to calling it Salvation Mountain."
"It'll be something to tell our kids about."
"Passport and identification, please."
"God, so this is my life."
"I think we all feel sorry for 'em."
July 15, 2018
Vollmann is obviously a giant talent and I'm a loyal fan, but jeez, this book could have been boiled down to about 500-600 pages and been much stronger. He repeats himself and makes the same points over and over for literally hundreds of pages.
August 12, 2024
Check out my thoughts here:
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December 5, 2024
Read this book 10 pages at a time between books I was already reading.
I liked the chapter about the “secret Chinese tunnels” and a lot of the border crossing chapters, but a lot of it is really about irrigation and capitalizing upon that in this “area” called Imperial. Genesis of that. Salton Sea stuff.
While Vollmann found something he can write a lot about (Rothkoscapes he likes to remind you) in 10 years or more (I believe), there is no amount of pages to be read to ever feel convinced that time, something we will never get back, spent on this will I ever look back and be like “damn, that’s wild.”
Vollmann likes to use these weird DJ Khaled taglines like WATER IS HERE or THE DESERT DISAPPEARS or MOISTURE MEANS MILLIONS or (most annoying) IVE NEVER BEEN CHEATED OUT OF A DOLLAR IN MY LIFE. You know when that uncle you don’t think fondly of finds something funny and slaps your shoulder very hard? That’s what reading these felt like and you will read this constantly.
I don’t think Vollmann has ever been cheated out of an edit in his life. He literally chose to put the word “crookder” in it.
Vollmann can write but only when there is a sweaty tit or ass involved. Well, I’m not entirely honest. The last “Los Angeles” chapter kind of goes hard.
What the book taught me is that life goes on in Mexicali/Caliexico/whatever the fuck you want to call it.
Perhaps he will feel sorry for me too.
Life goes on.
I liked the chapter about the “secret Chinese tunnels” and a lot of the border crossing chapters, but a lot of it is really about irrigation and capitalizing upon that in this “area” called Imperial. Genesis of that. Salton Sea stuff.
While Vollmann found something he can write a lot about (Rothkoscapes he likes to remind you) in 10 years or more (I believe), there is no amount of pages to be read to ever feel convinced that time, something we will never get back, spent on this will I ever look back and be like “damn, that’s wild.”
Vollmann likes to use these weird DJ Khaled taglines like WATER IS HERE or THE DESERT DISAPPEARS or MOISTURE MEANS MILLIONS or (most annoying) IVE NEVER BEEN CHEATED OUT OF A DOLLAR IN MY LIFE. You know when that uncle you don’t think fondly of finds something funny and slaps your shoulder very hard? That’s what reading these felt like and you will read this constantly.
I don’t think Vollmann has ever been cheated out of an edit in his life. He literally chose to put the word “crookder” in it.
Vollmann can write but only when there is a sweaty tit or ass involved. Well, I’m not entirely honest. The last “Los Angeles” chapter kind of goes hard.
What the book taught me is that life goes on in Mexicali/Caliexico/whatever the fuck you want to call it.
Perhaps he will feel sorry for me too.
Life goes on.
August 10, 2009
Imperial will probably be more "respected" than read. I would be a liar if I didn't admit that the irrigation and farming statistics, despite having a logical purpose in the narrative, did grow a bit boring. At the same time, the stuff about chinese tunnels, maquiladoras, drug ballads, and the new river more than made up for it. (It was also neat that the LA sections mentioned an exact block that I have lived on and the street that I currently live on.) Rising Up and Rising Down was more of a fun read per se. However, I would say this is his most important book. In fact, I would guess that in a thousand years or so it will be the equivalent of ancient roman tracts by authors like Suetonius and so forth.
February 5, 2021
Here's one for Vollmann completionists or anyone interested in an encyclopedic look at the U.S.-Mexican border region. Vollmann doesn't think of himself as a good investigative journalist, but my favorite sections of this book are the longform essays in which he travels down the fecal-infested waters of the New River on a cheap inflatable raft, or searches for the fabled Chinese-occupied tunnels hidden under the streets of Mexicali. However, for every glimmer of excitement there are hundreds of pages devoted to the history of water rights, lettuce, and near-biblical records of lineage.
February 15, 2020
THE MOTHER AND THE FATHER
The way a Coachella Valley history describes the events of 1973, labor organizing efforts by the United Farm Workers disrupted the valley and brought financial distress to workers and farmers.
The Chavistas saw it differently.
Why shouldn't they? A Nazi Gauleiter once proposed this distinction. The trade union is the nurturing mother; the state is the father who disciplines. Hence there must be opposition between them.
Up in Kern County that year I see a deputy cradling against his potbelly the panicked, agonized and tooth-bared face of the UFW picketer whose throat he is choking with his baton; the picketer's hands are clenched around the baton, trying to work it loose before his adam's apple crunches, and another deputy has his on the picketer's arm as if to comfort him. The first deputy, the one who is choking him, gazes at an alert angle (we cannot see the eyes behind the dark sunglasses) at the other deputy; those two remind me of cowboys castrating yearlings.
On 19 January 1974, in the Calexico Armory, Cesar Chavez speaks to two thousand farmworkers following the deaths of nineteen lettuce workers in a bus (he calls it a wheeled coffin) en route to High and Mighty Farms in Blythe. He says: This tragedy happened because of the greed of the big growers...
The way a Coachella Valley history describes the events of 1973, labor organizing efforts by the United Farm Workers disrupted the valley and brought financial distress to workers and farmers.
The Chavistas saw it differently.
Why shouldn't they? A Nazi Gauleiter once proposed this distinction. The trade union is the nurturing mother; the state is the father who disciplines. Hence there must be opposition between them.
Up in Kern County that year I see a deputy cradling against his potbelly the panicked, agonized and tooth-bared face of the UFW picketer whose throat he is choking with his baton; the picketer's hands are clenched around the baton, trying to work it loose before his adam's apple crunches, and another deputy has his on the picketer's arm as if to comfort him. The first deputy, the one who is choking him, gazes at an alert angle (we cannot see the eyes behind the dark sunglasses) at the other deputy; those two remind me of cowboys castrating yearlings.
On 19 January 1974, in the Calexico Armory, Cesar Chavez speaks to two thousand farmworkers following the deaths of nineteen lettuce workers in a bus (he calls it a wheeled coffin) en route to High and Mighty Farms in Blythe. He says: This tragedy happened because of the greed of the big growers...
May 24, 2012
I gave up a little over 10% of the way through the book and am still giving it three stars. I guess that says something.
Vollmann an incredible writer who can combine the personal and the journalistic (his abilities to interview coyotes and undocumented immigrants is impressive) with ease. He's figured out this is an incredible place to chronicle and (not that I know) seems to be really feeling something true about it -- he at least seems to Get it. It's a Book, with great literary ambition (see the hand-drawn maps), and one of the rare ones that doesn't get dragged down by the ambition.
But, at 1,300 pages, it needs to have a narrative. It just bumbles from observation to observation. I just couldn't sustain myself at that length with that pace and gave up. I in some senses loved it, but I sure couldn't hack it.
Vollmann an incredible writer who can combine the personal and the journalistic (his abilities to interview coyotes and undocumented immigrants is impressive) with ease. He's figured out this is an incredible place to chronicle and (not that I know) seems to be really feeling something true about it -- he at least seems to Get it. It's a Book, with great literary ambition (see the hand-drawn maps), and one of the rare ones that doesn't get dragged down by the ambition.
But, at 1,300 pages, it needs to have a narrative. It just bumbles from observation to observation. I just couldn't sustain myself at that length with that pace and gave up. I in some senses loved it, but I sure couldn't hack it.
March 19, 2010
Where do I begin? This book is the work of a crazy genius. This book is a mess. It's huge, sprawling, insightful, and (in my opinion) unfocused. In short this is classic Vollman. If you really really love Vollman, I would recommend this book. For people who have never read him, it will just be too much. Fabulous source notes. The publisher did a great packaging job. It's a real acheivemment to publish over 1,000 pages of changing typefaces and illustrations throughout the body of the text. Viking Press shows that there is still an art to book design. The jacket design really captures (as best as any one image can) the essence of the book.
April 25, 2010
If one best learns a language by total immersion, then one can likewise learn of place as William Vollman sets out to prove in his massive study “Imperial” which bombards the reader with every sort of datum on the California-Mexican area. Major themes include distribution of water, the transformation of small farms to vast agricultural domains, the plight of the Mexican illegal immigrant, the history of the Chinese in Mexico, accounts of early settlers, and more, much more. “Imperial” documents the conflicting cultures of American domination and Mexican poverty that poses a political and so far insoluable problem.
January 9, 2012
Whew! Took me a couple of years to finish this one, and in the end it was worth it. It's a combination of wry statistical anaylsis of crop yields and water-usage rates; a history of Imperial County; and Vollmann's own reportage from the area, which is always the best part of any book by him (hookers, illegals, corridos, secret Chinese tunnels in Mexicali). Part history book, part travelogue. If you make it through, you will know more about California's Imperial Valley than you even thought there was to know.
September 18, 2009
Imperial is sprawling, contradictory, and intense. Parts wildly compelling, others poorly (and idiosyncratically) edited and dull. But in the best parts -- when Vollmann's talking with people otherwise unheard, or with people who are lying and misdirecting -- it's a good read. If you can make it through the other bits (the statistics, tables, oddly-conceived historical reconstructions, tedious font choices, removal of personal boundary, rambling).
July 14, 2010
Downgrading this to 3.5 stars. The good parts are great, but with too much meandering and too many tangents the big picture gets lost at times. I've lost my motivation to plow through 1,000-plus pages and am returning this hefty volume to the library so that someone with more fortitude can take a crack at it. Vollmann is a great writer who in this case needs a great editor.
February 27, 2010
Exhaustive, exhausting, all you need to know about that place where everything North American converges. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in nonfiction (to be announced March 11)...
December 2, 2023
Usually I’d say reading a book of this size is like climbing a mountain, but the sprawl and subject matter of Imperial make the reading experience more like a long, water-less trudge across the sunbaked, treeless valley it describes.
Unreliable first person testimonies. Staggeringly soporific stretches of obscure county records. Narratorial interjections from Vollmann himself, that basically admit from the beginning that the book was never going to cut the mustard as an informative study. It’s a long walk to the meticulous bibliography which, I’m sure more ardent fans would insist, is just as essential reading.
Imperial gets easier when you accept that as a work of historical reference it has limited utility. Which is hardly surprising if you’ve ever read anything else by Vollmann, but it is easy to feel that the minutiae of agricultural history in this forgotten corner of SoCal is the principal concern of the book. A good 3/4 of the novel’s 1100-odd pages document the results of Vollmann’s slapdash archival trawling with nary a substance-smoking sex worker to be seen. So as much as other reviews tout the hallucinogenic and characteristically Vollmann-ish nature of the reportage, I’d still maintain that much of it is very, very boring.
One might be able to level this as a criticism if Vollmann didn’t own it from the beginning. Right from the outset he admits he has no idea what Imperial ought to be, what shape it should take, or what purpose he can expect to fulfil by gathering the material. He can’t even be certain of where “the entity [he] calls Imperial” begins and ends. It’s not Imperial County CA so much as it is a nebulous expanse that includes bits of Mexico, San Diego, and Riverside counties – all defined by a sort of ‘Imperial-ness’ that the novel tries to pin down in its more lyrical moments.
It’s a space of white hot afternoons, flat stretches of gridded agricultural nothingness, industrial areas devoid of shade. Streets of low, sand-coloured houses where the blinds are drawn year round and ancient F150s rust away in chaotic yards.
I’ve always longed to visit these places. I think I could even claim to be one of the few international readers who came to this novel with a genuine interest in soaking up the landscapes surrounding the Salton Sea, whose shores I have spent hours wandering on Google Maps. So I can’t help but be disappointed by the fact that so much of Imperial concerns itself with archival history that holds limited interest for me.
Yet there’s something genius about all the banality, because reading Imperial is much like inhabiting it. Like the Mexican illegals who trudge through the valley’s unrelenting heat in search of lumbar-destroying labour, so too does the reader trudge through endless swathes of obscure history – senior Imperialites’ testimonies recounting the good ol’ days of Calexico, tables of lettuce prices, land holdings and so on – in search of meaning or just the odd oasis of lyrical beauty. But when it comes, it’s exactly as quenching as you hope for.
“He also said, you know, Alice, once I had to go out at night and flood the fields because there was going to be a frost. And i saw a rainbow around the moon. That was what he said.” (702)
What becomes apparent is that Vollmann is searching the terrain for meaning just as we are. And most of the time he fails to find it. His leads go nowhere. The locals don’t trust him. The unreliable testimonies he gathers confound one another. He even spends a good fifty pages trying to set up a secret camera, which only gives him a view of the wearer’s chin.
In this sense Imperial is truly unique for being less of a ‘novel’ or docufiction or whatever, than it is a record of writerly failure. A brazen attempt to tackle an unwieldy, massive theme – for want of a better word – which lays bare its own inability to find coherence or meaning. The result is a feat that only Vollmann could pull off, and one that reminds me of something good mathematics teachers always used to say. Even if you can’t find the answer, always show your working out. As Vollmann himself writes:
“These documents permit me to make a beginning. That is all.” (752)
So maybe that’s all Imperial is. Less a novel than an assemblage of source material that aspires to some greater meaning – like the many discarded car parts and gallons of paint that make up Salvation Mountain in Slab City.
And after reading, I’m convinced there’s no other way to get to the heart of Imperial. A blank slate upon which generations of ranchers, agricultural entrepreneurs, and illegal labourers have sought to find something but so often come away empty-handed. After crossing the same desert in text I can’t help but relate. But then again, that’s exactly the point.
Unreliable first person testimonies. Staggeringly soporific stretches of obscure county records. Narratorial interjections from Vollmann himself, that basically admit from the beginning that the book was never going to cut the mustard as an informative study. It’s a long walk to the meticulous bibliography which, I’m sure more ardent fans would insist, is just as essential reading.
Imperial gets easier when you accept that as a work of historical reference it has limited utility. Which is hardly surprising if you’ve ever read anything else by Vollmann, but it is easy to feel that the minutiae of agricultural history in this forgotten corner of SoCal is the principal concern of the book. A good 3/4 of the novel’s 1100-odd pages document the results of Vollmann’s slapdash archival trawling with nary a substance-smoking sex worker to be seen. So as much as other reviews tout the hallucinogenic and characteristically Vollmann-ish nature of the reportage, I’d still maintain that much of it is very, very boring.
One might be able to level this as a criticism if Vollmann didn’t own it from the beginning. Right from the outset he admits he has no idea what Imperial ought to be, what shape it should take, or what purpose he can expect to fulfil by gathering the material. He can’t even be certain of where “the entity [he] calls Imperial” begins and ends. It’s not Imperial County CA so much as it is a nebulous expanse that includes bits of Mexico, San Diego, and Riverside counties – all defined by a sort of ‘Imperial-ness’ that the novel tries to pin down in its more lyrical moments.
It’s a space of white hot afternoons, flat stretches of gridded agricultural nothingness, industrial areas devoid of shade. Streets of low, sand-coloured houses where the blinds are drawn year round and ancient F150s rust away in chaotic yards.
I’ve always longed to visit these places. I think I could even claim to be one of the few international readers who came to this novel with a genuine interest in soaking up the landscapes surrounding the Salton Sea, whose shores I have spent hours wandering on Google Maps. So I can’t help but be disappointed by the fact that so much of Imperial concerns itself with archival history that holds limited interest for me.
Yet there’s something genius about all the banality, because reading Imperial is much like inhabiting it. Like the Mexican illegals who trudge through the valley’s unrelenting heat in search of lumbar-destroying labour, so too does the reader trudge through endless swathes of obscure history – senior Imperialites’ testimonies recounting the good ol’ days of Calexico, tables of lettuce prices, land holdings and so on – in search of meaning or just the odd oasis of lyrical beauty. But when it comes, it’s exactly as quenching as you hope for.
“He also said, you know, Alice, once I had to go out at night and flood the fields because there was going to be a frost. And i saw a rainbow around the moon. That was what he said.” (702)
What becomes apparent is that Vollmann is searching the terrain for meaning just as we are. And most of the time he fails to find it. His leads go nowhere. The locals don’t trust him. The unreliable testimonies he gathers confound one another. He even spends a good fifty pages trying to set up a secret camera, which only gives him a view of the wearer’s chin.
In this sense Imperial is truly unique for being less of a ‘novel’ or docufiction or whatever, than it is a record of writerly failure. A brazen attempt to tackle an unwieldy, massive theme – for want of a better word – which lays bare its own inability to find coherence or meaning. The result is a feat that only Vollmann could pull off, and one that reminds me of something good mathematics teachers always used to say. Even if you can’t find the answer, always show your working out. As Vollmann himself writes:
“These documents permit me to make a beginning. That is all.” (752)
So maybe that’s all Imperial is. Less a novel than an assemblage of source material that aspires to some greater meaning – like the many discarded car parts and gallons of paint that make up Salvation Mountain in Slab City.
And after reading, I’m convinced there’s no other way to get to the heart of Imperial. A blank slate upon which generations of ranchers, agricultural entrepreneurs, and illegal labourers have sought to find something but so often come away empty-handed. After crossing the same desert in text I can’t help but relate. But then again, that’s exactly the point.
November 6, 2020
Imperial is vast and unyielding. Imperial is dense, frustrating, and sometimes beautiful. Imperial is dry recitations of facts and figures, studded with eye-watering charts about population growth and agricultural yields. Imperial is essays on subjects ranging from John Steinbeck to the tumultuous history of water rights in Southern California to the fabled network of tunnels built by Chinese immigrants underneath the border town of Mexicali in the early years of the 20th century. Imperial is a 1500-page book about a county that only merits a 10,000-word Wikipedia article, most of which is census data and Chamber of Commerce boosterism. Yet Imperial is also something that remained on the periphery of my view for so long that its details will always remain with me: ocotillos, agricultural "Rothkoscapes", blazing heat, Calipatria, Brawley, El Centro, the estranged fraternal twins of Calexico and Mexicali, W. F. Holt, Lupe Vasquez, Barbara Worth, the fetid Rio Nuevo, the All-American Canal, the Salton Sea. Above all, Imperial is the people that inhabit it, from the Indigenous people who found a way to live symbiotically on its unforgiving terrain, to the Mexican people—day-laborers, prostitutes, campesinos, coyotes, maquiladora-workers, ejidatarios, ordinary citizens—who make up most of its population, above and below the border, to the Spanish colonists and later American capitalists who sought to divy it up in smaller and smaller subdivisions over the centuries, who dammed and diverted every last river and stream and claimed all the water for themselves, whose headlong optimism and boundless rapacity turned Imperial from a modest farming region to a spent place, a salt-caked desert rich only in pollution, unemployment, and human misery.
It would be easy to call Imperial "self-indulgent", "voluminous for the sake of voluminousness", "maybe fifteen good essays floating in a sea of arid, circuitous prose"—all of which is probably true. (On the shelf, it is impossible not to notice the troubling number of back-breaking tomes that bear the name William T. Vollmann.) At the same time however, Imperial is more than a year of my life, in fits and starts, in enraptured attention and, probably more often, in impatient boredom, wishing to be done with this massive task I naively undertook and stubbornly continued long after it had become onerous...but Imperial is never simply one thing long enough to write the entire project off.
"What is Imperial to you? To me, today at least, it is small houses, a child swinging beneath stately trees, the trees often nicer than the homes; Imperial is a tall rusty rocketlike tower on spider-legs overlooking the metal sheds; Imperial is the screaming green, the lovely chocolate fields of Palo Verde and Blythe."
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
It would be easy to call Imperial "self-indulgent", "voluminous for the sake of voluminousness", "maybe fifteen good essays floating in a sea of arid, circuitous prose"—all of which is probably true. (On the shelf, it is impossible not to notice the troubling number of back-breaking tomes that bear the name William T. Vollmann.) At the same time however, Imperial is more than a year of my life, in fits and starts, in enraptured attention and, probably more often, in impatient boredom, wishing to be done with this massive task I naively undertook and stubbornly continued long after it had become onerous...but Imperial is never simply one thing long enough to write the entire project off.
"What is Imperial to you? To me, today at least, it is small houses, a child swinging beneath stately trees, the trees often nicer than the homes; Imperial is a tall rusty rocketlike tower on spider-legs overlooking the metal sheds; Imperial is the screaming green, the lovely chocolate fields of Palo Verde and Blythe."
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
September 21, 2020
One of Vollmann's several non-fiction works. A tremendous addition to our culture today and to an understanding of how his mind works, his work works. His steady, ruthless capacity to maintain focus on a subject until he has fully grasped every detail and come to an empathetic level of discourse with it. Very few writers today work at this level (Richard Powers comes to mind) and can bring a subject fully to life for us. Of course, I recommend all of Vollmann highly, but this (because it is close to my heart) most of all.
Additionally, Rising Up and Rising Down, his groundbreaking thesis on violence.
I don't know if Vollmann is the best writer in America today. He isn't the most popular, certainly. Nor the best known. He may well be the best most ignored. The most topical and most ignored. The one to be most feared by those in power. Pick the one you think of as the one you think of as being the one, most popular and most feared by those in power. That would be like Bernie Sanders, and Vollmann would be, then, Elizabeth Warren. In other words, the one they REALLY fear.
He's been writing, fiction and non-fiction, for, like, ever, about everything that people don't want to know anything about, like migrant farmworkers in Imperial, sex workers, transvestites, immigrants on the road from Central America, the realities of the life of the poor, the manner in which the Noh theater deals with femininity, and countless other "untouchable" subjects.
In Rising Up and Rising Down, he spent 23 years studying violence and its relationship to freedom. I cannot imagine, in this space, a concise way to put forward how he edited down with precision the (literally) massive seven volumes he produced to this one volume in order to convey his vision of meaningful deduction about human civilization's "progress" through to this moment. It is shattering. It is necessary reading.
Additionally, Rising Up and Rising Down, his groundbreaking thesis on violence.
I don't know if Vollmann is the best writer in America today. He isn't the most popular, certainly. Nor the best known. He may well be the best most ignored. The most topical and most ignored. The one to be most feared by those in power. Pick the one you think of as the one you think of as being the one, most popular and most feared by those in power. That would be like Bernie Sanders, and Vollmann would be, then, Elizabeth Warren. In other words, the one they REALLY fear.
He's been writing, fiction and non-fiction, for, like, ever, about everything that people don't want to know anything about, like migrant farmworkers in Imperial, sex workers, transvestites, immigrants on the road from Central America, the realities of the life of the poor, the manner in which the Noh theater deals with femininity, and countless other "untouchable" subjects.
In Rising Up and Rising Down, he spent 23 years studying violence and its relationship to freedom. I cannot imagine, in this space, a concise way to put forward how he edited down with precision the (literally) massive seven volumes he produced to this one volume in order to convey his vision of meaningful deduction about human civilization's "progress" through to this moment. It is shattering. It is necessary reading.
May 1, 2021
I need to begin with a confession that involves a good deal of frustration. What to do with this author, Mr. William T. Vollmann? I am simply at wits end. Amazing fecundity, lengthy digressions, a multitude of facts, and an obsession with the basest elements of the human condition. The term 'base' can stand for many things, but when I apply it to Vollmann's writing it usually means detailed descriptions of those experiences or events which tend to lower the expectations for good outcomes. Hence the book "Imperial." A gigantic encounter with a relatively remote and unheard of corner of the state of California.
Consider the dedication: In memory of Serafin Ramirez Hernandez. This individual remains "unknown," a mere cypher. "Missing" and "illegal" indicating someone who doesn't "register," so to speak. And then a thousand pages to invite the reader into this abyss of the unknown, the unregistered, the marginal, the unheard of.
Ironically, the first sentence promises something about our great country: "The All-American Canal." And the first thing we notice is the pitch blackness of this place. Is America simply a dream that has a hold on the minds of millions of people? Yes, it is. In reality, it's all "pitch black." Luckily we can play with cyphers.
Gradually the first character emerges, only to recede almost immediately. Officer Dan Murray. Officer Murray says things. He talks about generators. He talks about lights. He talks about the flaming sword that guards any return to Eden. The book quickly shifts to "asparagus" and "blondeness," and we shouldn't forget the onion fields either. Here is the place of lowest median incomes. See how numbers pop up wherever you go? It's the only comfort many of us have when it comes to the abyss, to the surrounding darkness. Sectors 210 and 226, Sectors 217 and 223. Again, the retreat to number to offset the terror of the pitch darkness.
I wonder why there is no mention of the Mexican-American war on the first pages?
Consider the dedication: In memory of Serafin Ramirez Hernandez. This individual remains "unknown," a mere cypher. "Missing" and "illegal" indicating someone who doesn't "register," so to speak. And then a thousand pages to invite the reader into this abyss of the unknown, the unregistered, the marginal, the unheard of.
Ironically, the first sentence promises something about our great country: "The All-American Canal." And the first thing we notice is the pitch blackness of this place. Is America simply a dream that has a hold on the minds of millions of people? Yes, it is. In reality, it's all "pitch black." Luckily we can play with cyphers.
Gradually the first character emerges, only to recede almost immediately. Officer Dan Murray. Officer Murray says things. He talks about generators. He talks about lights. He talks about the flaming sword that guards any return to Eden. The book quickly shifts to "asparagus" and "blondeness," and we shouldn't forget the onion fields either. Here is the place of lowest median incomes. See how numbers pop up wherever you go? It's the only comfort many of us have when it comes to the abyss, to the surrounding darkness. Sectors 210 and 226, Sectors 217 and 223. Again, the retreat to number to offset the terror of the pitch darkness.
I wonder why there is no mention of the Mexican-American war on the first pages?
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