Customer Reviews

Europe Central

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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?

Since I try to read all the National Book Award winning fiction, I read this. Much of it is a chore to read: unless you have an interest in music or in Shostakovich's love life there are pages and pages which are dull and pointless. But there are sections which cannot help but excite one's interest. The account of the battle for Stalingrad, told mostly from Marshal Paulus' viewpoint, is vivid and easy reading. This is also true of the account of the SS officer who took risks trying to get word of the incredible events being perpetrated by the Nazis in the land under their domination, and of the account of the Russian general who was captured and then worked for the Germans. In other words, when Vollmann is relating things which maybe are true, the book holds one's interest. But when he talks endlessly about musical compositions by Shostokovich and his muings about his loves the effect is glazingly boring. I will admit I was mighty glad to get to the last page of this book. (The 59 pages of notes should be perused as one finishes each corresponding chapter--the notes are of some help, but there is no bibliography as such, and there should be.)

William T Vollmann follows in a long and almost uniquely American tradition - including dos Passos, Pynchon, Barth, de Lillo, Gass and Gaddis - of writers of big, slightly impersonal, self-consciously literary novels attempting to document a significant slab of history, usually involving some element of the formal innovations of modernism. Like many of its predecessors, this is not a true novel, but a fantasia on historical themes, veering in and out of biography, history, fiction and musicology.

As a work of history and biography, Vollmann's erudition is impressive. This is evident not merely from the text of the book but from the extensive bibliography, which while interesting is unnecessary for a novel unless, as I suspect is the case, Vollmann puts this forward to demonstrate the moral and historiographic case for his book.

The novel consists of the dramatisation of the roles of many of the key players in the great ideological struggles of the 1940s, both between Russia and Germany, but also within those countries. In portraying these historical figures as fictional characters - Shostakovich, General Vlasov, Field Marshall Paulus, Kurt Gerstein, Anna Akhmatova and others - Vollmann privileges us with an insight into the dilemmas and ambiguities that characterised their existence under totalitarian regimes in which personal resistance - however seemingly passive - could be fatal.

Despite some of the comments from other reviewers, I found the novel a relatively "easy" read - that is, it was engrossing and fascinating. But at the same time it took a long time - several weeks - to read it, not merely because of its size, but because it so often required me to put the book down to reflect on what I had been reading. Many of the scenes are harrowing and disturbing. Many others throw a new light on historical events I had thought I was familiar with, and in that sense the novel is a great success.

However, to appreciate this book it is necessary to be familiar with and interested in this period of history, and a working knowledge of the Stalingrad campaign, the music of Shostakovich and the Stalinist period are useful or, as others have noted, the novel may not mean very much to you.

Some sections of the novel are more convincing than others. Vollmann's fictional analysis of military detail is more convincing than his musicological knowledge - the discussion of Shostakovich's work, such as the "Leningrad" symphony or the 8th string quartet strike me as the comments of an enthusiastic amateur; someone with technical musical training would describe these works and their gestation in quite different terms. (Compare the way Thomas Mann described Beethoven's last piano sonata in "Doktor Faustus", for example.)

As other reviewers have pointed out, the identity of the various perspectives from which the novel is written are not always clear. We do not often know who is speaking - sometimes the character, sometimes an unnamed KGB(?) officer or German equivalent, sometimes an impersonal narrator. Perhaps this is intentional. There is also very little variation in tone between the voices of the different characters.

A serious reservation is whether the histories of many of these figures and events are appropriate subject matter for fiction at all. There is an argument along the lines that any fictionalisation of these events and characters somehow diminishes their sense of "reality", especially if the purpose of fiction is, amongst other things, entertainment. I do not think there is (or can ever be) a clear resolution of this issue, and while I believe that nothing is outside the scope of art, I think artists who deal in issues such as this have a much greater responsibility in the way they treat these events. (As examples, the film "Schindler's List" raises difficult questions, while novels such as DM Thomas' "The White Hotel" and Martin Amis' "Time's Arrow" in my opinion clearly cross the line and represent the grossly irresponsible treatment of their subject matter, which ultimately has the effect of trivialising these events.)While I think that Vollmann has treated these subjects responsibly, I am still occasionally troubled by the fictionalisation of some of these events.

Overall, I found "Europe Central" to be a compelling book and, genuinely, a great one. Vollmann has tackled an extremely difficult subject, and reproduced the interior lives of these characters effectively, with intelligence and a sense (if not the actuality) of authenticity. The scope of the novel is incredibly ambitious, and the fact that there are some reservations about its complete success does not in any way diminish the undoubted greatness of the novel. Like most masterpieces, it is flawed, but I nevertheless believe that "Europe Central" is a genuine masterpiece. Highly recommended.

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!

Nowhere, not on the cover, not on the front page, or any other page of this book, does it say that EUROPE CENTRAL is a novel, but it is--if not the Great American Novel (and how could it be, since it takes place in Europe, and features only one American character)--the greatest literary novel ever written by an American. Vollman's book is about war, about force and resistance and the ethical calculus where good and evil interlock around a fractal boundary, and most of all about love: the often heart-rending, sometimes adulterous but possibly redeeming affair between each one of us and our ideals. Vollman's writing is a prism that fractures the gray light of moral ambiguity into a rainbow of vibrating, painful to look at, never before seen colors; reading this book is like drowning, then suddenly discovering you can breathe under water. And what sights! What sounds! What horrors, what beauties, what joys! You can survive forty years in the desert on this one book. Vollman calls them "parables", mere "stories," but they contain the greatest historical writing, the greatest war reporting, the greatest music and film criticism, and the most terrifying death scene (which takes place in bed) I've ever come across.

Read it and see. Truly see.

Delighted to see the National Book Award so well awarded!

Vollmann has emerged as a major literary force! For those of us who have immersed ourselves in large chunks of RISING UP AND RISING DOWN, EUROPE CENTRAL confirms the perception of an extraordinary mind coupled with remarkable literary skills. What's more, there's a person behind the prose: a person who puts himself in harms way repeatedly, then comes home to write and write and write about it in ways that at once save the rest of us some of the pain and danger of violence and evil, while forcing us to confront the danger and the pain if only vicariously.

As impressive as anything else about EUROPE CENTRAL is its innovative form. Vollmann has stretched the genre of the novel in ways hardly touched by so-called "historical novels" or by the non-fiction "novels" of Truman Capote or Norman Mailer, or the "new journalism" of Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. The mixing of fact and fiction here is utterly unique and truly dazzling. The footnotes are essential and informative, yet the prose can roll on altogether without them if one so chooses.

One comes away from the experience of reading Vollmann with a renewed sense of the intensity that is possible at the point where acute consciousness meets moral compromise in a world very much out of joint. At a time in America when cook book catechisms pretend to substitute for morality, this plunge into the moral ambiguities and historical crises of mid-20th century Europe can only remind us of what a callow country we occupy. I find it refreshing and inspiring to find a sensibility so steeped in European history and culture, even as Vollmann's voice is so singly American. With the exception of writers like Paul Berman and Tony Judt, very few in this country can communicate, in gripping, non-academic prose, the complexities and historical cross-currents that make European consciousness so much richer--if more troubled--than our own.

Tip: before diving into this text that will keep you seated for hours and hours, go out and stock up on lots of Shostakovich. Let his clamorous (a)tonalities play as the theme music for your reading. Try it. You'll love/hate it.

Jay Ogilvy, Orinda, California

This is an important book for Americans to read, if only because it at least opens the possibility that in times of immediate, palpable terror, people--all people--will make moral accommodations in order to survive. Vollman asks us to imagine a world divided in two, bounded on each side by a murderous monster. The citizens of Europe Central can choose to side with Hitler or Stalin. There is no other choice on offer except death. Only D.D. Shostakovich, the nominal hero of the story, is crafty enough to keep the monsters at bay, although in the end even he must succumb to the demands of The Party.

As for complaints about the tedious lengths to which Vollman goes to take us through the ins and outs of Shostakovich's love of music (and the unattainable Elena, love of his life) in the face of unbelievable official pressure to conform to the needs of the State, I will say only in his defense that Vollman does his level best to make us feel what it is like to actually be in that mental meat-grinder.

Regarding the presentation of the story, I was at first put off by Vollman's coyness about revealing the narrator of each story. But after a while I decided that it was a cautionary exercise for the reader: When reading history, we may not always know who is telling the story, but it is essential to at least ask the question--because when it comes to history, all narrators are unreliable and self-serving.

To repeat: As an earlier reviewer points out, this book is essential reading for Americans who want to believe in "good wars" fought for the "right" motives. In a world ruled by bloodthirsty madmen, there is no such thing as "good."

I am surprised that an American author puts that much time and emotion into a European subject. It can not possibly do him much good in terms of commercial success. Apparently, there was at least enough critical acclaim to consider it an artistic success.
I am not sure myself, if I fully "like" the novel, apart from the fact that I read it like a crime novel. Interesting, fascinating, yes. But: does it mean something or is it just pretentious?
Does he have to play around with the narrator so much? One moment it sounds like WTV himself, including cocquetish apologies for interfering with the story, then, next line, it is somebody else, not always quite clear who. It seems arbitrary, not following a need of the story, nor of history. Sometimes it seems to be clear that the narrators are Russian or German police agents. Do they have to sound so vulgar and so anachronistically modern?
There is also a problem with the editing of this book. The explanation on sources mentions a chronology: where is it? Deleted? The contents list gives data for the chapters, which seem totally off. The story follows some chronological pattern, but the individual chapters overlap and interfere with each other. The data given in the contents are useless. There are also far too many typos, mainly in the German words.
The book is about the German/Russian conflicts in the 20th century. It uses real historical people to transport us through time, mainly Shostakovich, but also others like Krupskaya, Kollwitz, Akhmatova etc. It is strongly based in art history. You could say that the novel is about music and war. You also need to know the communist party history quite well.
If you do not already have fairly broad knowledge of these historical subjects, the book will be meaningless to you. There is not much explanation. Some of the stories are "parables", i.e. they assume the reader can help himself as far as backgrounds are concerned. In the age of the internet, that is largely true, but relies on a lot of motivation. How many readers can a writer have that way?
I do not think he handles the Germanic mythology well in relation to the German elements of the story/history. Interpreting Nazi ideology in the light of the Nibelungen or of Parzival does not go very far. It would have pleased them too much, let's not give them the honor.
I am also not happy with the cosy nicknames that WTV finds for the evil guys: sleepwalker, Uncle Wolf, the realist ... why are they, Hitler and Stalin, depicted in such cute terms? Sarcasm?
After all these complaints, why still 4 stars?
The core of the book consists of strong historical "stories", like the "biographies" of Shostakovich's 7th symphony, in the chapter called "The Palm Tree of Deborah". Like the mini-bio of Roman Karmen, or the one of the tragic General Vlasov, or the one of poor Paulus, or the deeply sad story of "holy fool" Gerstein.
Conclusion: yes.
If only he had kept his scope to the mini-bios and staid out of the realm of mythology and of meaningful parables.

I can understand one reviewer's opinion that it was difficlt to determine 'why' Vollmann chose to write this novel, but if you take Rising Up and Rising Down into account, there is at least a hint of it.

It has been the easiest read of any of his novels. I normally expect to have to hit the dictionary pretty often when reading his novels, but in this case I only had to once. I think this points more to his word choice than the possibility that my vocabulary has now grown to the point where his words are no longer challenging. This left me a little disappointed.

The reason I call it flawed is because it seems to be far more history than novel since he was keeping an exhaustive biblography. I admire the research deeply, but I think he sacrificed much of the heart (however mixed up that heart can be) of the earlier novels; the heart was replaced with a perspicuity of almost compulsive proportions. For the first time in a long time, I got the sense that Europe Central was even more intellectual bragging than Rising Up and Rising Down: a sort of "Look at how much I know" expression than a story that needed to be told.

Something else I wrestled with isn't yet something I'm willing to call a flaw, but it could very well be so. One reviewer mentioned the narrative shifts and the appearance of an unidentifiable "I." I personally loved the shift in narrators with little warning; it kept me on my toes--and let's face it, casual readers don't pick up Vollmann, or if they do they seldom finish it or pick it up again--and that is one of the main reasons I bought and read it. But I was troubled by the "I."

This strange "I" shows up in many of his novels, a sort of narrator above the narrator. I don't call "I" Vollmann--my graduate school training beat that out of me--so I call it the playful god. "I" is the dynamo or spirit of all of the other narrators in one of his novels, or the guide if there is only one narrator (You Bright and Risen Angels). I find it distracting because it feels like I'm being presented a riddle that doesn't acutally have a question mark at the end of it. Which makes me feel like I am missing something important--when I very likely am not.

For Vollmann fans, this is a decent novel and a departure from his others, so that might offer variety for a fan seeking it. For the casual fan: it is a quick read despite its size (compared to other Vollmann works). To the noviate: there are several other Vollmann novels and works of short stories that you should probably start with.