William T Vollmann Central discussion
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The Dying Grass
Seven Dreams
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2015 The Dying Grass (Seven Dreams #5)
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Jeff
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Jul 28, 2015 04:05PM
Can reviewers just get over the weight and length of the thing already?
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My copy arrived today! So much looking forward to this one. The paper is nice and the book frels good too - except: why, o, why that horrible cover illustration?
T.R. wrote: "I kinda like it!"I think the cover is fine -- it's far more likely to draw potential buyers/readers than, say, the cover of Argall.
I like the cover. The Appaloosa is from that region of the country and is key to the Nez Perce. Can't wait to see it in person.
Jeff wrote: "Can reviewers just get over the weight and length of the thing already?"Hear, hear!!
Re: the cover:: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ???
Seriously? Well, I have to say I find it somewhat generic, trying too hard to look like a bestseller - perhaps it had been better without that damn horse? - but then again, I find the cover for The Ice-Shirt a bit of an eyesore too. The use of photos inside the book for the divisions of the main parts are really nice though.
That NYTimes review was awful. Was it sleepwritten? That was one of the least engaging reviews of a book I've recently come across.
Nathan, I'm not getting a paywall and neither is my girlfriend. Is it IP address based or what?Try taking the mobile out?
T.R. wrote: "Nathan, I'm not getting a paywall and neither is my girlfriend. Is it IP address based or what?Try taking the mobile out?"
I think they give me like 10 accesses then block me. My fault!! I'll try mobile a little later. I hate to miss a travesty of a Vollmann=review!
No idea if this is legal:One alluring aspect of the novel form is that every one is simultaneously too large and too small. When we are writing and reading a novel, it can overwhelm us with feelings and ideas — but no novel, and no author, can ever encompass a real experience; every author must eventually give up and close the book (the manuscript, the file, the trilogy, the series). William T. Vollmann, whose “Europe Central” won the National Book Award in 2005, is undaunted, though; he has certainly tried as hard as any living writer to convey the grandeur of real experiences, many of them cruel, some of them inspiring.
William T. VollmannWilliam T. Vollmann: By the BookJULY 23, 2015
“The Dying Grass” is Volume 5 in Vollmann’s “Seven Dreams” cycle, which explores the European invasion and conquest of North America. Volume 1, “The Ice-Shirt,” concerns the Norse colony in “Vinland the Good” (possibly present-day Newfoundland or New England) around the year 1000. Volume 2, “Fathers and Crows,” follows the French into Canada, focusing partly on Samuel de Champlain. The third book, “The Rifles,” accompanies the Franklin expedition of the mid-1840s to the Arctic. Vollmann is always digressive and experimental — in “Argall” (Volume 4), about John Smith and Pocahontas, he attempted a postmodernist pastiche of 17th-century style that, in the eyes of many reviewers, didn’t work. But Vollmann, who appears in these volumes as a researcher and writer named “William the Blind,” has a compulsion to be as faithful to history as he can, and if that leaves the reader in a dissatisfied quandary, so be it.
The subject of “The Dying Grass” is the campaign of the United States Army (the Indian Service division) against the Nez Percé peoples in eastern Oregon about 10 years after the Civil War. Vollmann’s 1,215 pages (with another 135 of notes and references) begin in March 1877 with the attempt of Gen. Oliver Otis Howard to confine the heretofore cooperative Nez Percés to a new reservation one-tenth the size of their previous reservation, which was established by a treaty abandoned once gold was discovered on the land. It ends six months later, after a 1,200-mile pursuit on horseback (and many deaths and atrocities), in Idaho Territory just south of the Canadian border. Winter is closing in, and the Nez Percés are beginning to starve to death. That the issues of betrayal Vollmann raises have not gone away is demonstrated by the fact that Congress recently voted to hand over Apache holy lands in Arizona to a copper-mining company.
When the “Bluecoats,” as the Nez Percés call them, insist on tribal removal to the new reservation, several of the younger men resist, and attack local “Bostons” (their term for white settlers, merchants and other invaders). The war begins. Vollmann explores both sides of the conflict in chapters written from the point of view of the American soldiers (especially Howard; his increasingly doubtful aide-de-camp, Wood; his ever-reliable aide-de-camp, Wilkinson; his helpful Native American scout, Umatilla Jim; and others), and the Nez Percés, especially Heinmot Tooyalakekt, known to the American Army as Chief Joseph, who was not actually the chief (apparently Looking Glass and Lean Elk held greater authority).
Vollmann generally relates his story in a mixed inner/outer narrative style. The only way thoughts and utterances are distinguished is by indentation — dialogue, which is not indented, gives way to thoughts, indented, which are interrupted by ongoing dialogue and occasional description. This technique has rhythm and authenticity, especially in the sections about the soldiers; Vollmann moves easily among the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned soldiers, gossiping about war, boots, horses, morals, faith, whiskey, tobacco, weather and landscape with some grace, some grief, some rage and plenty of bombast. In a long chapter about the first battle, the Battle of White Bird Canyon, he writes:
“Where’s Trimble?
“Last I saw him, colonel, he was riding thataway.
“I see. And is that more . . . Indians up ahead?
“Looks like citizens from Mount Idaho, sir.
“Well, I’m glad to see they could get their thumbs out of their precious” rears.
The sections about the Nez Percés are shorter and more problematic. All the Nez Percés, male and female, young and old, are well intentioned, including the Three Red Blankets who resist being confined and start the war that Heinmot Tooyalakekt does not favor. Vollmann seems to be veering into “noble savage” territory. Concerning the departure of various bands after the battles of June, he writes:
“They ride for the country of Red Owl, who is of their People,
he whose grandfather killed a Crow warrior most bravely, in the days
before we had peace with that nation
although War Singer first counted coup on the dead man, and
therefore got to keep his scalp.”
But Vollmann may know more about Nez Percé culture than the reader does, and it may be true that in such a small and closely related group the sort of casual disrespect and selfishness that many of the Bluecoat and Boston characters routinely show is not the norm. Nez Percé culture cannot help being alien to the typical modern reader, but we also cannot help sympathizing with their resistance to the perennial bad faith of their American conquerors, manifest destiny or no.
Twelve hundred pages about a six-month war in which not many people died, at least compared with the Civil War — in which General Howard suffered defeat at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and lost his right arm at Fair Oaks — provokes in the reader a lot of idle thoughts, as it is intended to do. It can be tedious reading, because it is storytelling in a strict, documentary way, and as the scenes unfold, there are no familiar Hollywood faces to inhabit the voices and remind us who’s who. Vollmann’s extensive notes become an essential resource, even though their necessity slows the energy of the narrative. Vollmann nicely portrays the routine discomfort and boredom of the march, sometimes relieved by the beautiful landscape, but often painful and fraught with deadly surprises. Lieutenant Wood can speak for the reader when he wonders what can justify the cruelty he is engaged in. General Howard has an answer: “President Grant signed an executive order granting Joseph his range, and within two years, they forced him to rescind it! Don’t you see that if we left Joseph to his own devices in Wallowa, the settlers would come nonetheless, as they have, and within five years at the most, he’d be ruined?” The Nez Percés are never wrong when they discuss how they have been cheated and mistreated. The only question is give up now or give up later (and when Joseph and his followers do surrender, all the promises they exact are soon broken).
In “Rising Up and Rising Down” (2003), his 3,300-page opus on the nature and morality of violence, Vollmann writes, “My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.” Judging by “The Dying Grass,” he is still weighing this moral calculus, and its relationship to the appropriation of the Western Hemisphere by European colonists. Vollmann is one of the most idiosyncratic and challenging novelists at work today. “The Dying Grass,” like his other works, daringly pushes at the edges of the novel as a form while at the same time demanding that the reader sit up and pay attention.
It's not so much a travesty as it is boring, empty of content or energy or even much of a reaction to the book at all. "Bill Vollmann wrote these books. This is one of them. It's about an Indian War. There are sources in endnotes. Bill Vollmann writes books."
T.R. wrote: "No idea if this is legal:"Totally not. But it will get deleted in 24 hours' time.
Sorry, I might just be in an ungenerous mood today.
Does anybody else feel this sentence completely misses the point of reading Vollmann: (Bolding mine)
"It can be tedious reading, because it is storytelling in a strict, documentary way, and as the scenes unfold, there are no familiar Hollywood faces to inhabit the voices and remind us who’s who."
Sorry, Jane, but I don't need Hollywood to help me read books. I know we live in an instant gratification culture and many readers (on iPad reading young adult books?) prefer reading stories that put a movie in their heads, but Vollmann isn't going to play that game.
"It can be tedious reading, because it is storytelling in a strict, documentary way, and as the scenes unfold, there are no familiar Hollywood faces to inhabit the voices and remind us who’s who."
Sorry, Jane, but I don't need Hollywood to help me read books. I know we live in an instant gratification culture and many readers (on iPad reading young adult books?) prefer reading stories that put a movie in their heads, but Vollmann isn't going to play that game.
I'm not sure what to make of "storytelling in a strict, documentary way" either. I mean, I think it's probably just not true. Documented, yes, but not documentary. Nor strict, not by a long shot. [at least the previous dreams...]
Oh yeah, that "Hollywood" line was ridiculous!
Geoff wrote: "That NYTimes review was awful. Was it sleepwritten? That was one of the least engaging reviews of a book I've recently come across."I thought you read my review Geoff!
Marc wrote: "Seriously? Well, I have to say I find it somewhat generic, trying too hard to look like a bestseller - perhaps it had been better without that damn horse? - but then again, I find the cover for The..."See, I missed the Vollmann illustrations on the inside
Oh come now James, your review was a beauty and you know it!
The NYT piece is like a dutiful book report by a student who just didn't much care. I'm only on page 39 -- and unless WTV really messes up -- it's clearly his masterpiece, everything in his career has been leading up to this moment. Sentence by sentence, it's impeccable.
Yeah Tom I'm on page 21 and it is the strongest beginning to a book of his I know.
Geoff wrote: "Yeah Tom I'm on page 21 and it is the strongest beginning to a book of his I know."yeah - there is an emotional power to it already - something hard to put my finger on, but incredible
Keep the comments coming! It's fun to "read along". I'm usually a few hundred pages behind Jonathan by now. My copy still hasn't arrived.
James wrote: "Keep the comments coming! It's fun to "read along". I'm usually a few hundred pages behind Jonathan by now. My copy still hasn't arrived."I'm still out in the cold too. But I'm having trouble believing that it's the best Dream ; the others were all so good!
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "James wrote: "Keep the comments coming! It's fun to "read along". I'm usually a few hundred pages behind Jonathan by now. My copy still hasn't arrived."I'm still out in the cold too. But I'm hav..."
It's pushed Fathers and Crows off the throne for me. I still have The Rifles to go before I've caught up with Bill though. I checked last night and it looks like I ordered it last November. You would think they could have sent it to Wisconsin by now. ...
Still waiting too, James. Compulsively tracking the shipment, hoping, praying, wishing for it to get here before I go on lunch! Learned my lesson...pay the extra monies, be at the door of a physical book purveyor morning of release.
At 89 pages it's too soon to tell if it will dethrone Fathers and Crows for the top slot in the Seven Dreams - but it is a contender. Let's see what will happen with the remaining 94% of the book.
It came with 5 minutes to spare (before lunch)! It's beautiful!
ATJG wrote: "It came with 5 minutes to spare (before lunch)! It's beautiful!"Nice. Enjoy!
James wrote: "Nathan "N.R." wrote: "James wrote: "Keep the comments coming! It's fun to "read along". I'm usually a few hundred pages behind Jonathan by now. My copy still hasn't arrived."I'm still out in the ..."
The Rifles is my fav of the 7 dreams, and my fav Vollmann. Got my copy of Dying Grass couple of days ago. So pretty! Crazy excited to read it. But first I'm finishing The Royal Family AND An Afghanistan Picture Show...
How are folks feeling about the formatting of the writing?
I'm still getting a handle on it. It's been slowing me down a bit, to be honest. But I'm think I'm finally "getting" it. Any other opinions, hints, suggestions? :)
T.R. wrote: "I'm still getting a handle on it. It's been slowing me down a bit, to be honest. But I'm think I'm finally "getting" it. Any other opinions, hints, suggestions? :)"Let it flow over you!
Finally purchased my copy from a local independent store. Cashier said it was one of the thickest book she's ever sold.
I thought there were times where it was fantastic, where it really emphasized and intensified what Vollmann was going for. Otherwise I felt it was just kind of there, but really it's there as a courtesy to you the reader. It makes it much easier to follow than the text of something like JR in my opinion. At least that's how I felt about it, just wondering how others were feeling.
Well, I've just finished the Indian Service section, and it ending with a magnificent battle. The style brought out the chaos of fighting, the cacophony of soldiers' voices, the despair of men in agony and defeat. I was there. I would say it's the first place it shined.
I was wondering how The Dying Grass might be doing in sales. I note that the book dropped from $35 something to $30.87 on Amazon yesterday, and in sales rankings it's currently 409 in books -- not an NYT bestseller but not bad at all. And, Amazon currently says the book "ships within 1 to 3 weeks," which means its out of stock. So the early reviews -- except for Jane Smiley's "meh" in the NYT -- must be having an effect.
Greg wrote: "Well, I've just finished the Indian Service section, and it ending with a magnificent battle. The style brought out the chaos of fighting, the cacophony of soldiers' voices, the despair of men in ..."I finished the Indian Service section yesterday -- the sequence with the killing of the lieutenant is stunning, as is the very end of the section when Col. Perry tells the lieutenant's widow of his death. I agree with Alexander about the format and the mostly quotation sections of writing -- just "let it flow over you." This is a book that teaches you how to read it.
I don't think there's any special technique to reading it - the line breaks and page setting give it a unique flow for sure, and as in poetry allows for a nice use of repetition and isolation of phrases for emphasis and a kind of inner/outer perspective dualism that I think works well - again, I don't think it's tricky, you just go with it and its voices start making sense... The page setting is similar in appearance to the whole River of Time idea that runs through all the Dreams - rivulets of prose, eddies of prose, pools of prose, torrents of prose...
Greg wrote: "I don't think this review has been posted before:Booklist Review" Nice
Donna Seaman has been interviewing and reading writers for years, and not a few have been off the beaten track. That shows in the Booklist review. She accidentally picks up on something Geoff has mentioned above when she writes:"Yet this virtuoso, polyphonic saga of invasion, resistance, forced exodus, and conquest flows, whirls, and mesmerizes with riverine dynamics, and it is as large, encompassing, and deeply felt as it needs to be to do justice to its momentous subject."
"Nice" indeed.
James wrote: "How are folks feeling about the formatting of the writing?"I'm thinking its (finally!) a return to what he did in YBARA, which is to return to his sentences over and over again in order to pack in more and more. The various line breaks, indentations, etc allow him to pack in more subordinate and juxtaposed clauses while keeping the sentence open. I think it's a pretty cool technique for creating constantly ballooning sentences ; better than all those {[()]}s.
I'm also, in general, again reminded that Vollmann does not come from the tradition of the English Realist Novel. Much more so the sagas and epics and things like Genji, and Lautréamont.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "James wrote: "How are folks feeling about the formatting of the writing?"I'm thinking its (finally!) a return to what he did in YBARA, which is to return to his sentences over and over again in o..."
I think that because of that, some reviewers don't know what to do with him. They don't understand what he's up to. "Europe Central" is not like any other WWII novel by an American -- America is an irrelevance in its pages, and the prose style seems very, uh, Central European, with writers like Danilo Kis as models. His recent book of supernatural tales, "Last Stories and Other Stories," is modeled for the most part on writers like De Maupassant, Le Fanu, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and quite a few others I've probably never heard of. So we wind up with silly reviews like Dwight Garner's in the NYT.
My previous comment is referring to this statement, not to the question about formatting: "I'm also, in general, again reminded that Vollmann does not come from the tradition of the English Realist Novel. Much more so the sagas and epics and things like Genji, and Lautréamont."
New York Journal of Books
"The Dying Grass is a novel for the dedicated reader; that is, one who enjoys a many-layered story that unravels slowly, which is told in an unconventional style.... At 1,367 pages it’s too long for this 140 characters digital age. This is not a novel for the casual reader who wants a fast story quickly told. Nor is it a book one may pick to read a chapter or two before going to sleep. The Dying Grass requires concentration, but the rewards are worth the effort. Highly recommended."
I think it's a fair enough warning for readers who prefer books nice and easy. But then, again, would the easy reading crowd even be looking in this direction?
"The Dying Grass is a novel for the dedicated reader; that is, one who enjoys a many-layered story that unravels slowly, which is told in an unconventional style.... At 1,367 pages it’s too long for this 140 characters digital age. This is not a novel for the casual reader who wants a fast story quickly told. Nor is it a book one may pick to read a chapter or two before going to sleep. The Dying Grass requires concentration, but the rewards are worth the effort. Highly recommended."
I think it's a fair enough warning for readers who prefer books nice and easy. But then, again, would the easy reading crowd even be looking in this direction?
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