Life & empathy

Newsweek interview the mighty William Vollmann.

If William T. Vollmann ever wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as many speculate he will – he knows exactly what he will do with the $1.1 million pot the Swedes attach to the award. “It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,” he says, sitting on his futon, chuckling, a half-empty bottle of pretty good bourbon between us.

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Robert L. Caserio, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who has studied Vollmann extensively, thinks Vollmann deserves a far greater audience: “When I consider Vollmann’s gigantic energy and global reach, and consider that feeble, ill-writing Alice Munro has won a Nobel Prize, I am staggered by how pathetically shrunken our standards of magnitude have become.” He adds that Seven Dreams “grandly revises American and North American history and economics. The revision, which takes the breadth of the continent for its inspiration, reminds us of the smallness, and the pettiness, of the national venture that began in 1776. It’s a salutary reminder.”

Rothacker says much the same: “It is a shame that William T. Vollmann’s relevance needs to be explained. He is good, scary good, possibly the greatest living American writer, and I mean this with no hyperbole.” He adds that he is “sure” Vollmann will one day get the Nobel. (It may come as little surprise that Rothacker has a Vollmann-inspired tattoo: runic symbols for “piss, lime and vitriol” from You Bright and Risen Angels).

[Via Paris Review]