Europe Central
A couple of weeks ago, while looking for someone, I came across goodreads. Putting one’s bookshelf online is a nifty idea, and I’d do it if it wouldn’t be too depressing to notice all the books Katrina took from me. Instead of joining goodreads, I’ll spend a few blog posts writing bits about some of the books I read in 2007, something I meant to do as I read them.
The first one, which is that last one I finished, is William Vollmann’s Europe Central. I can’t give it a proper evaluation, because I didn’t read it fairly. I started it before Katrina. After Katrina took it from me, I bought it again and tried to continue, but it was too dense and bleak for me at that time. (A Confederacy of Dunces, which is partly responsible for bringing me to New Orleans in the first place, was serendipitously lying beside by my bed-in-exile, so I reread that, then started reading the NYT through every day. Confederacy helped; the NYT was a little bleak, you know.)
So, just very recently, I’ve been feeling pretty good, and I decided to go back to Europe Central. Vollmann uses his familiar imagined-history approach, but allows himself much more license for it than in his Seven Dreams. Here he imagines the lives of artists (Käthe Kollwitz, Roman Karmen, Dmitri Shostakovitch), military commanders (Andrey Vlasov, Friedrich Paulus), and others (most notably SS officer Kurt Gerstein) in an ambitious attempt to get at the nature of living with war and totalitarianism in the twentieth century.
Based only on the last third of it, which I just read, he largely succeeds. The prose is as good as anything he’s written. That last third follows Shostakovitch from the end of the war until his death; it ties into some things Vollmann has done nearer the beginning of the book, and I think to really appreciated it I’d need to read it through from the start again. In particular, I should pay more attention to the stretch about Käthe Kollwitz.
But I’m not going to any time soon. Instead, I’m rereading Vollmann’s The Rifles. This one gave me real trouble the first time through, but I since I seem to be in a good place for reading Vollmann, I’d like to see what I can get from it now.
Have you seen EXPELLED FROM EDEN – A VOLLMANN READER. I highly recommend it — I co-ediyed it after all! ;)
Late next year the Univ. of South Carolina Press will release my study UNDERSTANDING WILLIAM T, VOLLMANN.
Was that an automated comment? Weird, because it showed up only minutes after I published that post — I wouldn’t have thought bots could find it that fast. But nobody reads my blog, and my blog had nothing about books or Vollmann before now, so it’s hard to imagine that you actually happened on that entry so fast.
In any case, yes, I have Expelled from Eden. In general, I don’t like “readers”, but this one is very well done. It was actually in flipping through it again and rereading the description of Vollmann’s stay at Isachsen that pushed me back toward The Rifles.