2 months ago
27
I have an interest on american maximalists and I've been wanting to see what Vollmann's work contains as I've seen him being praised very highly in the past. I started his novel ''You Bright and Risen Angels'' expecting the hallmarks of maximalism: tons of characters, a confusing and disjointed that will eventually figure itself out...But 200 pages in I'm feeling a little disappointed.
I didn't exactly expect this novel to be an essay-novel to the style of Robert Musil or Hermann Broch but so far it seems to rely a lot more on relatively ''cheap'' humor and drawn out sequences to envelop it and while I find the themes of criticism of capitalism, white supremacy and the consequences of technology interesting I expected it to do so with more subtlety. Calling the electric company of the main villain ''White Power'' is on brand with the rest of the novel, but hardly very clever.
Maybe I came in to this novel with the wrong expectations and I have to adjust my vision to better enjoy it. Did you find some qualities in this work or in other works of Vollmann that I have perhaps missed so far?
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