The former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are the settings for his new novel, a grimly magnificent dramatization of the impossible moral choices forced on individuals by those totalitarian regimes. Ranging from 1914 to 1975, the book is organized as a series of paired stories, like Plutarch's Parallel Lives, comparing a German and a Russian facing similar situations … Like a method actor immersing himself in a role, Vollmann tells most of his stories from the point of view of their protagonists or a related character – the apparatchik Comrade Alexandrov relates many of the Soviet stories – relying on his immense research to empathize with his characters … Vollmann's language beautifully captures these warring conflicts, moving from lyricism to military strategy to hallucination to erotic longing as his characters navigate their way through a landscape of atrocities – and not just the ones perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists.
The stories come as ‘pincer movements,’ as pairs that give readers manageable units to ponder between segments of the Shostakovich ‘novel.’ The pairings are almost always set in the same approximate time and usually in opposing spaces – Germany and the Soviet Union. Often one story sketches a minor political character or articulates an ideological position, and the paired story will be longer, more personal, more subtle … Although Vollmann has composed and arranged this whole opera of mostly doomed souls, he speaks in his own voice only in the notes. Like an intelligence agent tapped into the telephone exchange, he records narrators both sympathetic and repugnant, authentic and propagandistic, fumbling and crazed.
What Vollmann calls a parable is actually closer to a good cartoon. It works by tightening up and paring down rather than through exaggeration, so that the confusions of reality give way to a series of schematic moments … The book is always lucid, even as it hovers between the obvious and the recondite, and the under- and over-examined, but it is not seeking a conclusion, only a new framing of moral options, and the pathos of Europe Central is that it reminds us that a moral calculus is only as good as its local practitioners can make it … One of the consistent pleasures of this book, and a feature that makes the woodenness of the impersonation of certain of the major characters all the more surprising, is the variety of narrative positions Vollmann skillfully takes up.
Vollmann's aims are bold. His starting point is a pained awareness of the fact that by approaching some unknowable infinity of evil, their examples too extreme to wrap our minds around, the two great criminals of the 20th century exist in most of our imaginations as wax figures in some walled-off freak-show mausoleum of the mind. Ever the provocateur, Vollmann takes on the near-impossible task of crashing through those walls, with the smell of burnt rubber in the air, and pulling Hitler and Stalin back from the useless realm of inert, hardened collective memory. He seeks to reanimate their obscene legacies the only way that actually works – painfully.
Vollmann's [novel] is a hall of mirrors – each tale getting a kind of sister story that forms its opposite image. Enter the book, take a twirl around, and you are presented with a kind of kaleidoscopic portrait of life in Europe around the dawn of World War II, when totalitarianism was on the rise. Try to find your way out and you will become, well, a little lost. This sense of claustrophobia and confusion is, one imagines, purposeful, as Europe Central aims to show how totalitarianism occurred and how it felt on the inside, and to bring us up close and personal with the nubbly texture of history.
Those pages consist more of a series of interlocking stories than a single narrative. The stories – told by several narrators, including a high-ranking Russian secret service operative and a telephone operator – weave a remarkable tapestry of mid-20th century continental history … The question of ethical behavior in despicable times is asked in different contexts throughout Europe Central. Scoffing at ‘intellectuals who'd never been compelled to pitch their tents in necessity's winds,’ one of Vollmann's narrators – himself no angel, a former philosophy student who ‘never shot a civilian except when under orders’ – breaks to address us, ‘Reader, which would you choose?’ Of course, this is impossible to answer in cozy high moral retrospect.
The stories bleed together, with character parallels and conceptual continuations. Often at the center of the fugue is Soviet ‘formalist’ composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who aches as part of a Vollmann-invented love triangle with shape-shifting translator Elena Konstantinovskaya and Roman Karmen … Still, the most compelling stories stick to military maneuvers, as in the closely observed family drama that retells Nazi infiltrator Kurt Gerstein’s attempt to keep ‘Clean Hands’ while sabotaging the SS, a claustrophobic Stalingrad standstill in ‘The Last Field-Marshal,’ and traitor General A.A. Vlasov’s ‘Breakout,’ which buzzes with nervous, melancholy energy. Linkages grow playful: Germany’s Sixth Army vs. Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, East/West Germany, De/Pre-Nazification, Berlin portrayed as both a brain and a quartered heart, and Europe Central (both book and place) as a telephone or octopus.
Vollmann's greatest accomplishment is to capture the overwhelming nature of violence and sex through seemingly outré detail. In previous books this has often involved personal revelation, but here his authorial intrusions are few. He seems most concerned with people ‘consumed with fear and regret’ who do what they can to ‘uphold the good’, which here is described as ‘freedom of artistic creation’ and ‘the mitigation of other people's emergencies’.
