The Atlas by William T. Vollmann

Author:William T. Vollmann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author), General
ISBN: 9780670865789
Publisher: Viking
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He had read Snow Country long ago one Arctic summer in Pond Inlet when people were hunting narwhals. Pond Inlet lies considerably north of Churchill, and the landscape is different. East of the dump, perhaps a thousand paces from shore, a stream wound through a rich bed of moss. If you walked up this green S-shaped valley you reached a triangular arroyo whose walls hid ice and waterfalls. Above, climbing the black-lichened steps of these white and orange cliffs, you reached a green ridge that looked down on the sea where a Ski-Doo slid bravely along one of the last solid spans of ice and the sun was long and white on Bylot Island. A shot sounded. Water trickled down beneath banks of dirty snow (which resembled the black-lichened white rocks). Listening to the splashes of the dying animal, he remembered the book's first sentence, variously translated as: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country and After the long border tunnel, the snow country appeared. It reminded him of that Faulkner sentence Soon now they would enter the delta. Snow Country is a hundred and seventy-five pages long, and its palm-of-the-hand reduction a mere eleven, yet old Kawabata, who they say was shy and wise and lonely and who gassed himself, not long after receiving his Nobel Prize, kept this sentence even in the shorter version. It was the backbone of the world he must miniaturize. The train emerged from the long border tunnel into the snow country. The snow country was for Kawabata's protagonist the end of this world and the beginning of another, the country of pure mountains of sunset crystal which all tunnels are supposed to lead to, the zone of that uncanny whiteness hymned by Poe and Melville, the pole of transcendence. But on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, although it was snowing outside and there had been a tunnel, ladies sat reading glamour magazines or drinking piping hot canned tea, while businessmen dozed or fuddled over their papers. No one had been transcended. The snow country was to the north, but they were going west. Yuki said that the snow country had been grossly developed since Kawabata's time. (Yuki was the traveller's wife.) She said that it would be difficult to find sensitively decaying geishas in the hot springs now. He looked out the window and everything was ugly, dreary and clean. Now they passed Mount Fuji's broad paleness. Yuki's father had taken her there when she was five. Her father had put her on a horse when she got tired. It had been summer season, and so beautiful, she said. The top half of the mountain had refracted a special purple color into her soul. He gazed at Fuji's dull snow far above so many dull white apartments and could not see any beauty. The train was born from the lengthy border tunnel; it came into the snow country. Behind Yuki, a man in a silk suit gaped his lips blackly, the lower side of his mouth sagging from right to left.

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