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zacharyfoote's review against another edition
5.0
really more of a 4.5. maybe soonish i'll do a little review
iangreenleaf's review
Who is our author, William T. Vollman? Imagine that [a:Norman Maclean|16943|Norman Maclean|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1319767261p2/16943.jpg] took peyote, climbed to the top of the Y in the Hollywood sign, and spent three days up there hallucinating that he was [a:Hunter S. Thompson|5237|Hunter S. Thompson|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1206560814p2/5237.jpg]. Then on the third night he disappeared and no one heard a thing from him until five months later he stepped off a cargo ship in San Pedro with a tattoo and a slight limp that he didn't have before. That, perhaps, is William T. Vollman. Or else that's only the memory of a William T. Vollman who never was.
William T. Vollman is a slightly mad person, and this is a very mad book. I've been reading it for months and I'm not even a quarter of the way through. Imperial County is a sprawling enigma of a place that's hard to love yet hard not to be transfixed by, and so it's perhaps fitting that Imperial the book is a sprawling work wrought over a decade by an author who cannot bring himself to believe wholeheartedly in anything Imperial has ever stood for, but cannot bring himself to leave it alone either.
I don't know that I could recommend this book, exactly, to anyone. But if the gaze of a confident man is set upon this course, well, there's hardly anything I could say to turn you from it. Nor would I, perhaps. This world needs those seekers who do not doubt themselves.
Imperial the book is a tangled mess of borders, of histories, of loss, of people whose faces are right before you but still unknowable, or maybe familiar but just out of reach of the faded photograph's point of focus; of fragments of dreams that were and stories that never were, lives that are lived only in the records they left or lives that were lived beyond the reach of our records at all. Of course, I think William T. Vollman would agree that Imperial the county, Imperial the land, Imperial that resists all attempts at delineation, Imperial is all of those things, too.
William T. Vollman is a slightly mad person, and this is a very mad book. I've been reading it for months and I'm not even a quarter of the way through. Imperial County is a sprawling enigma of a place that's hard to love yet hard not to be transfixed by, and so it's perhaps fitting that Imperial the book is a sprawling work wrought over a decade by an author who cannot bring himself to believe wholeheartedly in anything Imperial has ever stood for, but cannot bring himself to leave it alone either.
I don't know that I could recommend this book, exactly, to anyone. But if the gaze of a confident man is set upon this course, well, there's hardly anything I could say to turn you from it. Nor would I, perhaps. This world needs those seekers who do not doubt themselves.
Imperial the book is a tangled mess of borders, of histories, of loss, of people whose faces are right before you but still unknowable, or maybe familiar but just out of reach of the faded photograph's point of focus; of fragments of dreams that were and stories that never were, lives that are lived only in the records they left or lives that were lived beyond the reach of our records at all. Of course, I think William T. Vollman would agree that Imperial the county, Imperial the land, Imperial that resists all attempts at delineation, Imperial is all of those things, too.
mrjoe's review
4.0
I do not recommend this book for most people. It's frustratingly long and detailed to the point of being quite maddening at times. Yet some of the time I loved this book. Without the footnotes it's 1150 pages. Reduce repetition and cut out 300 pages and it'd be a lot stronger. But Vollmann has guts. He doesn't compromise. And I respect that. Took me 7 months to read, in which time I put Imperial down at times and read about 20 other books. You gotta take breaks, but it's do-able. I've never been cheated out of a great novel in my life.
christie's review
4.0
This one took me a little while, and while I started it years ago, it took on more relevance after I moved to the border area, albeit in Texas, not in California. The book examines so many complicated matters involving Imperial and the author offers a unique perspective and analysis, based on his experiences and research. The bite-sized (and sometimes slightly larger) pieces offered up by the author help one get a pretty wide understanding of the entity that is Imperial.
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