William T. Vollman Books

Celine doesn't have much good to say about the world, and is also notorious for having written 3 antisemitic pamphlets in the late 30s, but it's hard to ignore his genius. Journey To The End Of The Night was his first exploration of the dark and rancid side of humanity. Bardamu's experiences are expressionistic renderings of events in Celine's life.

From the battlefields of WWI, to the African jungle, to Detroit, and back to France, it's a journey into mankind's heart of darkness that the reader will not soon forget. Was Celine the world's greatest misanthrope? The deepest pessimist? I'm not sure, because he does find good human qualities here, although they are as rare as rain in the desert. Journey To The End Of The Night is an important novel that influenced writers as diverse as Beckett, Sartre, Genet, Henry Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Heller, and Vonnegut.

Whodathought? Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I'd love this book. Celine has a weird reputation here, because I have never in all my years in university literature departments heard a good word about this fantastic writer. I have heard charges of anti-Semitism, which may be true, but Celine's at heart a humanist who may have simply fallen for a kind of conventional prejudice rather than the sort of brutalizing racism we connect with the 20th century. Celine is a brilliant stylist and perhaps a conventionally disgruntled WWI-generation crank. He writes a profanity-laced prose filled with zingers, witticisms, puns, word-play, and savage put-downs. Unlike some contemporaries, his anger is not an outgrowth of pretentious poses; his is the old-fashioned rage, of the sort one finds in Genet and Solzhenitsyn. This style has almost disappeared now, but it is common among intellectuals and artists of the early-20th century. Karl Krauss comes to mind as does Bertolt Brecht. Theirs is a bitter sarcasm, mercilessly witty, but poignant. Celine and the rest were brutalized during WWI and have a lot of anger toward to societies and governments that sought to justify the insanity and waste of that gruesome war.

I can't think of a more original , funny and yet saracastic book than this one. Just when you think that the author had exhausted his brilliant use of words to describe an aspect of human nature and French society, he comes up with something new within the next paragraph or page. This book is tilted towards describing more of the negative aspects of everything but there are enough positive books out there for any one to read. For something with passages that will literally make you laugh out loud and get you to rethink the extent of free creative writing during the early 20th century , read this book at once! If you're easily offended or constantly critiquing a work of art as you read it, then this one is not for you.

This review refer to Spanish version - " Viaje al Fin de la Noche" / Maestros del Siglo XX- Editorial Oveja Negra

I read this book in my early twenties, along a long list of nihilist, existentialist... the unavoidable Henry Miller.. I was captivated by the expressionisms of his own inner feeling as he travels here and there observing an absurd humanity.

I'm just picking up the book and looking at the notes I made so long ago, not so clear...

Definitely the book to read in the twenties, the book to review in your forties and I predict the book to quietly glimpse and flavor in your sixties.

Human spirit is contradictory, the pen that accomplished this fine work was an anti-Semitic and pro-occupations of the Nazis.. as one preface of the book says, he avoided the death sentence by a miraculously act.. Being I an absolute anti-Nazi .. I can only judge the literary creation and not its creator

My notes take me so far away.. I guess the notions of love and the uneasy feeling of trying to observe stoically the stupidly of nature, came in part from here... in those days my feelings of anti-Europeanism were forming from the study of its militaristic history and by the conviction that the last wars of humanity were going to start there.. all of that changed, of course, but the notion of how absurd the I WW was, came from the insight (I am not a translator so please forgive any fatal errors)

".. No matter how hard I tried to look into my memory, I cannot recall of any harm I had done to the Germans. I always was nice and educated toward them. I knew the Germans a little, I even assisted to a schooling Germany when I was a younger in the surroundings of Hanover. I had spoken their language. Back then they were a noisy screaming mass of howling punks. After school we went to the surrounding woods to fondle the girls, we also shot with pistols and arches that we bought for four marks. We drank beer with sugar. But form that to be here killing each others without further explanations, here in the middle of the road, there seemed to be emptiness even an abyss. Just too much of a difference"

Be ready to embark in a literary journey of fine XX century prose

The book in question is a triumph in every sense of the word. If you aren't taken in from the first couple of pages then do yourself a favor and kill yourself immediately. What Celine is able to do here is not only to paint a portrait of a character, or of a type, but in the end the whole of humanity. Much of the humanity in question is not pleasant, nor are the situations they force the poor, but resourceful and essentially strong, protaganist into. If you've ever found yourself in a foreign country with little idea of what is expected from you, then you can relate. If you have had family members or girlfriends encourage you to go die in a useless foreign war, then you can relate. If moments of tenderness wash over you and then crash against the shores of existential absurdity, then you can relate. If have not only a heart, but an eye, and a head to perceive the world by then you can relate to this great work of art. Celine is called cynical, but his cynicism is the kind of a failed romantic, not of a mysanthrope. If you can see past the bitter veneer what you'll find is a person who always expects alittle more from his fellow human beings than he usually gets, and despite his protests he usually gives despite himself. This might be a bit harsh- but I don't think so- if you read this book and don't get it, don't see the humor and absurdity, or the love that runs beneath it, than you are a worthless mass of flesh and bone and should find a way to save the rest of the world from your continued prescence. This book is a litmus test of humanity.

Vollmann's work is expensive, sprawling, beautiful, and sterilizingly heavy. It's historical analysis, personal anecdote, philosophical inquiry, ethical manifesto, war journalism (his), photography and drawings (mostly his), and thumbnail illustrations. And it's worth the price to get one of the few remaining sets. You'll become intimately acquainted with Trotsky, Cortes, Lincoln, Plato, John Brown, Stalin, Leonidas, Gandhi, the Unabomber, de Sade, Hitler, Montezuma, the Ik, Napoleon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others. Will you run across an occasional typo or forced metaphor? Sure. But considering the product, who cares? It's brilliant and very, very readable. Two things particularly please me about this work. First, Vollmann never pretends to objectivity. RURD is an "essay" in the original sense of the word, and provokes plenty of discussion. Second, McSweeney's typography and binding are breathtaking, so that each volume is a pleasure to see and hold, much less read. If you enjoy the abridgment, the set is worth all 50,000+ pennies, or whatever the last sets are going for.

Vollmann has called this his life's work, and it shows, the book distills his original heart and soul, tearing through readable passages of objective reasoning, making circuitous and interesting routes towards his moral abstract for violence. The reading is passionate and well-reasoned, even if flawed at times. For me, it has exposed me to more historical figures and recent phiolospophical thinking that has escaped modern culture (or at least my Western one). I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes to observe history (like fans of Robert Conquest) through the lens of modern philospy.

I have the revised edition (which is availble remaindered at the Barnes and Nobles in my areas for ten bucks), and I can see from the progress I have made in it that it is an extremely important work and might unlock some of Vollman's other work. However, I have some reservations; the abridgement does not seem like it was what Vollman wanted, and some of the cuts leave a disjointed feeling. I have found that I can skip around in the book without losing the meaning, and the arguments do not seem to develop from the first page to the last, but gradually throughout the book. I am reluctant to invest in the seven volume set, but I would like to see an abridgement that is more considered and smooth. Vollman states that he abridged "for money"...when he does it for love of or respect for his readers I think this will be his masterpiece. As is, it is very very good but somehow lack cohesion.

In writing Rising Up and Rising Down, William T. Vollmann has forgotten that the primary purpose of writing a book is communication. To this end, one would expect the author to use a consistent style to aid the reader's progress, rather than arguing:

Should I have standardized these inconsistencies? I recall Lawrence of Arabia's comments to the proofreader who warned him that he had spelled the name of this favorite camel every which way in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence replied simply, "She was a splendid beast." (p. 534.)

One would also expect the writer to express his ideas, not only completely, but also concisely. Even in the abridged version, arguments are stated one on top of the other, separated from the information that supports them. As the book progresses, earlier arguments are often referred to by number, forcing the reader to flip through the pages to recall the passages cited.
Near the beginning of the book, Vollmann writes:

I had a gun . . . and right then I did not feel comforted . . . The books that I read and the things that I saw while writing this book affected me more than I wanted them to . . . Near the end of the twenty years that I spent writing this book, I began to suffer from frequent nightmares of violence . . . They were not normal sights that I'd seen-or were they all too normal?-and these were not normal thoughts, and I knew this and sought to dampen the vibrations of my paranoia . . . (pp. 78-79)

I submit that Mr. Vollmann wrote this book, not to inform his readers, but to vanquish his own demons. In reading Rising Up and Rising Down, I was sometimes informed, sometimes confused and often numbed. Further revision and editing might make this book into a useful study in violence, or, perhaps it was never more than the author's self-therapy.

The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -the term deployed by Vollman to refer to the ethical analysis of violence - is clearly necessary, but the biological realities of violence always seem to render the sterile rationality of philosophers irrelevant. Determining when violence is and is not morally justified is such a difficult task that it is tempting to just dispose of the question, taking refuge in absolutist positions like pacifism or Kissingerian realism. As a result, worthwhile contributions to the practical ethics of war are few and far between.

This is the best attempt to reason through the moral problems of violence since Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and it improves on that flawed work in every way. Vollman's analysis is not limited to nation-states, he distinguishes between just and unjust regimes, he does not assume that there must be a binary moral value to every act of violence, and he knows when to conclude that a moral problem is insoluable.

Vollman passes judgment confidently when it is called for, but he has a healthy respect the lesser of two evils, the exigencies of war, and the pressures of decisionmaking in violent situations. He makes objective moral judgments, but they are clearly informed by his own subjective encounters with violence and death.

That said, this book has a lot of problems. First off, Vollman is clearly a thrill-seeker. When he talks about packing a handgun in Golden Gate Park or smoking crack cocaine, he reveals a very unusual attitude toward death. We should be suspicious of the moral handwringing of anyone who has deliberately seeks out violence. When he recounts the deaths of his colleagues while he was a reporter in the Balkans, I find myself wondering if this was not another "limit experience" that he actively chased. The experience of an aspiring novelist-DETERMINED to find abysses to gaze into-is just not comparable to that of the Somali and Sarajevan civilians who had no choice but to passively endure extreme violence.

The other big problem with this book is the lack of structure and logical rigor. If you have read any of his fiction, you know that this is just how Vollman's (brilliant) mind works, but this book suffers for it. It's a sustained meditation on violence, not a work to which the reader can refer for moral guidance in a specific situation. But it's still the best contemporary work in an otherwise empty field and very much worth reading.