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Europe Central, by William T Vollmann
Free PDF Europe Central, by William T Vollmann
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A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award.
In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.
- Sales Rank: #337485 in Books
- Brand: Vollmann, William T.
- Published on: 2005-11-14
- Released on: 2005-11-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.43" h x 1.30" w x 5.50" l, 1.43 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 832 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In the small set of America's best contemporary novelists, Vollmann is the perpetual comet. Every two years or so he flashes across the sky with another incredibly learned, incredibly written, incredibly long novel. Two years ago, with Argall, he easily bested John Barth in the writing of 17th-century prose while taking up the tired story of the settlement of Jamestown and making it absolutely riveting. His latest departs from his usual themes--the borders between natives and Westerners, or prostitutes and johns--to take on Central Europe in the 20th century. "The winged figures on the bridges of Berlin are now mostly flown, for certain things went wrong in Europe...." What went wrong is captured in profiles of real persons (Kathe Kollwitz, Kurt Gerstein, Dmitri Shostakovich, General Paulus and General Vlasov) as well as mythic personages (a shape-shifting Nazi communications officer and creatures from the German mythology Wagner incorporated into his operas). Operation Barbarossa--the German advance into Russia in 1941, and the subsequent German defeat at Stalingrad and Kursk--is central here, with the prewar and postwar scenes radiating out from it, as though the war were primary, not the nations engaged in it. The strongest chapter is a retelling of Kurt Gerstein's life; Gerstein was the SS officer who tried to warn the world about the concentration camps while working as the SS supply agent for the gas chambers. The weakest sections of the book are devoted to the love triangle between Shostakovich, Elena Konstantinovskaya and film director Roman Karmen. Throughout, Vollman develops counternarratives to memorialize those millions who paid the penalties of history. Few American writers infuse their writing with similar urgency.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Most critics praised Vollmann’s twelfth novel, paying homage to his ambitious yet capable grasp of the pivotal political and moral issues of the 20th-century. They hail his dazzling prose, sure command of history, innovation, and copious research, and they proclaim that Europe Central is one of his best (if not the best) works. Reviewers cast an indulgent eye on Europe Central’s shortcomings, though almost all bemoan the ponderous length of the novel and Vollmann’s predilection for hammering his main points ad nauseam. The critics agree: What kept Europe Central from being a tour de force was an editor willing to excise the excess.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
"We have a Motherland and they have a Fatherland. Their child is Europe Central," muses one of the many sly narrators in this grand matrix of paired stories about moments of truth during the most brutal conflict of World War II, the war between Russia and Germany. Following his landmark opus on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), Vollmann, a master of synthesis and an intense and compassionate writer, presents an epic inquiry into the nature of conscience and survival in catastrophic times. His guiding light is the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who managed to create works of profound elegiac beauty under the murderous censorship of Stalin's regime, and not only does Vollmann empathetically portray this controversial figure, he also emulates the rich drama of his music. In spite of the massiveness of this zealously researched creation (replete with 50 pages of notes), Europe Central is a work of compelling intimacy as Vollmann imagines the inner lives of individuals caught up in an orgy of hate, fear, and apocalyptic violence. Here are provocative portraits of the German artist Kathe Kollwitz; the revered Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, whom Vollmann casts as the love of Shostakovich's tormented life; and the "spy for God," Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who tries to tell the disbelieving world the truth about the Holocaust. Working, as is his wont, on a monumental scale that embodies the full complexity of the dilemmas and horrors he grapples with, Vollmann opens new portals onto a genocidal war never to be forgotten, and illuminates both the misery and beauty human beings engender. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A towering and magnificent work of art!
By kobe8
It joins V. Grossman's Life and Fate - two works that illuminate WWII in the same way that War and Peace did the War of 1812
You cannot read one without the other.
It is that rare book that one finishes and takes a breath and then begins again.
131 of 151 people found the following review helpful.
Timely, Insightful, and Pynchon-esque
By Guy Rittger
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.
124 of 143 people found the following review helpful.
Symphonies & tombstones
By John L Murphy
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 (which has been asserted by some to take liberties with fact) 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 Sajer), 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, (most of whose books I've gone on to review in late 2013/first half of 2014) 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?
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