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A review by delore
The Rifles: Volume Six of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes by William T. Vollmann
5.0
I picked this up expecting a short, interesting read that I could essentially breeze through, but it wasn't long before I realised that this was not that kind of book. Wall-to-wall with dense, poetic language and a cast of characters seeming to transform into each other and across historical periods between sentences - the omnipresent chill of this novel struck me as seemingly neverending.
At first, I resented the book for its difficulty. I found the construction of the Franklin/Subzero/I/You protagonist deliberately difficult and not clearly established. The density (i.e. lack of paragraphing) of the text was difficult to swallow; often finding myself zoning out multiple times before making it to the bottom of a single page.
But the thing that kept bringing me back to the book was Vollmann's endless literary inventiveness and the power of the ideas he evoked.
Not too far in, I fortuitously stumbled across an interview with the American broadcaster Michael Silverblatt, where he states:
"The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age, with rereading."
For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, after this point, I really started to pay close attention to the language - using a bookmark, or sometimes even a finger, to focus on each line (and also partly to conceal the daunting volume of those wall-to-wall paragraphs beneath).
Upon doing this, the book became strangely comprehensible.
The once confusing duality of the protagonist(s) revealed itself as a meditation on vicariousness: how the authors attempt to retrace the footsteps of these historical figures (in an attempt to more authentically retell their stories) inadvertently reincarnated them through his own experiences. The poetry of the language went from being inscrutable to transporting - feeling the chill and disorientation of the characters from well beyond the other side of the page.
My favourite section - and perhaps the lynchpin of the novel - was Subzero's experiences in Isachsen: a fraught and nightmarish retelling of the author's own near-death week spent bunkered down on the barren, completely uninhabited island, where the threat of a bead of sweat can mean the difference between life and death. I would argue that this is the only truly 'page-turning' section of the book, but I think it comes at a time when it is both quite rewarding and yet at the same time, quite offputting (given the extreme discomfort and paranoia that it elicits in the reader); suggesting that there is no real escape from Vollmann's invocation of the Arctic wasteland.
'The Rifles' is by no means a straightforward piece of historical fiction -- the language is dense, the landscapes are icy and the characters difficult. But I think this is Vollmann at his most evocative, not to mention his most challenging, and I think it is what he asks from the reader throughout the experience of reading this book that is what makes it so special.
At first, I resented the book for its difficulty. I found the construction of the Franklin/Subzero/I/You protagonist deliberately difficult and not clearly established. The density (i.e. lack of paragraphing) of the text was difficult to swallow; often finding myself zoning out multiple times before making it to the bottom of a single page.
But the thing that kept bringing me back to the book was Vollmann's endless literary inventiveness and the power of the ideas he evoked.
Not too far in, I fortuitously stumbled across an interview with the American broadcaster Michael Silverblatt, where he states:
"The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age, with rereading."
For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, after this point, I really started to pay close attention to the language - using a bookmark, or sometimes even a finger, to focus on each line (and also partly to conceal the daunting volume of those wall-to-wall paragraphs beneath).
Upon doing this, the book became strangely comprehensible.
The once confusing duality of the protagonist(s) revealed itself as a meditation on vicariousness: how the authors attempt to retrace the footsteps of these historical figures (in an attempt to more authentically retell their stories) inadvertently reincarnated them through his own experiences. The poetry of the language went from being inscrutable to transporting - feeling the chill and disorientation of the characters from well beyond the other side of the page.
My favourite section - and perhaps the lynchpin of the novel - was Subzero's experiences in Isachsen: a fraught and nightmarish retelling of the author's own near-death week spent bunkered down on the barren, completely uninhabited island, where the threat of a bead of sweat can mean the difference between life and death. I would argue that this is the only truly 'page-turning' section of the book, but I think it comes at a time when it is both quite rewarding and yet at the same time, quite offputting (given the extreme discomfort and paranoia that it elicits in the reader); suggesting that there is no real escape from Vollmann's invocation of the Arctic wasteland.
'The Rifles' is by no means a straightforward piece of historical fiction -- the language is dense, the landscapes are icy and the characters difficult. But I think this is Vollmann at his most evocative, not to mention his most challenging, and I think it is what he asks from the reader throughout the experience of reading this book that is what makes it so special.