This book is written by a traitor to his class.

Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil.

Huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper.

For you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

This book is a paradox. It contains a balancing act between metafiction and politico-social mythologizing.

Just like the omniscient Programmer, the meta-version of William T. Vollmann, who faces off against the omnipotent and malevolent Big George, [who may or may not be a metaphor for electricity].

They both compliment and undermine each other.

But Vollmann isn't content to simply tell the story of a swimming pool filled with tepid water, a revolutionary with a bug in his ear, and a war for the fate of capital.

In the end, once all the mythos and magic falls away, it's just a tall tale, written by a meta-character hunched over a blue screen, yearning for his love, the bright and risen angel that is now in her grave.

That's why this book is sad. It's really truly heartbreaking.

And more than anything, it's sad because I don't know if William Vollmann ever truly felt love.

This book is in many ways the diary of a broken man, and to this day he is in many ways still broken.

Once you consider this book as a cartoon, as is suggested by the subtitle "A Cartoon", it indeed has several appealing aspects.

There is a great deal of vivid and energetic language, which brings the story to life. The fractured narrative device, with the contrast between "I, the author" and "I, Big George", adds an interesting layer of complexity. The parallels and allusions to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union provide a historical and political backdrop that enriches the story. Additionally, the arbitrary Stephen King-like violence becomes an integral part of the over-the-top characters and the overall atmosphere that surrounds the book.

However, in the final analysis, everything seems to be rather loosely connected. The identities of the characters lack sufficient coherence, which is presumably as Vollmann intended, but it still makes it difficult for the reader to fully engage with them. The narrative arc also disintegrates too frequently for my taste, making it hard to follow the story's progression.

Overall, the pros and cons of the book more or less balance out, which is not quite satisfactory for a book that exceeds 600 pages. Especially towards the end, I found myself questioning why I should care about the various characters such as Frank, Parker, Wayne, Bug, Mr. White, and so on. This made the reading experience feel like a sluggish sprint to the finish line.

Back in 1985, a year that many may not recall vividly, humanity was firmly shackled by the oppressive system of capitalism.

Worse still, this system had a particularly detrimental impact on certain groups based on social and historical factors. For instance, blacks in the US faced significant economic hardships.

Now, it's understandable that you might have forgotten all of this. However, William Vollmann came to the rescue with his revolutionary prose.

He borrowed heavily from Burroughs and unleashed a torrent of words that, in a sense, freed us all.

First, Vollmann managed to undermine the economic superstructure. He spent 90 pages flailing to find the author's voice, but then, miraculously, he honed it. For 40 pages, the book became engaging and fun.

But then, he boldly abandoned that tone and adopted a much more leaden one for the remaining 500 pages.

Next, Vollmann righteously took on the CEOs of big, bad corporations. He constantly pointed out that nobody in the world was as clever as he was.

Could a CEO include epigrams from sources as diverse as Lenin and a Unix manual? Perhaps. But none would be as innovative as Vollmann, who created his very own pictographic alphabet for the epilogue.

Thanks to his little drawings, the Fortune 500 companies dissolved their wealth and spread it to the masses.

Finally, realizing his work was not quite complete, Vollmann dropped a bombshell by highlighting the connection between race and economics.

This, in a nutshell, explains how we got to where we are today. And those gigantic gold-plated statues of Comandante Vollmann are a testament to his supposed "freedom" - or perhaps just a strange literary conceit.

I truly wish that I had been the one to pen this remarkable piece.

The words seem to flow so effortlessly, as if they were crafted by a masterful hand.

The ideas presented are not only thought-provoking but also engaging, drawing the reader in and holding their attention from start to finish.

I can only imagine the amount of time and effort that must have gone into creating such a wonderful work.

It makes me strive to improve my own writing skills, hoping to one day produce something that is even half as good.

This article serves as an inspiration to me, a reminder of the power of words and the beauty that can be achieved through the written word.

I will continue to study and learn, aspiring to reach the level of excellence that is evident in this piece.

Maybe one day, I too will write something that others will wish they had written.