Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Butterfly Stories is set in the early 90s when the Khmer Rouge was still causing trouble in Cambodia. Vollmann went to Cambodia to cover this trouble, and I’d have liked to know more about his journalistic mission. However, what we get is a blow-by-blow account of the Journalist (the narrator and stand-in for Vollmann, not capitalised in the book but should’ve been!) and the Photographer going to the bars to find women-of-the-night to take to their room. Yes, they share a room. Vollmann’s sex scenes are realistic, not exaggerated, and not hardcore. He uses a lot of KY jelly. It’s hard to write honestly about sex so he should get an award for this. Perhaps more ‘hardcore’ are his descriptions of gonorrhoea and white throat fungus: the unfortunate results of his risky sexual encounters.
I raced through the first hundred pages which tell a commonplace story about these two Americans whoremongering in Southeast Asia. The Journalist is sensitive, falls in love with the girls, and wants to save them. The Photographer wants to get his rocks off without any emotional entanglement. Vollmann uses plenty of pathos, self-knowledge, and humour. This puts his account well above others I’ve read.
The Journalist imagines the sufferings of the girls in great detail. He wants to love them and for them to love him. Love is expressed by a kiss, something much harder to get than sex. But having sex you don’t want so as not to hurt a prostitute’s feelings is also love. Vollmann mocks his own save-them-all innocence.
In an interview somwhere on YouTube, Vollmann says it’s very hard to help people like prostitutes, drug addicts, or homeless. You can give them money, but that doesn’t help most of the time. It’s hard to help one person in this world, but evil is easy and the Khmer Rouge can smash thousands of skulls in a day. That’s the world as Vollmann sees it in Butterfly Stories.
After the narrator – now called the Husband rather than the Journalist – gets back to America, the book becomes harder going. The Husband obsesses about Vanna, the Cambodian prostitute he fell in love with (the most). He doesn’t care about his real wife or journalism anymore. The narrative becomes dreamlike. Vollmann mixes Vanna up with a former Inuit love interest he met in Alaska. The fear of AIDS and the Khmer Rouge looms above everything. I saw what he was trying to do, but the last third of the book was a chore.
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