Stranger Than Fiction

...Much of the book consists of pairs of chapters, one set in Germany (mostly in the Nazi era), the other set in Russia (mostly in the Soviet era), the two playing off each other...

...A writer of stunning ambition, he seems at times preemptively to ward off criticism by chasing potential readers away, at once self-indulgent and self-destructive...

...It's a book about World War II— with battlefield set pieces—and a book about living under a totalitarian regime, particularly about what it was like to be an artist in the era of Hitler and Stalin, with portraits of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and the Soviet documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen...

...This is Vollmann's most controlled performance to date, his least willful book...

...Writing journalism to pay the bills while producing a steady John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture and Best Christian Writing 2006...

...And so we also need fiction writers audacious enough to imagine the calamity which befell Europe and the world in the 20th century—a reality that isn't comprehended by talk of governments and "interests" and balances of power, however learned that talk, however necessary...

...Europe Central is not a novel, exactly, or a collection of stories...

...And then there are variants in which both chapters are set in the Soviet Union or both in Germany...

...We need historians...

...These are Serious Men...

...Not that Europe is the root of all evil (though in Seven Dreams Vollmann occasionally gives way to the temptation of idealizing the victims of the European conquest of North America...

...Unfashionably strenuous in pursuit of truth and justice, he's also a trickster...

...A one-volume abridgment was published last year...

...In part, that may be because he doesn't suit any ready-made constituency...

...If faced with a choice between Rising Up and Rising Down and John Rawls and his epigones, I'd take Vollmann every time...

...Each branch of knowledge is indispensable...

...So too with Fathers and Crows and The Rifles and Argall, the rest so far in Seven Dreams...

...stream of novels and other fictions, Vollmann was also at work on an encyclopedic study of violence and the justifications thereof, an unclassi-fiable blend of reportage, rumination, and autodidactic moral philosophy, copiously illustrated with his own photographs from trouble spots around the globe and published in seven volumes in 2003 under the title Rising Up and Rising Down...

...But it's on his fiction that Voll-mann's principal claim to our attention rests...

...Will the National Book Award change anything...

...And the novel comes with an extensive list of sources...

...A tale of the Norse Greenlan-ders, culminating with their violent encounter with the natives of North America, it features Vollmann's own illustrations (self-consciously amateurish, playful, something like garage rock) and an elaborate, mock-archaic title page on which the author is identified as "William T. Vollmann (Known in This World as 'William the Blind')," a conceit which subsequent volumes in the series have maintained...

...For all its flaws, this treatise is worthy of greater respect than many an accredited volume issued with the imprimatur of our finest university presses...

...Rather, there's a specifically European trajectory of the universal human story of desire and striving and utter folly...

...Vollmann himself pops up in the book now and then, visiting Greenland in the late 1980s, another recurring device in the series...

...Vollmann chose, as he explains in an appendix that follows the more than 50 pages of source notes, to make her central to Shostakovich's life and imagination, a tragically mysterious, infinitely desirable woman who, moreover, somehow represents Europe...

...At 46, Vollmann has published a formidable stack of books, but chances are you haven't read him, unless you happened on one of the dispatches he's filed over the past 15 years or so for magazines such as Esquire, Gear, and Spin, on the war in Bosnia, Pol Pot and his henchmen, the Thai sex trade, and so on...

...I know that some people besides myself read The IceShirt—it was reviewed, after all—but I've met only one other...

...Though his books have been praised, sometimes extravagantly, and his scabrous stories set among the brothels and drug dens of San Francisco have a cult following, there's no single novel of Vollmann's that you can confidently expect a reasonably enterprising fellow-reader to be acquainted with...

...Here the telephone is not merely a tool of human agency...

...There, too, he works on a huge canvas...

...Let him do his job, tell a good story of a kind that might even aspire to be made into a movie...

...Who does he think he is, playing at this game...

...Still, if you can forgive much from a writer in exchange for largeness of vision and language that has some of the magnificent excess of Shakespeare and Dickens, if you have read Moby-Dick more than once, you owe it to yourself to give Vollmann a try, and Europe Central is a good place to start...

...It's a worthy ambition of a sort that Serious Readers—readers of that small company who think at all about Europe for purposes other than business or tourism—don't find risible if the author is, say, Tony Judt, who muses near the end of his recent Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, that "the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe," or Mark Leonard, director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, whose Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century appeared in 2005 (and was shelved as nonfiction...

...But a novelist...

...by JOHN WILSON Confounding the literary prognosticators, William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, a massive volume of linked stories shifting between Germany and Russia in the period from 1914 to 1975, won the National Book Award for fiction, beating out E.L...

...it has taken on a life of its own, embodying the momentum of a society that will sleepwalk its way to an orgy of destruction, facilitated by the latest technological advances...

...There's something of the perpetual adolescent about him, evident in his obsession with prostitutes, his alternating flights of grandiosity and self-deprecation, his bad-boy antics...

...But this authorial fiat is entirely unmotivated, and Vollmann's portrait of Elena—seductive or silly, depending on your mood—has the atmosphere of a private fantasy...

...Embedded in the book are a couple of longer episodes that could stand alone as novellas, and a thread of chapters that could be stitched together to form a novel centering on the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich...

...reader, be thankful for small mercies...

...And so "Europe Central" is also a metaphorical telephone exchange evoked at the very beginning of Voll-mann's narrative...

...for all his deliberate slouch, Vollmann is at home in archives, a bibliomaniac, an inhaler of print, and if he's going to depart from the historical record—as he does—he wants to be sure precisely when and how he is taking liberties...

...He manages to signal his awareness of his hubris without for a moment disowning the project...

...we need policy analysts...

...Europe Central" is the heart of Europe, not simply a place but the core of a civilization that is infected by a kind of original sin shorn of its theological meaning...

...The act is recollected in tranquility, so to speak, and doesn't take place during the interview itself...

...In a prologue of sorts, the author seems to speak for a moment in his own voice, as he will briefly now and then in the course of the narrative: "So I apply myself now, on this dark winter's night, to invade the meaning of Europe...

...Vollmann remains unrepentant...

...There is a tragic cast to Vollmann's North American epic, but it's the tragedy that began in Eden...

...To my knowledge, he's the only writer interviewed by The Paris Review who has contrived, within the first page of conversation, to mention himself masturbating...

...Still, there are self-indulgences, most notably the character of Elena Konstantinovskaya, a translator with whom Shostakovich—the historical figure, that is, as opposed to Voll-mann's fictional version—was (briefly) romantically involved in the mid-1930s and who was later married for a time to Roman Karmen...

...Not much, probably, though certainly the book deserves such recognition...

...He was still in his twenties when he conceived a "symbolic history" of North America called Seven Dreams, a projected series of seven novels, four of which have appeared, beginning in 1990 with The Ice-Shirt (1990...

...Doctorow's The March, among other competitors on the shortlist...