Book Review: Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

I'm a Vollmann fan from way back, though the number of books I've started by him far exceeds the number of books of his that I've finished. Maybe it's something about his Joycean free-association, the lack of conventional narrative form or just his general incomprehensibility? But he and I are in sync when it comes to subject matter- war, plague, death, the under class, poverty- darkness- the darkness of life. All you Bukowski fans- Vollmann is worth a look see if you haven't peeped him yet.

Europe Central is his latest novel- I think- he's very prolific- Europe Central was published in 2005 and I've been meaning to read it ever since. It's somewhere between a novel and a set of short stories- like a set of short stories in that each chapter tells a different tale, like a novel in that each story shares a common theme (i.e. the relationship between germany and russia from the period of 1918 through 1970.) It's also more novelish in the sense that certain characters come back in separate stories and that the narrative proceeds in roughly chronological fashion.

Like many of Vollmann's books, he takes a very academic approach to his research and writing. He's got 20 pages in footnotes & annotations to prove it. I suppose I appreciate the effort at verisimilitude on his part, but I also felt like the attention to realistic detail detracted from the immersive quality possessed by superior fiction.

The main character in this novel/short story cross over is the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich succeded & sufferred under the vagaries of Stalinist Russia. He wrote some of the hallmark symphonies of that era and achieved international acclaim, but was also banned and castigated at different points. Through Shostakovich, we can see the central theme of Europe Central: That living under a totalitarian regime forces man to compromise himself and his ideals. Throughout Europe Central Vollmann posits a moral equivalence between Stalinist Russia and Hiterlian Germany, and he says as much in the end notes. To live under one totalitarian regime is to live under all.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but laugh about news media articles about the "angry mood" of American voters in Iowa. Angry about what, exactly? All the freedom they have? The fact that our Presidents actually leave office after a maximum of eight years? If anything, Europe Central made me, again, appreciate American society. Actually, this is a theme of many of the books I read. Americans should be thankful for the world they live in, even if it isn't a perfect world.

In addition to the re-occuring chapters about the life of Shostakovich, there are shorter episodes involving a russian general who defected to germany and a german general who defected to russia. In fact, stories are paired together- mostly one from germany and one from russia, though that format doesn't always hold.