"Europe Central" by William T. Vollmann

I started reading this masterpiece in June. Six months later, I am 150 pages from the end, but I will most likely finish it in the next few days. A few things popped up here and there that either prevented or precipitated heavy amounts of reading: LSAT preparation, a trip to Seattle, Cosmos by Sagan, Thanksgiving, and scattered weeks of heavy work schedules. That being said, I think the passing time has allowed me to more deeply come to understand that complexity that drives not the plot of "Europe Central", but the literary purity. My understanding of the book has developed in stages and I feel that, with such a short amount left (the book stands at 750 pages, total), I can provide some general insight into what this book is at an elemental and essential level.

To start, I will quote the back of the book, to provide the sort of concise summation of background that I simply cannot write:

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. With these and other unforgettable stories, Vollmann breathes life into a haunting chapter form the past and gives us a daring literary masterpiece.

That phrase "two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined" perfectly encapsulates the central metaphor of the book: the defining quality of juxtaposition. Each chapter serves as a call to a later chapter's response. Successive chapters always differ in content but the use of some imagery or events is consistently adapted to several contexts that lead to the ultimate conclusion: the vignettes of generals, martyrs, artists, and leaders; the omnipotent narratives and pretentious critiques of high art from the ever-observing NKVD officer, Comrade Alexandrov; the dreamlike and ideologically driven stories of the front by former telephone operator and Gehlen operative; all is written to support the analogy between the times and the love triangle between Elena, Shostakovich, and Karmen.

Elena Konstantinovskaya is not your traditional main character. Very little of the story is about her. Most of Europe Central's plot is dedicated to Shostakovich. A large portion is dedicated to Roman Karmen. But between the actions of these two characters and the imagery that continually strives to describe beauty and horror in terms of a beautiful, dark haired woman (and vise-versa: typically, interactions between Elena, Shostakovich and Karmen are written in terms of art and war) who we know as Elena Konstantinovskaya. She is the focal point of the book in that every detail described in any chapter serves only to more finely tune the gigantic analogy of Elena that I know as EUROPE CENTRAL.

A fine example is found in the chapter "We'll Never Mention It Again". The reader gains a superfluous understanding of Elena in the opening lines of the chapter, which reads: "Everytime she said no to him, that no was as perfect as her cheekbones. There was about her something comfortably immovable, reassuringly merciless..." So early in the chapter, you can not be sure to whom Elena is saying "no", whether Shostakovich or Karmen, but the complexity of the those opening lines, that she is "comfortably immovable, reassuringly merciless..." is better understood in the context of the previous chapter, "Red Guillotine". "Red Guillotine" details the life of Hilde Benjamin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilde_Benjamin), an East German judge dubbed the 'Red Guillotine' for her aggressive propensity to sentence beheading to those leftover Nazis and Anglo-American instigators. "Red Guillotine" is spent illuminating that Benjamin was "immovable...merciless..." When Vollmann tells us that Elena says no, she says it with the force of thousands of executions. This is one example of the way in which the complex relationship between Elena, Shostakovich, and Karmen is not only narrated, but progressed. Words are bombs, bodies movements of armies, nos executions, and so forth. To return, this is why I believe the phrase "two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they define" perfectly sums the book. The war between Nazi Germany and the USSR serves as an analogy for the love triangle in the sheer passion of intensity.

And that's why this book was awarded the National Book Award in 2005.