Readers who pick up his latest novel could be forgiven for assuming that William T. Vollmann is European, and not just because its subject is Russia and Germany and their shared history of war and totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Seven hundred fifty pages long, with an additional fifty pages of notes, Europe Central is dense with allusions to art, to music, to literature, and to history. Its characters include Kurt Gerstein, Käthe Kollwitz, and generals on both sides of the Eastern front in the Second World War; Vollmann's psychological portrayals of these individuals are both plausible and intense.
Structured as paired stories, "pincer movements" to home in on a single idea, relationship, or image, Vollmann's tales shuttle between fable, realism, and near-absurdism as rapidly as they move between Nazis and Communists. At the start of "Airlift Idylls," Vollmann writes:
Structured as paired stories, "pincer movements" to home in on a single idea, relationship, or image, Vollmann's tales shuttle between fable, realism, and near-absurdism as rapidly as they move between Nazis and Communists. At the start of "Airlift Idylls," Vollmann writes:
It's nearly impossible to convince my grandchildren that at the beginning the Iron Curtain was just that-although now that I think of it, the material might not have been iron at all. If you've ever inspected one of those pouches of lead foil which protects film from X-rays at airport security checkpoints, you can well imagine the abnormal heaviness, not to mention limp pendulousness (as opposed to flexibility) of that Iron Curtain: grasp a fresh corpse by the knee and raise it; the calf will swing inwards, compelling the foot to describe the same unfailing arc as a grandfather clock's weighted pendulum; but it's a one-way affair; heel strikes buttock or thigh, and that's the end. When we stood our turn in the exit queue of the border station, I sometimes used to bend down and raise the hem of the Iron Curtain, just to peek out at the capitalist side where I was going; nobody was very strict in those days, and obviously I wasn't trying to "escape." (p. 536)
The passage contains many elements common to the book: First, Vollmann turns a cliché into an amusing, lighthearted device by making it literal. Next he compares this newly-literal iron curtain to an airport commonplace, evoking the airport's security apparatus, the technology and psychology of surveillance. In the middle of the paragraph, he describes the curtain with a vivid analogy to a corpse, an experience common to many of the book's central figures. Vollmann renders this corpse's falling with a sickly precision common to his treatment of violence in this and other books: horrified, Vollmann cannot turn away, and he will not spare the reader.
At this central point, the previously entertaining image takes on a sinister aspect, a character reinforced in the next sentence, where Vollmann recapitulates the airport security checkpoint as a checkpoint between East and West, reminding us of Communism's weight, of the people smothered under that iron curtain. Finally, he recapitulates the image of the Iron Curtain from the beginning of the paragraph, turning away from the sinister by reminding us that, in the early days of East and West Germany, the common individual at least did not know how high the stakes would become.
At this central point, the previously entertaining image takes on a sinister aspect, a character reinforced in the next sentence, where Vollmann recapitulates the airport security checkpoint as a checkpoint between East and West, reminding us of Communism's weight, of the people smothered under that iron curtain. Finally, he recapitulates the image of the Iron Curtain from the beginning of the paragraph, turning away from the sinister by reminding us that, in the early days of East and West Germany, the common individual at least did not know how high the stakes would become.
This neat little palindrome, carefully constructed as it is, is rendered with no less care, albeit with less realism, than the paired tales of Soviet Lieutenant-General A. A. Vlasov and Germany's Lieutenant-General Friedrich Paulus, and their militarily hopeless situations. Vollmann returns almost reflexively to territory he has mined since he went to Afghanistan in the early 1980s, a masculine world revolving around honor, violence, and its justification. Vollmann's writing in this vein is rich, even where one might expect it to be tapped out.
Vollmann reserves his best for Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who he imagines as part of a love triangle with Soviet film director Roman Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya. Vollmann imagines the composer hopelessly attracted to Konstantinovskaya years after their relationship ended; these passages verge on the heartbreaking. Vollmann's writing on the subject of Shostakovich's music reads as sensitive music criticism based squarely in biography, but it is unclear what portion of this biography is imagined.
Vollmann reserves his best for Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who he imagines as part of a love triangle with Soviet film director Roman Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya. Vollmann imagines the composer hopelessly attracted to Konstantinovskaya years after their relationship ended; these passages verge on the heartbreaking. Vollmann's writing on the subject of Shostakovich's music reads as sensitive music criticism based squarely in biography, but it is unclear what portion of this biography is imagined.
