Heo Yêu Diêm Vương - Tập 2 tải xuống LIT miễn phí

Jeanniffer Susana laflaca2702391 — Vollman’s guided tour through a highly personal experience of Thai and Cambodian prostitution is operated neither for the benefit of lusty travelers nor for the righteously indignant. He deploys neither statistics nor sob stories to manipulate his readers, nor does he pander to voyeurists and perverts. However, his project is still manipulative—especially because of the tacked on narrative frame. The bulk of the novel (at least 80% of it) transpires in chapters three and four. These can (and should) stand on their own as the full text of Vollman’s effort. The novel would exercise far more raw power without the sloppy and stereotypical fragments and short stories that he has packed around the edges. The first chapter follows the grade school protagonist through the process of being humiliated in the playground, misunderstood by his parents and sheltered by little girls willing to show him their underpants. The selection of details is irritatingly limited to those sorts of events that might “explain” the “deviousness” of a grownup sex tourist. The second chapter falls into the same trap, showing the protagonist in his early twenties grappling with suicide, substances and relational inhibitions. Are we supposed to take these forty anemic pages as the cause for the protagonist’s drive to start his third chapter with the sentence, “Once upon a time a journalist (the protagonist) and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia?” A throwaway chapter is sort of excusable; but not if it is meant to work as an interpretive key. The final four chapters, each less than ten pages of fragmentary narrative snippets, dream sequences and hallucination, are presented as a sort of verdict or moral. It seems like all six less substantive chapters might have been requested by an editor who was trying to render the book more digestible for popular audiences—to defend the rottenness of the two core chapters by offering a justification and a punishment. These tactics should be beneath William Vollman; they cheapen what he accomplishes in the sour guts of his novel. “Butterfly Stories” does not in any way deserve the comparison; but imagine if “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” started with thirty pages about how tough it was to be a young Hunter S. Thompson and then ended with him reconstituting in a rehabilitation program—that is how affected the periphery of Vollman’s novel seems. Now, what about the two hundred pages in between? They come from the mirthless perspective of someone almost adolescent in his willful refusal to acknowledge just how self-pitying he is. The photographer who travels with the journalist is not ever humanized. He is just a more promiscuous, hurtful and opportunistic person than the journalist, someone so jaded and emotionally detached that he will always make the journalist seem dimensional and interesting by comparison—if he didn’t seem somehow like a realistic companion to the journalist, I would accuse him of being a cheap plot device. Vollman’s writing veers unexpectedly between crass artlessness and attempts at denser, more poetic and even experimental fiction. So, a reader encounters something as gradeschool as “Eventually, she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he’d have to do it. What a chore! But life isn’t always a bed of guacamole. He squeezed K-Y into her cunt, handed her the rubber, and then she said she didn’t know how to put it on . . . Wasn’t that SOMETHING?” And just a few pages later, Vollman may start unleashing sentences like the following (which I will not excerpt in full): “Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men’s cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus . . . etc.” I’m not sure that Vollman actually succeeds with his less conventional dream/hallucination prose; but he doesn’t totally fail and I appreciate his trying. I also found the two primary chapters addictive in spite of their faults and honest in spite of their manipulative self-defenses. “Atlas” was a better and more memorable book—and certainly the place to start. But, “Butterfly Stories” was worth reading as a sort of faux-memoire/travel literature offering. Vollman’s work that falls in those genres will continue to interest me. I haven’t been able to make any headway into his massive myth/history/shirt series. If anyone can suggest the path of least resistance, I’d be willing to give it another attempt.

Max Prive maxprive — Yay! A book with character who spells her name the same way I do! Woot!

Edu Pastor epastordua0d0b — i liked this book it is about a girl who goes to a drama school.