The Atlas by William T. Vollmann

This book being a palindrome, and this tale being the central and infinitely regressive metonym thereof, one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller's world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid--that is, a pear--and so the reference point, the map of magma which lies precisely halfway through our atlas, is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect. Then, too, mass displacements occur beneath our feet and no one knows their laws. But, as I've said, cannot we not make our own planets wherever we go, with even our own idees fixes or lunar satellites to accompany us in orbits of measurable eccentricity?

William T. Vollmann's The Atlas takes the reader, as the title might suggest, all over the globe: from the U.S. to Canada and Mexico, to Germany, India, Australia, Israel, Madagascar, Myanmar, Italy, etc., etc., etc. Place is the guiding theme of the book, and it has places aplenty, each vignetted and listed in the gazetteer that opens the book. The Atlas is arranged chiastically, that is, as a palindrome, though it's not the settings that unite the sections on either side of the fulcrum but themes. (And as such, with some exceptions, only a really patient reader will probably notice most of the correspondences, or take the trouble to count backwards from the center to find where they should lie. I'm not that patient reader.)

At the heart of The Atlas is a long title section that follows the unnamed narrator and Vollmann stand-in on a train journey from Montreal up to the northern Manitoba town of Churchill. On the train, the neatly segregated organization of the atlas begins to fall apart, and the delineation between places falls away through the slippage of memory: one memory of a lost love bleeds into another, and Thailand becomes the United States becomes Australia, and so on, as Canada whistles by in the window. Loneliness and a desire for love is, if anything, the theme that threads the many places together. Over and over again, in disparate locales, we find the same Vollmannian sad sack, yearning for the true love of a prostitute or an ex-wife. They may be the same sad sack (how many places could Vollmann possible have traveled to between 1991 and 1993???) and they may not, but the yearning is the same. For such a heady writer, the yearning is startlingly simply and sweet, even romantic. Perhaps the search for love is like the search for that central place, the heart of everything, but as the traveller of "The Atlas" learns, the center of things is something you carry with you as you go.

Though it's not by any means my favorite, The Atlas might make a good introduction to Vollmann's writing. It's a kind of Vollmann sampler platter, combining scenes and characters from his other books, even sometimes under the same titles: Fathers and Crows is here, and The Rifles, in miniature scenes that seem almost like outtakes, and a long and tremendous version of The Butterfly Stories. It was an interesting introduction to some of the places that I know Vollmann has written about, but which I have not yet read, like Southeast Asia and the war-torn Balkans. (His time with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, oddly, makes no appearance.) For me, it confirmed a lot of what I liked best about Vollmann. My favorites are still his renditions of the Canadian Arctic, which capture their melancholic color so well, and the strange contours of a culture at the limit of the world. (Of course, for those who live there and even for the transient traveller, it's the center of things; on this asymmetric rotational spheroid, there really is no center.)