Europe Central
by William T. Vollmann
Summary
A telephone rings somewhere in the dark between Berlin and Moscow, and an unnamed operator, part narrator, part surveillance apparatus, begins connecting calls across the twentieth century's central catastrophe. The novel is built as paired stories, German and Soviet, parables of individuals caught at the moment when the two total states demand a decision: the artist Käthe Kollwitz, grieving her son into pacifism under a regime arming for the next war; General Vlasov, captured by the Germans and choosing collaboration; Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who smuggled eyewitness accounts of the gas chambers to anyone who would listen while delivering the Zyklon B himself; the translator; the tank general.
At the centre, recurring like a theme under variation, is Dmitri Shostakovich: the composer writing under Stalin's eye, denounced, rehabilitated, decorated and used, his symphonies parsed for loyalty, his irony his one unconfiscatable property. Vollmann threads him through an invented love triangle with the filmmaker Roman Karmen and the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, and makes his decades of survival the book's deepest study of what compromise costs and preserves.
The chapters pair off across the front, a German life answered by a Soviet one facing its mirrored choice, and most can be read as freestanding novellas, though the force is cumulative: by the last movements the reader has watched the same demand for obedience arrive in two uniforms and every possible answer to it get its parable. It is enormous, more than eight hundred pages, source notes included, and written in a high, incantatory style that risks everything continually.
Best for readers who want the moral history of the Eastern Front conducted person by person, and who will grant an obsessive his scale.
Historical Context & Significance
Europe Central won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005, the establishment's embrace of American letters' great outlier: William T. Vollmann had spent two decades producing enormous books at unnatural speed, the Seven Dreams cycle on the collision of Europeans and native North America, a seven volume treatise on violence called Rising Up and Rising Down, reportage from wars and brothels, and the prize fixed his reputation at the exact point where obsession reads as monument.
The Times Literary Supplement called the book cinematic in scope and epic in ambition, and the New York Times Book Review called it his most welcoming work and possibly his best: the fifty pages of source notes are part of the design, the novel offering itself as testimony checked against the record.
The Shostakovich thread drew the most argument, its invented romance grafted onto a documented life, and Vollmann's defence, that the parable needed a heart, is the book's method in one line.