Europe Central

Author - William T. Vollmann ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Viking Press was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. Anecdotes from hell. The 20th century is a lot of fun. It takes a lifetime of reading to put together a book of this sort. Part biography, part confession, this novel is an intellectual´s delight. Here are all the ghosts of the twentieth century, especially the juicy vignettes from the backrooms of the monsters´ lairs. I love the opening between Fanny Kaplan, Lenin´s would-be assassin, and Krupskaya, the put-upon wife of the beloved, blood-thirsty communist. The book has few of the literary tricks up its sleeve that one finds these days in so many unreadable works. This is old-school realism, a kind of historical novel of the Truman Capote school of "faction," perhaps something Norman Mailer might of attempted, a literary working over of the encyclopedia. What distinguishes it is its erudition, high irony, and sly playfulness.¤

2) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. ´Europe Central´ surpasses genre. For all I learned about Germany and Russia from this book, it could well have been a history textbook; but the unflagging eloquence of its prose earns it a place amongst the great novels of our time. The novel grapples with vast, vast ideas, but the story is not crushed by didacticism. On the contrary, ´Europe Central´ paints the struggles, whether military, political, ideological, psychological, or personal, in vivid and often nightmarish colors. I was extremely impressed by the author´s facility with narrative voice and his expressive and lavish prose style.

The novel is not organized round a plot that points at any conclusion; rather, it is a sequence of vignettes that contribute to a Gestalt of the times it covers. Certain characters, especially the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his love interest Elena Konstantinovskaya, have a presence throughout the novel, but the vignettes are in only a loose chronological order. I found this presentation extremely effective. Readers who find themselves adrift without the presence of a plot may not enjoy ´Europe Central´ as much as I did, but I urge anyone who appreciates good literature, or who is interested in the Second World War, the Cold War, and the history of European totalitarianism, to give it a good long try.¤

3) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. The winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction, this is a copiously annotated historical novel of Europe in the first half of last century. "Interesting times" is an understatement. The scope of research that went into this work is staggering. All of the major players show here in multiple plot lines that meander in and around through central europe, converging and diverging.

As you can see, the reviews are mixed, and I think it´s mainly because of the numerous plots, the license and "multi-dimensional" methods used. Some concepts don´t easily lend themselves to words and i think Vollmann considers that a challenge. I could almost smell the colors and taste the textures. As one reviewer here perceptively complains, "You can´t read it in the bathtub." This is a thinking persons book; a contemplative read, not passive. In the first chapter, he throws you right off of the deep end into a magical telecommunications system that is living, breathing, and cognizant.

Don´t be put off by paragraphs that consist of a single long sentence. Be patient, have a webster´s collegiate handy, and you´ll be well rewarded.

I read this three times and enjoyed it more each time. If you really like this book, then you´ll also like "The Ice-Shirt" and "Fathers and Crows".

Prediction: William will someday win a Pulitzer.¤

4) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. I´ll have to admit, I could not get past the first 16 pages. I´m a person with a rather large vocabulary, (I did crossword puzzles for years) and I found my self quite frequently running accross words I did not know. It reminded me of when a college professor told me my paper sounded like I had my head in a thesaurus (If you mean drunk, use drunk, not besotted!). Worse still, I found myself re-reading sentences frequently to decipher the meaning.
I thought maybe it would change and the later writing would be clearer, so I randomly opened a few chapters, and the same obfuscating style is used throughout.
After a while I just had a headache and put the book down. Peerhaps I´ll try the Gulag Archpelago which another person reviewing this book recommended.
Even War and Peace was easier reading.
Authors, remember: Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation!!¤

5) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. Europe Central is that "walled kingdom in the middle of the past. Every day here begins ´once upon a time.´" So says Vollman near the end of his sprawling novel of the intertwined history of Germany and Russia in the 20th century. Earlier, he has already told us that Europe Central was the name of the German telephone exchange that literally covered Europe to the west and center and . . . Never fully to the east, which is the crux of the matter.

Vollman´s National Book Award Winner is a difficult and adventurous book to read. Much of it is historical (with historical sources footnoted), but not strictly factual, as Vollman points out in the notes. Much of it is stream of conscious fantasy. The framework is a series of stories told from either side from the early years of the two regimes through the sort-of resolution in the post war era.

At the core is the conscious and constant conflict between communism and fascism, between political state and ethnic tribe, between individual freedom and group duty, between victors and vanquished, between the mundane and the imagined. Much of the book is a free-form (read the notes, many seemingly factual points have been changed or imagined) biography of the Russian composer D. D. Shostakovitz, who created his classical compositions in the face of pressure to conform to communist principles of social expression, not individualism (a slur in that time and place which often put Shostakovitz´s life and career in jeopardy). Other artists, the German sculpter Kathy Kollwitz and the Russian documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, also figure heavily in this battle of the one against the mass.

A repeated Russian propaganda slogan from those days frames the background and great question Vollman finally asks: "Life has become better, comrades; life has become more joyful." Had it then? For the Russian victors? For the German vanquished?, Did it remain so (there are hints of the collapse of the cobbled Soviet bloc)?

A deeply thought-provoking book that struck me as just a notch too obscure to be a classic.¤

6) Hardcover Book Europe Central by Viking Press. In this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional—a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich laboring under Stalinist oppression. Through these and other lives, Vollmann offers a daring and mesmerizing perspective on human actions during wartime.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, , 620-370-430-991-KGB-9OB-8

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