William T. Mann is a dazzling figure of American literature. There's story, FBI kept him for some time for Unabomber. There is story that he fought with mujahideen in Afghanistan and almost died. There's story, all men don't own a phone, no credit card, and live in an old restaurant in Sacramento. There is story that all man created a female alter ego, a woman named Dolores, in whose role and clos he kicks door. All se stories are true. This, by way, also: if it were after his mainly American supporters, he would have been a Nobel laureate for a long time.
When complete man writes, it is rarely less than 1,000 pages in end. A few years ago in Germany, his many-voiced novel Europe Central made him known to a large audience. He is an author of almost limitless productivity and breakneck Recherchewut. He wrote extensive, life-and suffering-wise books on femininity in Japan, on violence, on hobos and prostitutes. Always with a radically subjective look and often erratic temperament, which one now meets again in his collected, hirto unpublished reportages, which have just appeared in a band. They all deal with poverty and absolute lack of ownership.
In Thailand he meets plastering Sunnee, who loves alcohol too much. In Russia, he meets Natalia, A has who sits on a cardboard in front of church every day. In Japan he drinks under a bridge tea with small mountain and Big Mountain, two homeless. In Yemen he speaks with a tuna fisherman, in Kenya with prostitutes. The man goes to Pakistan, to Philippines, to Colombia, to Congo. On his travels he sees unrealized, possession and toothless, bricks, demolition gravel, cold concrete. He also sees gestures, fleeting smiles, shyness and loneliness. To whom he meets, he asks a question that moves like a thread through all texts: "Why are you poor?"
Honest CuriosityAlready on first pages, he says: "I know how little I know." This is a well-travelled, highly-read writer, like him, also flirtatious modesty. But this sentence is quite an ethical principle of this book, and it has formal and stylistic consequences. Some of his expeditions go into void, many drill into reflections and end in almost obsessive self-doubt. This is not a defect, but a principle of a planned surrender.
In this way, wording of a man's formulations underruns reading expectations of commercially-accepted milieu or social reports. There is no sentimental emotion, no over-flash exposure, where most void detail throws a clueless shadow. The author's empathy is not only evident in his renunciation of amateur psychological programmes and experienceding empathy, but also in sincere earnestness with which he portrays his characters, in his honest curiosity.
He would like to design a new phenomenology of poverty, organized by terms: invisibility, deformity, Unerwünschtsein, dependence, susceptibility to accidents, pain, dulling, alienation. Perhaps frame in which man forces some of lyrics is a little too big and arbitrary. But this is as forgivable as his occasional inclination to peculiar adventurers pride.
Date Of Update: 16 July 2018, 12:02
