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Vollmann asks us to put aside what we think we know of history and immerse ourselves in it once again. - Boston Globe
Viking
March 2005
832 pages
ISBN: 0670033928
Hardcover
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Contemporary
Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William
T. Vollmann, author of the seven- volume nonfiction work
Rising Up and Rising Down and the "Seven Dreams" sequence
of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as "likely to
become one of the masterpieces of the century." In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing 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. He conjures up two generals, one Russian
and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for
different reasons and with different results. Another
pairing tells of two heroes—a female Russian partisan
martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young
German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets
and halt its crimes. Several stories concern the complex
and elusive Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the
Stalinist assaults against his work and life; also explored
are the fates of artists and poets such as Käthe Kollwitz,
Anna Akhmatova, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen.
Europe Central is another high-wire act of fiction by a
writer of prodigious talent.
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