William T. Vollman Books

[...] In solitude a young woman lies on her bed reading and underlining line after line by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Like the one that begins with "Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination." The electronic letter glides idly by the currents of the Mississippi, until it reminds itself that it is charged with a responsibility and therefore must make its delivery to the other side of the country. And so the email slides pass West Virginia and New Jersey, and twists upward toward Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, passing towns with names that come straight out of an eighth-grade American history survey-book. [...] --from "Passages"

I guess like many American readers, I first became interested in Celine by way of Bukowski. It was a mistake to begin the book with expectations of similarity in terms of style or content, but I quickly warmed to this great author's totally unique voice and view of the world. The ability to combine outrageous humor with the grimmest subject matter imaginable is a rare talent, and Celine had it in spades. I'm quite sure this is one book I will be revisiting often in the future.

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.

I'm not writing a reivew, rather, I am making a plea. This should probably be in the discussion section...alright, fine...I'll make this brief and head the their next.

This book absolutely needs to be made available in Hardcover!!! Why isn't it? Is this not a classic? Here, we have the definative translation. Hopefully, no other translation will ever be attempted. I've gone through three trade-paperbacks of Journey... and would appreciate nothing more to own an Everyman's Library Cloth Edition that would last me for the rest of my life. It baffles me. There are 93 overwhelmingly positive reviews of this book, and yet we are forced to read a cheap paperback. Believe me, I try to take very good care of the flimsly cheap little things, but eventually they wear out.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please, those with the ability to do so: TAKE HEED. make me a nice hard-bound book, with the pages stitched into the binding, with a nice flexible but solid cover bound with cloth. Tell me what Font was used on the very last page! Maybe even include a map of Celine's paris.

Also, Death On the Installment Plan I like even better than this book, so if you could do that one too i'd be much obliged.

I don't understand why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as great as those two authors are, are translated time and time again. I think it's shameless for Pevear and Volokhonsky to go around translating these books for the Nth time, when the Garnett and Mauve translations really can't be beat. None of that matters though.

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 read this a year ago, and can recall little about it. My point exactly.

I have it listed as - too long and erratic.

Having special ordered this book I forced myself to read it all.
I wasn't impressed with Vollmann and his writing had no effect.

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.

The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -Vollman's label for 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.