Europe Central
by William T. Vollmann
From the old old world
A review by Daniel Lukes
"We prefer our personal tragedies, because we're all cowards and bastards",
notes one of many narrators in this long novel, thus providing the key to its
thirty-six intertwined fictionalized historical narratives. As a tireless investigator
of such diverse topics as the underworld of San Francisco prostitution (in The
Royal Family, 2000), the first American settlers (in the continuing Seven
Dreams cycle), the Mujahadeen (in An Afghanistan Picture Show, 1992)
and the history of human violence (in the seven-volume Rising
Up and Rising Down, 2003), the high priest of contemporary underground American
fiction, William T. Vollmann, now turns his voracious eye to the Old World, ravaged
by the Second World War, and presents us with his latest novelistic expanse, Europe
Central.
Wide-reaching and hugely ambitious, this work tells the stories of major and
minor figures on the German and Russian Fronts. They include people such as
the Sixth Army commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who led the Germans
at the siege of Stalingrad, the Russian General A. A. Vlasov, who crossed over
to the Reich after his capture and formed a German-collaborationist Russian
army, and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life in an attempt to
inform the world about the Holocaust as it took place. There are also portraits
of artists, poets and film-makers: Kathe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova and Roman
Karmen. The novel's piece de resistance, however, is the life of the composer
Dmitri Shostakovich, his ambivalent relationship with the Stalin regime and,
especially, his doomed love affair with a translator called Elena Konstantinovskaya,
who plays the role here of eternal femme fatale: "Europe is Europa: Europe
is a woman . . . above all, Europe is Elena".
Vollmann intends the reading of his works to be an emotionally traumatic experience,
and Europe Central is harrowing, in part because of its depressing subject,
but also because of the raw and often sadistically insightful way the material
is treated. To portray the novel as a thoroughly ominous and doom-laden affair
would be unfair, however; Vollmann is still a master storyteller and bravura
stylist, and he sustains and constantly reignites interest over the course of
this lengthy book. He is well served by his acute eye for emotional impact and
the now trademark literary cubism of his style -- first-person "collective"
narrators, dispassionate reportage, see saw chronology, biographical music criticism,
prismic Faulkneresque interior monologue, and more. Overkill is still largely
Vollmann's preferred method of literary construction. "Can music attack
evil?", Shostakovich asks one of his lovers, while grappling with what
will become one of the struggles of his life: how to avoid capitulation to the
regime. "Certainly not", she answers. "All it can do is scream."
And there is a lot of screaming here.
Thankfully, there are passages of beauty and intensity amid the wintry corpse-laden
gloom in Europe Central. The composer's brief but ardent love affair
with Elena, which will then blossom into a slow-burning self-destructive lifelong
obsession, allows Vollmann to exchange his usual dizzying pornographic overload
for strokes of sensuous elegance, rich in symbolist grace:
"She was the only one he ever found who could have dwelled with him
in that four-roomed house within his chest, which they were fully capable
of connecting, by means of trumpetlike passageways, with the four chambers
of her own heart, so that then they would have had quite the castle together,
oh, my, sharing refuges and secrets."
If this whimsicality recalls the Vladimir Nabokov of Ada or Ardor, elsewhere,
the spectres of Danilo Kis's gloomy mystical rationalism, and Milan Kundera's
bitter- sweet love-among-the-ruins exuberance, loom heavily.
William T. Vollmann is at his best when conveying a sensual immediacy in prose,
as in the impressionistic works such as Butterfly
Stories (1993) and The
Atlas (1996), which made his reputation as one of America's most compelling
chroniclers of the self. That he has turned to the historical novel and made
it his own, fashioning a work which is cinematic in scope, epic in ambition
and continuously engaging, shows that he is one of the most important and fascinating
writers of our time.
Daniel Lukes
is a freelance journalist living in New York.
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