Europe Central

William T. Vollmann

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Publisher

Viking

Date

March 24, 2005

Award Winners
Fiction
Historical
Literary
National Book Award Winners

Winner of the National Book Award

A series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures—some famous, some infamous, some unknown—associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century.

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Positive

Based on 8 reviews

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Positive

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Pan

What The Reviewers Say

Rave Steven Moore,
The Washington Post

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.

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Positive Tom LeClair,
The New York Times Sunday Book Review

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.

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Mixed Michael Wood,
The New York Review of Books

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.

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