You Bright and Risen Angels is a work of absolute insanity. It's a messy, sprawling piece filled with deranged nonsense and a bizarre sensibility, yet it's also speared with moments of true brilliance.

To say it lacks a plot isn't entirely fair, but the plot that exists is more about dualities. We have reaction vs. revolution, electricity vs. nature, bullies vs. nerds, and capitalism vs. socialism. At one end, there's Mr. White and his Blue Globe electricity conglomerate, controlling the world through an environment-destroying corporate dictatorship. At the other, there's Bug, his small band of revolutionaries, and their insect allies, willing to destroy without discrimination to topple the global order.

The novel's world is like a cartoon, and its characters are caricatures. But as the book's epigraph says, the "exaggerations are really true." It refracts our world in a shattered way, presenting an alternate reality with distant links to our own.

Most of the first sixty pages should probably be stricken. And, like many massive post-modern tomes, don't expect the characters' arcs to be fully resolved. This book mostly goes from nowhere to nowhere. In fact, the table of contents spills far past the actual pages, suggesting an entire (and imaginary) second half.

However, this is a work of unconstrained abandon. It's like a virtuoso spilling his cerebrum onto an easel in scattered marks and iridescent squiggles. At first, I disliked the book, but then I warmed to it, and finally, I was taken in by Vollman's vision and learned to love it. Its page-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs are truly marvels to behold, and its chaotic and wicked humor is both cruel and joyful.

A war between insects and electricity... Vollmann's experience as a war correspondent during the Soviet-Afghan war (in some mysterious way) laid the groundwork for his first novel. The conflict is presented within an autobiographical meta-narrative where the author details the history of the bug conflict from his work computer, after staying late in the office. Filled with frenetic schizo-asides and transtemporal detours, "You Bright and Risen Angels" truly takes a long story and makes it even longer. Nothing is presented in a linear fashion. The timeline is completely overshadowed by all the random addendums and side plots. In fact, the conclusion of the war occurs in a fictitious second volume, and we get closure through random flash-forward snippets scattered throughout the book.

If you recall anything from that 100-level creative writing course you took to fulfill the remaining credit hours of the humanities requirement for your major, you might remember being told that you shouldn't rely too much on coincidence to extricate your characters from difficult situations. However, Vollmann does just that in this book. Well, actually, he alters the laws of the universe to suit his story. It's like when you played superheroes with the neighbor boy and he fired a deadly laser directly at your chest, but, oh, wait, you had just developed laser immunity, or rather, you developed a laser shield that bounces the laser right back at the sender. The world of "You Bright and Risen Angels" is malleable and fluid, subject to fantastical changes at any moment.

All I can do is praise the imagination. Writing such inane nonsense of this caliber demands generational talent. My review might seem negative, but I actually loved this book. There is no doubt in my mind that Vollmann is the greatest living writer.

Sidenote: In the unyielding camera of my mind's eye, I envision a meeting room full of G-Men in early 1996. After completing an 18-hour marathon session of popcorn reading "You Bright and Risen Angels," they all start cheering and shouting, "we got 'em!" because the Author's Note at the end of the book would persuade anyone that Vollmann was, in fact, the Unabomber.

I haven't read the whole thing yet.

However, that one chapter that I did read truly broke my heart.

The emotions and the story within that chapter were so powerful and moving.

It made me feel a deep sense of sadness and longing.

Now, I am determined to find a copy of it.

I need to experience that chapter again and perhaps explore the rest of the work.

It's like a missing piece of a puzzle that I must find to complete the picture.

I will search high and low, in libraries, bookstores, and even online.

Surely, there must be a copy out there waiting for me to discover.

Once I find it, I know it will be a precious find and a source of great inspiration and reflection.

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It was the best of novels, it was the worst of novels.

Its premise, that through a little William Burroughs-style satirical fantasy, the author could transform a couple of adolescent traumas (summer camp, swim team) into an epic struggle between capitalist reactionaries and revolutionaries re-framed as a war between insects and electricity, might have sufficed to support a 150, or even a 200-page novel.

But, then again, the very prolixity and the endlessly long sentences that swirl around themselves - dare I say it? like moths around a lightbulb - are what's best about this practically unreadable novel.

It's a case of style not only overshadowing but ruthlessly crushing content - exactly as these post-1960s revolutionary bugs are squashed underfoot.

Oh, how I remember those heady years of the early 1980s in the Bay Area!

My own first two books (Poison and Antidote, stories, and Inbetween, a novel) are, if a whole lot less prolix, also of this same time and place.

Granted I opted for more Oulipo-ian formalist tricks to break the barriers of modernist realism, thematically we were brethren.

Also in our rejection of Modernism, even if here Vollmann is leaning on the most radical of the Beats (and, one is tempted to say, joining Pynchon in prolixity although W.T.V. claims not to have yet read Gravity's Rainbow when he penned the tales of these angels) rather than straining across the ocean toward Perec and Blanchot as I was.

I do have to give this novel credit for name-checking Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, and the Haight Ashbury - places where I lived as a child and where I now live during my summer vacations.

I never expected to see those lost and uninteresting suburban zones mentioned in a serious masterpiece of US literature! So there's that.

But, well, the downside of prolixity is that it bludgeons one with words until words are practically meaningless and there are still 600 or 500 or 400 more pages to read and where the hell is this going and these cardboard characters are not holding my interest and there are so many of them and who cares about them anyway and stop whining about fucking summer camp and no, although perhaps analogous, I don't think the bullies on your swim team are actually the most evil forces in our nation.

It's just not all that fun or fulfilling or enlightening to read - it's just a lot of super well put together endlessly long sentences at which to marvel.

I marveled. I sat through it. I got to the end. I remember some random images, places, the basic outlines of the good guys and bad guys, but I don't really feel illuminated, despite the brightness of the risen angels.

I feel pleasurably bludgeoned by words, yes; like a good dominatrix Vollman has pleased me there with a certain amount of titillating pain. Still...

Let's just say that the whore trilogy and Europe Central were both linguistically wowing and spoke of things deeply moving and worth thinking about, and so I was disappointed by You Bright and Risen Angels.

Although that's his best title and such a beautiful opening line.

Something I see no one else has addressed here and, as an obvious formalist, I found fascinating was the novel's incompleteness vis a vis its own table of contents.

In the TOC the pagination ends about 2/3 of the way through, as if a third of the story is in a volume to come - a point to which the text several times seems to allude.

I see, however, no evidence of a second volume so I can only assume this is either a literary play to make us believe we've read only 2/3 of a projected text.

The TOC does, in a tantalizing way, fill out the rest of the "story," such as it is - like the novel's characters, mostly cardboard and obvious, if filled with much heartfelt human experience - Vollmann's forte certainly in the whore trilogy.

I cried hot tears over the Bee sequence, it being so familiar to my second divorce and the agonies of heartbreak and a lover's forced indifference to our suffering as they tear us apart in order to "move on."

I better stop there before I talk myself into liking this novel more than I did.

It's genius, of course, but genius at its most painful to experience.

I leapt at the chance to write about this for my masters. I was given free rein in terms of texts. Now, ten years older, I come back to it. I don't feel too much wiser, but certainly more experienced. And it's even sadder than I remembered it being. There was so little that I didn't vividly remember still. It almost exceeds my ability to talk about it. I am somewhat embarrassed by my old review. But how could I betray my younger self by taking it down?

As I reflect on this work, I realize how much has changed in my life. The ten years have brought with them a wealth of experiences, both good and bad. These experiences have shaped me into the person I am today. And yet, when I look at this text, I am reminded of the person I was ten years ago.

I can see the naivete in my old review, but I can also see the passion and enthusiasm that I had for the subject. I don't want to take that away by removing the review. Instead, I want to use it as a reminder of how far I've come and how much I still have to learn.

Dense with absurdity as if coated in thick grease, Vollmann's first novel reminds me a great deal of Robert Coover. It's like his epic work, The Public Burning, which predates this novel by a decade. In fact, at one point, one of the characters even attends a Coover College to study language. This could potentially be an influence, given the near-slapstick absurdity of both novels and their focus on politico-ideological war.

At any rate, it's fascinating to observe Vollmann's peculiar style taking form here. This style is what makes his later, greater novels so highly entertaining. That's not to say that this chaotic, raucous, and somewhat unfinished work isn't worth enduring its 639 pages. Dragging each dry and crinkled leaf of a page from the right side of the volume to the left can be a laborious task. However, if this is the only Vollmann work you've experienced, then clear your calendar because there are great things in store. Also, consider this passage:

"But what," you still ask, "did the bugs think?" – Ah, well; as Trotsky said about something else, that is not the sort of question which can be answered by a questionnaire. To arrive at even a provisional result requires a great grief, such as I have when my electricity is interrupted. My appliances flicker and hesitate, and from the light bulb issues an expanding bulb of darkness, which is how everything really looks. As the balloon blows itself up to its usual size, made huge by the hot vapors of chaos and violence (for electricity is a cooling, numbing force that contracts things), people themselves expand and go dark around me. Soon, I lose sight of their faces in the dimness and can only vaguely sense their towering shoulders blocking out the night above the shining stars of their belt buckles, which themselves recede to other galaxies. The monstrous thousand-mile-high knees in the choking darkness do the same, and finally, I can just barely make out the black mountains of their shoes, which I could not hope to scale in a lifetime. Now, the insulated hollows, the spaces between the grass blades, the utility room, the darkness behind the workbench all become horrifyingly spacious. And when somewhere near me I hear the clicking and scraping of some roach twice my size, I take cover behind a thumbtack and dutifully take notes on the damned creature, as I must, being the author.

I notice that a significant number of reviews emphasize that this book is not straightforward to read. Well, I would just like to state that it is easier than, for instance, Gravity's Rainbow and an awful lot easier than Ulysses. I mean, when it comes to Ulysses, I'm pretty much at the point where I'm banging my head against the ceiling in frustration. So, if you're a fan of Pynchon, then you should be okay with this one.

I categorized it as Sci-fi, but it's not entirely certain that it should be there 100%. In fact, it delves into politics and explores how the different cultural strands in the US inevitably come into conflict. It's sort of a "dude" book in the sense that none of the female characters have much depth or substance, but some of the male angst is描绘得非常生动.

I must admit that it progresses at a slow pace, but it is still entertaining.

Imagination like no other

Imagination is a truly remarkable and unique faculty. It has the power to transport us to places we have never been, to create worlds that exist only in our minds, and to envision possibilities that seem beyond the realm of reality. With imagination, we can break free from the constraints of the present and explore the infinite potential of the future. It allows us to dream big, to think outside the box, and to come up with innovative ideas and solutions. Whether it's in art, literature, science, or any other field, imagination is the driving force behind creativity and progress. It is what makes us human and sets us apart from all other beings. So let your imagination run wild and see where it takes you. You might be surprised at the amazing things you can discover and achieve.

This big thing had been sitting on my shelf for such a long time that I often made the mistake of regarding it as an ugly minimalist sculpture.

There were numerous baleful glares exchanged between myself and it before I finally gave it the statutory 100 pages.

And before that, I noticed that even the publisher's blurb on the cover seemed to be apologizing for it! They were well aware that it was bad!

Anyway, I initially thought it was completely unreadable and it really made me very cross.

But that was then.

These days, reading 100 pages of bad books no longer puts me in a grumpy mood because I know just how much fun I'll have with them on Goodreads later.

Mr Vollman has been described as "the maximalist's maximalist".

It's quite an interesting title for him, and perhaps it gives some indication of the nature of his work.

Maybe his books are filled with an abundance of details and ideas, which could be overwhelming for some readers.

But for those who are willing to take the plunge and explore his maximalist world, there might be hidden treasures to discover.

Who knows what awaits within the pages of his books?

It could be a wild and crazy adventure or a thought-provoking exploration of complex themes.

Only by reading his work can we truly find out.

Vollmann is one of those authors who has occupied a place on my bookshelf for many years. For a long time, I was too intimidated to even touch his works, fearing that they would be beyond my comprehension. However, this year, I decided to make an effort and finally picked up one of his books.

To my great delight, I absolutely loved it. The comparisons to Pynchon on the cover are quite fitting, but Vollmann's work is much more centered around the characters. His writing style would be relatively easy to digest if each paragraph didn't seem to go on forever. Surprisingly, there is more of a coherent plot here than one might expect from a postmodern doorstopper. What's more, this book is extremely funny. For some reason, I had no idea that Vollmann was supposed to be so humorous. And yes, the run-on sentences are a characteristic feature of Vollmann's writing throughout this entire book.

I had an amazing time reading this book. I've heard that it's an outlier in the author's catalogue, which only makes me more eager to explore the rest of his work. I should probably add a disclaimer: this is a very messy and often scattered book. Despite giving it a perfect rating, I don't think it's a complete masterpiece. But as I closed the book, I felt as if I had just finished reading 5 great books all at once, and that's more than enough reason for me to give it 5 stars. I would highly recommend it to those with a taste for the strange and the unusual.

I can admire Vollman's writing and the magnificent translation.

However, when it comes to the story... I don't know how I endured 800 pages of it.

Vollman's writing style is indeed unique and has its own charm. The translation also does a great job in presenting his words in another language.

But the story itself seems to lack something that could hold my interest throughout the entire 800 pages.

Maybe it's the pacing, or perhaps it's the lack of a clear and engaging plot.

Whatever the reason, I found it a bit of a struggle to get through the whole book.

Nevertheless, I still appreciate Vollman's effort and the work that went into creating this piece of literature.

And who knows, maybe upon a second reading, I might discover something that I missed the first time around.

Overall, it's a mixed bag for me when it comes to this book.