Vollman on editing himself

From Michael Wood's review of Europe Central and Expelled from Eden, in the December 15, 2005, "New York Review of Books."

Vollmann, born in 1959, has published eight novels (four of which are part of his Seven Dreams series, a historicofictional account of the settlement of North America), three collections of stories (including The Atlas), a memoir about his experiences in Afghanistan, and an extraordinary seven-volume, two-thousand-plus-page meditation on violence called Rising Up and Rising Down (2003). In 2004, he produced an abridgment of this last work (just 726 pages, not including the acknowledgments) and the tone of his preface makes clear why it is so easy to like him and also why you might not want his company all the time. "The longer version of Rising Up and Rising Down," he says, "took me twenty-three years, counting editorial errands. The abridgment took me half an hour." And:

"The single justification which I can offer [for the length of the original version] is that I believe it needed to be that long. This abridgment likewise has only one justification: I did it for the money. In other words, I can't pretend (although you may disagree) that a one-volume reduction is any improvement upon the full version. All the same, it's not necessarily worse. For one thing, the possibility now exists that someone might read it."

The complete review, which I didn't finish, is here.