Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Part IV, Thy Will Be Done, p. 309 – 467, and Part V, Temperance, p. 469 – 477


The Jesuits and the traders continue their expansion into Canada, encountering The People and their many tribes.

I'm hoping to buy this book with my next paycheck and finally join in-I've gotten so hopelessly behind in this group: it's sad.

I'm not sure a single person would be capable of actually reading everything on the group schedule, but I don't think that's the point anyway, unless I got something wrong? For my part, I just pick the books that interest me most and stick with those.

In this part, Vollmann starts pulling the various narrative streams together a bit, and somethin like a general direction in which the rest of the novel will be headed becomes visible.

Like in The Ice-Shirt - even more so, considering the proliferation of characters and locations compared to the previous volume - Vollmann keeps what is fragemented on a surface level together with imagery and thematic clusters, some of which seem like variations on things we already encountered in The Ice-Shirt - there is, for example, also a play on and with colours here, only that white/blue seems to have been replaced with red/yellow - colours of autumn as well as of fire.
Also, did anyone else wonder about how often he mentions grease in this novel? or rather, his characters do so a lot, the Europeans seem quite mystified by it. I think it's always the India women that are greased, and when one of them converts to Christianity, the first thing done to her is the grease being washed off. I'm sure there is some symbolical connotation involved here, and a quite distinct relation to sexuality.
And the whole water/river/stream of time complex of images continues to be of central importance - I was too lazy to look on a map, but I was wondering if the shift in location the novel is undergoing here might not occur along a river, too?
Gougou / Fox's scalp on the other hand, seems to have faded into the background somewhat - it still gets mentioned, but there doesn't seem as great a significance attached to it. Of course I'm still stumped as to what precisely that significance is in the first place... much like the black hands in Ice-Shirt, coming to think about it - I wonder if there's a connection between the two?

I'm glad you're still commenting Larou. Its always good to hear your take on things. I'm too far behind to comment on real time, but very much enjoying the book. I wonder if any of the books will give equal time to the Native American/First Nations perspective, or if Vollmann will continue to skew Eurocentric.

Thank you, glad someone is someone is enjoying my ramblings. ;) - And from how I understand this group works, these threads are left open so people can add their comments at any later date.

Unlike The Ice-Shirt, there's actually a lot of the native perspective in Fathers and Crows - if it's not quite 50/50 then that's most likely because the European side is considerably better documented - under those circumstances, a certain slant towards the European perspective seems unavoidable, unless you want to start just making stuff up which might be considered another colonialising gesture, and I rather respect Vollmann for avoiding that. I even think that one sign of his maturation as a writer from Ice-Shirt to this is that, while he does a lot ventriloquising in the earlier novel, Fathers and Crows is all about giving his characters (and not just the Indians) a voice.

Definitely. Vollmann's background is journalism so I could see where he would want to err on the side of writing about things he can research. That said, I think his most interesting European characters so far have been the lesser known ones like both the Pontgraves and Poutrincourt.

I liked how Canada seems to consume both Poutrincourts.

What do you think about the hints of the supernatural nature of Merveille?
I'm curious to see whether he fleshes that out more in the book as things progress.