Hailed by Newsday as "the most unconventional-and possibly the most exciting and imaginative-novelist at work today," William T. Vollmann has also established himself as an intrepid journalist willing to go to the hottest spots on the planet. Here he draws on these formidable talents to create a web of fifty-three interconnected tales, what he calls?a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in.? Set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, Mogadishu to New York, and provocatively combining autobiography with invention, fantasy with reportage, these stories examine poverty, violence, and loss even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, the infinitely precious pain of love. The Atlas brings to life a fascinating array of human beings: an old Inuit walrus-hunter, urban aborigines in Sydney, a crack-addicted prostitute, and even Vollmann himself.
For some fine people who've helped me travel:
Will Blythe of Esquire magazine.
Elizabeth Mitchell and Bob Guccione, Jr., of Spin magazine.
Paul Slovak of Viking Penguin.
Without you, friends, I would have seen much less.
This book was inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's "palm-of-the-hand stories," which I enjoy rereading at bedtime, in the five minutes between lying down and turning off the light. It is equally pleasurable for me to page through a certain great atlas that I have, idling over unknown countries while I wait for my companion of the evening to finish brushing her teeth. The writing of these stories has given me the same sort of desultory joy. As James Branch Cabell remarked, "Toward no one of those pre-eminent topics of my era do I feel incited to direct an intelligent and broad-minded concern." What you hold, then, is but a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in. I hope that you like it, in spite of its omission of a continent or two. And if you were to keep it by you as a pillow-book, reading through it in no particular order, skipping the tales you find tedious, dozing amidst my somniferous paragraphs, I'd feel that at last I'd done as much good in the world as the manufacturers of our drowsiest codeine syrups. Slide it under your buttocks when commencing the night's revels. Slay the nightmarish flies of sleep with its hard covers. Lay it across your eyes to guard yourself from light. And may your soul flit freely across this world! For, despite the opinion of a certain Transcendentalist, who informed us that "traveling is a fool's paradise," other philosophers reverence the salubriousness of a change of clime. Consider the school essay of a second grader of Cambodian origin. The children were asked to expound upon the topic "The Future." This boy wrote:
IN the Future I would like the world to be a war zone IN CHINA. I hope I will be in the NAVY to help the USA NAVY to Kill ALLIES. I will Kill polpot and his men and famliy. I will come back as a heor. I will be the only CAMBOADIAO on the ship.
May we all kill our best allies before they kill us. And so, reader, good night.*
W.T.V.
* For those who require games and calculations in order to drowse, I should state that this collection is arranged palindromically: the motif in the first story is taken up again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and so on. In addition, certain tales have tides in common with books I have previously written; they are thematic reductions in the manner of Kawabata's short "Snow Country," derived from his novel
Mount Aetna, Sicily 37.45 N, 15.00 E
Afghanistan
Agra, Division of Uttar Pradesh, India 27.09 N, 78.00 E
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada 45.50 N, 78.20 W
Allan Water, Ontario, Canada 50.15 N, 90.14 W
Antananarivo, Madagascar 18.52 S, 47.30 E
Avignon, Department Vaucluse, Provence, France 43.56 N, 4.48 E
Bangkok
(Krungthepmahanakhornbowornrattamakosinmahintarayuthayama- hadlikokpopnopparatratchathaniburiromudomratchaniwetmahasathan),
Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (Prathet Thai)
13.44 N, 100.30 E
Ban Rak Tai, Mae Hong Song Province, Thailand
Battambang City, Province Battambang, Cambodia 13.06 N, 103.13 E
Battle Rock, Oregon, U.S.A.
Beograd, Serbia, Yugoslavia 44.50 N, 20.30 E
Berkeley, California, U.S.A. 37.52 N, 122.17 W
Berlin, Germany 52.32 N, 13.25 E
Big Bend, California, U.S.A. 39.16 N, 120.39 W
Bologna, Emilia Romagna, Italia 44.30 N, I 1.20 E
Boot Hill, Nebraska, U.S.A.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 42.20 N, 71.05 W
Budapest, Hungary 47.30 N, 19.03 E
Cairo, Egypt 30.00 N, 31.15 E
California, U.S.A.
Capri, Campania, Italia 40.33 N, 14.15 E
Charlevoix, Québec, Canada
Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand 18.48 N, 98.59 E
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada 58.45 N, 94.00 W
Coral Harbour, Southampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada 64.10 N, 83.15 W
Cornwall, Ontario, Canada 45.02 N, 74.45 W
Delhi, India 28.40 N, 77.14 E
Diesel Bend, Utah, U.S.A.
Elma, Manitoba, Canada 45.50 N, 95.56 W
Eureka, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada 80.00 N, 85.40 W
Frankfurt am Main, Germany 50.06 N, 8.41 E
Goa, Goa, India 15.31 N, 73.56 E
Grand Central Station, New York City, U.S.A. 40.40 N, 73.58 W
Great Western Desert, Northern Territory, Australia
Guildwood, Ontario, Canada
Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A. 43.42 N, 72.17 W
Herculaneum, near Napoli, Campania, Italia 40.50 N, 14.15 E
Highway 88, California, U.S.A.
