Europe Central [Paperback]

First, "Europe Central" is not a work for those who need linear narrative structure - "plot" in the conventional sense - unambiguous authorial "voice", and all the trappings of popular, realist fiction. Vollmann writes in a stylistic mode that is simultaneously impressionistic and expressionistic - jarring "realist" imagery juxtaposed against swirling emotions that flow around, between and through the multitude of characterizations (not "characters") that populate the work. Readers unaccustomed to the styles of high modernist and post-modernist fiction such as the works of Thomas Pynchon, Antonio Lobos Antunes or Juan Goytisolo will find themselves struggling continually and probably find the novel impenetrable.

For the rest of us, "Europe Central" is a much-needed antidote to the American exceptionalist, "Good War" nostalgia that informs so many American accounts of the 20th century. The corollary of this perspective is to simultaneously anthropomorphize "Europe" and dehumanize "Europeans" in an attempt to contrast them unfavorably to "America" and "Americans". Indeed, this is precisely the discourse that we currently hear so frequently from various corners of our much-benighted country.

In this respect, "Europe Central" succeeds in many of the same ways that the recent film "Downfall" succeeds: i.e., by humanizing the protoganists of some of the world's most catastrophic events and forcing the reader / viewer to ask the question, "In similar circumstances would I have felt or acted any differently?"

What dismays many readers is precisely the discomfort of having to "read" through the authorial perspective of narrators whose moral positions are not clear-cut, who are compromised by their proximity to or intimate involvement in actions that "history" has labeled attrocities or war crimes. The present response of denial and disbelief of many Americans to U.S. military attrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq underscores this quite strongly.

Apart from the politics of "Europe Central" - which should not be construed in knee-jerk fashion as "leftist" or "fascist" (though it is interesting how the work will no doubt attract both epithets) - the novel is stylistically rich and exhibits the kind of virtuosity that is rarely encountered these days, at least in terms of the scope of Vollmann's intent.

I personally found the book both very difficult and very exhilirating to read. You may be an experienced reader but the unfamiliarity of the narrative terrain, the twists and turns, the strange background and place names, the polymorphous characterizations, the polysynchronic narrative structure, will all contribute to a challenging read.

I strongly recommend the book to readers who like to work hard at their reading. I also recommend it to those, like me, who find the current "America" / "American" realities disorienting and depressing.

Having finished the book a few minutes ago, I must record my reactions. I spent the last few weeks in its passages--on and off, necessarily--it's an overwhelming monolith as forbidding as its 1935 "Deutschland, das Land der Musik" stylized eagle cover image. Yet, like the somber image, it attracts a certain reader curious to part the curtain and enter. This mythic structure towers over the individual, whether in the storylines or ourselves, wandering into a great labyrinth.

The blurbs summarize the plots, but a few overall reactions may let you know if this book may be worth the considerable effort and investment of time. I was pleased to see that in the sources appended to the text, Guy Sajer's outstanding memoir (which I've also reviewed for Amazon) "The Forgotten Soldier" is cited first of all. This account of an Alsatian fighting for the Germans on the Ostfront came often to mind as I read Vollmann. The author's scope and research simply is not the type we expect to find so evidently scaffolding even "historical fiction," and this involved me more in the result even as it distanced me from the conceit that I was listening to fully-realized narrators rather than, as Vollmann gives away in one footnote, a "fabulist."

The musical themes I found appropriate, but lacking knowledge of Shostakovich's ouevre, the exacting attention given to them left me floundering for long stretches of an already nearly endless work. (My wife was reading Anna Karenina simultaneously, and we kept pace with each other!) Unlike the earlier Russian writers, Vollmann's epic does not unfold so easily. Even with background knowledge of the conflicts (in no small part thanks to Sajet), the panoramas, like the Ostfront serving as the focus for so many scenes, astonish but diminish you as a reader, struggling to keep up with the events. Perhaps this reaction is intended by Vollmann as the appropriate response?

My favorite parts were those of Kurt Gerstein, Van Cliburn, Vlasov and Paulus, and Hilde Benjamin, the GDR's "Red Guillotine." Vollmann takes on a very intriguing narrative style imitating the leaden justifications of Soviet propagandists well for many vignettes, and his energy often seems more expended on the side of the USSR rather than the "German Fascist" entries, leaving the book a bit more lopsided than the design of paired stories would suggest. This probably, given the determinism of the Soviets as well as actual events, nonetheless may convey the force--in so many ways--of the Russian over the German ideology in the struggle for Europe Central--which tends to get overlooked, actually, in the novel in favor of the Russian steppes.

If you're somewhat familiar with the contexts already, this is in my opinion a fitting and challenging work that will force you to enter into the minds of people that you may have only glimpsed at a distance in grainy documentaries--this itself serves as one of many motifs--the humanity is less directly perceived than in more accessible, sentimentalized, or tidy novels.

Yes, the work needed an editor. A lesser author would have ironically earned another star! But a writer as intelligent as Vollmann should know that he needs to keep his reader in mind, and not expect us to labor for so long on what his labor needs to compress into a more comprehensible form. The Shostakovich-Elena-Karman triangle makes its point and encapsulates the question of "can art fight evil" well. But it goes on three times longer than needed in an already stuffed narrative that needed more concentration upon, say Zoya. The ties with the Nibelungenlied, Tristan, and the Germanic myth are excellent, but I think these could have been tightened and honed. You also sense that Stalingrad, Dresden, the gulags and lagers all are filtered through book-learning. Vollmann for all his impressive research tends to let it sit on the page as "facts that need to be made into fiction to make it a WWII story" rather than to incorporate what's been published as memoirs and first-hand interviews, say, into vividly rendered experiences transferred into the plight of his imagined protagonists.

For many authors, this would have been the work of a lifetime. For this prolific if admittedly prolix writer, it's an immersion that seems to have been, more or less effectively in parts rather than the whole--within who knows what shorter time. And what's Vollmann getting at in blaming "wartime paper shortages" for the lack of the supplement's chronology? Perhaps a sly relevance for us today?

I don't think I've read a book for which all the Amazon readers' reviews, whether positive or negative, are so perceptive in penetrating at least some aspects of what is an incredibly complex structure. That says much about the power of what Vollmann undertakes, whether or not he suceeds with every reader.

For myself, I am heartily glad to have finished with the book, which has been hanging around my neck for a long time. And yet I could not simply give up on it. For one thing, it told me a lot about aspects of 20th-century history that I barely knew, such as the early years of Stalinism and the Nazi war on the eastern front, as well as touching on things that I thought I knew pretty well, such as the long struggle of the composer Shostakovich with the Soviet authorities. For another, several of its huge central chapters offered gripping portraits of real people caught in situations of moral ambiguity: the captured Russian General Vlasov who allowed himself to be used to recruit an army of expatriates to fight against Stalin; Field-Marshal Paulus, holding precariously to his honor through the debacle at Stalingrad; Kurt Gerstein, who became a functionary of the Final Solution even as he tried to blow the whistle on it; and the "Red Guillotine" Hilde Benjamin, the hanging judge of the DDR, who too late comes to question her own rigidity.

As a musician, I ordered the book because its main character, Dmitri Shostakovich, is one of my favorite composers. He is indeed treated at length, but I found these sections only intermittently satisfactory, and ultimately infuriating. His music -- primarily the cello sonata, the fifth and seventh symphonies, the eighth quartet, and the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk -- is cited as a repository for far more sound impressions, political reactions, and extreme emotions than the notes can possibly bear. The composer's story is interwoven with a plethora of romantic liasons, real or increasingly fantasized, which soon become tedious. These chapters in particular are dotted with throwaway references to other characters, mentioned in Soviet style by surname and initials only, which even a specialist might fail to identify completely. And the narrative voice, which elsewhere has the stylistic neutrality of political propaganda, takes on a curious vagueness when dealing with Shostakovich, in which thoughts are, as it were, started, and, so to speak, never quite.... The composer might not have dared to declare himself except through the ambiguous medium of music, but it is risky for an author to assume the same privilege.

Undoubtedly, the strongest chapters deal with the War itself. I could recommend pages 260-471 to anyone, even if read on their own, and there are strong chapters both before and after. But with the defeat of Germany, a haze of unreality permeates the novel: the objective historical writing generally ceases, and a kind of extended nightmare takes its place; perhaps this is intended as a political parallel, but it makes it difficult to persevere. Only at the very end, with twenty pages describing the end of Shostakovich's life and a fine chapter on American pianist Van Cliburn's success in the Moscow Tchaikowsky Competition, does the novel come back to earth.

Still, read it and wonder. It is not every day that a contemporary novelist will dare to emulate Tolstoy on his home turf!