- Paperback: 651 pages
- Publisher: Penguin; Reprint edition (31 Dec 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140110879
- ISBN-13: 978-0140110876
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 4.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,199,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Synopsis
This comic and surreal novel about the beastliness and pain in the world focuses on the stories of assorted young American misfits, reactionaries and revolutionaries, young lovers, and raging old tyrants.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This epic work of surreal fantasy mixes adventure, science fiction, magic realism and satire to create a roller-coaster reading experience. At times reminiscent of Grass (especially "The Tin Drum" and "The Dog Years"), with elements of William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, it is nevertheless a highly original work. To describe the plot is irrelevant, since it is the energy, drive and imaginative power that make this novel so exciting. As in much great fiction, one feels that the book burst out of the author's imagination in an entirely uncontrived way. It is an excellent first novel which paves the way for Vollmann's calmer, more thoughtful later works. This volcanic piece of prose will delight those who enjoy offbeat, original "culty" literature.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Come into the cartoon
21 Sep 1999
Format:Paperback
In the way the best caricatures can tell you the truth in corrective-lens fashion--to distort the view against your own distortion so you see it plain--Vollmann's first book--which he calls not a Novel but a Cartoon--caricatures the outlandish oppression & cruelty of the human being: especially the human male, especially the American. Seeing where Vollmann's career has taken him--on a nightmarish reporter's journey through the 3rd World, into the ragged world of the San Francisco Tenderloin, deep into an ambitious 7-novel project recounting the history of the New World--it's no surprise to see his concerns with power & preterition set up here in his first work. A tale of America's dream of the bullying, Protean, endlessly inventive, heartless power of money, this Cartoon pits the authoritarian powers against the scrappy underdogs: Electricity(Power) vs. Bugs(the little guys). If this reminds you of Thomas Pynchon's fabulist (& fabulous) Gravity's Rainbow, there's good reason. Vollmann's the next ecstatic drop running up that literary vein. Along with all this, there's the metafictional struggle to tell the story throughout, as 2 narrators (at least 2) wrestle over the helm: 1) a lowly employee with subversive tendencies & sentimentalities whose affection for the characters & obsessions about his ex-girlfriend sneak into the telling, and 2) the being who gives him dictation, the shapeshifting, immortal, amoral Big George, whose exaggerated accounts of his own adventures are a pastiche of every Big Fish tale ever spun in America's history, but who nevertheless is in the service of the kind of truth that only comes with the heartlessness of the fact that everybody (else) dies. Lodged, of course, in the best sort of eyebrow-raising fiction. I, the reviewer, am trying to tell you that I liked this book, and that I am a picky reader. But I, the writer, keep getting mixed up as to how to get you to buy it. For the sake of postpostmodern literature--for the sake of the longevity of the love of literature--read this insane, awkward, gorgeous thing.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
It's worth the effort
17 July 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The first 50 pages took me almost three hours to read. I was worried I made a big mistake in reading this book. And then Vollmann's world captures you. By the end my opinion had changed: this is the best book I've read.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Relax into it, don't fight it, and it is quite a ride
10 Aug 2005
Format:Paperback
I've been a Vollmann fan for years, but his first novel had always given me fits. I have what I refer to as the 'permanently unfinishable' shelf (4 attempts to read over the course of a couple of years), and I was on the last attempt for this novel. Finally finishing Coover's The Public Burning definately helped me relax into the quasi-cartoony world that YBARA offers. If you like the parody and allegory of this novel, then I think you would also like The Public Burning.
It is overwhelming in its scope and pathos. It takes on history and politics and love--all the bad forms of it anyway--with a very dark sense of humor and with a lush (sometimes too lush) use of language. It is a fantastic adventure that requires a total suspension of disbelief, and that is where I think I failed early on. The novel is part science (or at least computer) fiction; what I mean specifically is that the world he creates has its own scope and honesty though it takes place 'here.' If something, like a praying mantis bartender that no one really seems to mind except Wayne, really doesn't make sense, just mark it in your head and move on. In the end, it will either make sense or drop off like the molting shell of certain beetles.
I did have 2 problems with the novel. The first is the language. Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, DF Wallace and Vollmann are heroes of sorts for me because they don't fear complex language if using it makes the story more enjoyable. YBARA commits the first novel sin of going just a little too far in that arena. But it is an astounding first novel regardless.
The second problem is one that I also have with Wallace's Infinite Jest. It seems to assume that there will be a second part. YBARA refers to dozens of events that will eventually occur, but then it stops far short of getting to those events. I understand that this is a mode of storytelling (not unlike the epics and eddas that Vollmann takes up after his first novel), but the structures of the two are different. YBARA didn't read like those epics, it read more like a serial. This is both somewhat exciting and somewhat daunting. I mean . . . What if he does write a sequel?
It is overwhelming in its scope and pathos. It takes on history and politics and love--all the bad forms of it anyway--with a very dark sense of humor and with a lush (sometimes too lush) use of language. It is a fantastic adventure that requires a total suspension of disbelief, and that is where I think I failed early on. The novel is part science (or at least computer) fiction; what I mean specifically is that the world he creates has its own scope and honesty though it takes place 'here.' If something, like a praying mantis bartender that no one really seems to mind except Wayne, really doesn't make sense, just mark it in your head and move on. In the end, it will either make sense or drop off like the molting shell of certain beetles.
I did have 2 problems with the novel. The first is the language. Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, DF Wallace and Vollmann are heroes of sorts for me because they don't fear complex language if using it makes the story more enjoyable. YBARA commits the first novel sin of going just a little too far in that arena. But it is an astounding first novel regardless.
The second problem is one that I also have with Wallace's Infinite Jest. It seems to assume that there will be a second part. YBARA refers to dozens of events that will eventually occur, but then it stops far short of getting to those events. I understand that this is a mode of storytelling (not unlike the epics and eddas that Vollmann takes up after his first novel), but the structures of the two are different. YBARA didn't read like those epics, it read more like a serial. This is both somewhat exciting and somewhat daunting. I mean . . . What if he does write a sequel?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Literary Fiction
- Books > Humour > Comic Strips
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
