SOURCE: "Symbolic History," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 3, No. 104, June 8, 1990, p. 38.

In the review below, Richler offers praise for The Ice-Shirt.

The Ice-Shirt is the first of seven planned novels in William T. Vollmann's "symbolic history" of North America, a strange fusion of Norse myth and legend dealing with the arrival of the first colonists and their encounters with the native Indian and Inuit peoples. Occasionally interrupted by his own travel observations of Greenland, Iceland and the Canadian sub-arctic—the book is illustrated by sketches and maps the author made during his researches there—his sources are the Greenlandic and Icelandic sagas, the chronicles of travellers, but also Butler's Erewhon, tourism brochures and conversations with drunks. It is "an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue, based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth".

As in...