Two reviews of note in this weekend's newspapers...
Ed Champion on William Vollmann:
The prolific writer William T. Vollmann once traveled to the Arctic, nearly freezing to death, to know what it was like to feel cold and hungry. He smoked crack cocaine with prostitutes to hear their true-blue tales. He survived a mine explosion in a Balkan war zone, with a close friend and another man dying in the Jeep he was sitting in. He authored a 3,300-page treatise, "Rising Up and Rising Down," which examined various forms of violence, applying them to a moral compass.
These rugged credentials suggest the right author for a book on poverty. But "Poor People," which has the comparatively well-off Vollmann compiling his conversations with the downtrodden, is fragmentary and often contradictory in tone, much like poverty itself. In his book's "dictionary" section, Vollmann defines being "poor" as "lacking and desirous of what I have; unhappy in his or her own normality." But Vollmann, traveling to Thailand, the Philippines, Russia and several other nations, never quite pinpoints a norm. He styles his own "phenomena" of poverty as an alternative to the United Nations' "dimensions of poverty." But if Vollmann wishes to take the U.N. to task, a book composed largely of anecdotes and meditative banter may not be the best way to do so.
Russell Banks on Milan Kundera:
Not surprisingly, then, reading “The Curtain” is like spending a long desultory afternoon into the evening sitting over coffee and cigarettes in a pleasant cafe listening to Milan Kundera hold forth on history, literature, music, politics, large countries versus small, East versus West, the lyric versus the novelistic, Paris versus Prague and so on into the night. One has the impression that Kundera, at least on the page, is a fabulous talker and not an especially good listener. But he is 78 now, and he has lived through the military occupation and liberation of his country twice and has endured more than three decades of exile; he has written at least three of the most admired novels of our time, “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” plus another half-dozen books of fiction. Kundera’s opinions, reflections, memories and desires are well worth listening to.
Besides, he is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion. For instance, while analyzing Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina’s suicide, he notes in a tossed-off, parenthetical aside: “Stendhal likes to cut off the sound in the middle of a scene; we stop hearing dialogue and start to follow a character’s secret thinking,” which leads him to speak of Anna’s last thoughts: “Here Tolstoy is anticipating what Joyce will do 50 years later, far more systematically, in ‘Ulysses’ — what will be called ‘interior monologue’ or ‘stream of consciousness.’ ” Which in turn leads him to observe that “with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine’s life. And that is much harder, for the more dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities. ... Tolstoy’s examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a ‘discovery’ that has no parallel in the history of the novel and never will have.” End of parenthesis.
