How Literature Saved My Life (2013)
“ Other people IN THE FIRST of the eight interlocked stories or chapters of Butterfly Stories: A Novel, William Vollmann tells “what happened to the child,” establishing the psychic interconnection—for the butterfly boy—between solitude, beauty, loss, pain, and punishment. The lyric catalogue of childhood humiliations in the first story yields, in the seven stories that follow, to litanies of the butterfly boy (who as an adult is called first “the journalist,” then later “the husband”) reenacti...ng—with a lesbian traveling companion, the son of a former SS officer, a sybaritic and amoral photographer, and especially with a Phnom Penh prostitute named Oy—the sadomasochistic scenarios of his childhood.
Vollmann begins Butterfly Stories with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page, he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.”MoreLess
Vollmann begins Butterfly Stories with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page, he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.”MoreLess
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