Centralization

Last night, I finished William T. Vollmann's Europe Central.  This would be the fifth book of Vollmann's I've finished; none of them has been an easy read, as Vollmann is not one to shy away from the ugliness and horror summoned up by the morally wracked situations in which he places his characters.  Nonetheless, Vollmann's willingness to grapple with these situations -- and the hallucinatory quality of much of his prose -- makes him a writer (for my money, at least) impossible to ignore. 

Europe Central is set in Germany and the Soviet Union in the years before, after, and during World War Two, and unsparingly depicts the conditions of living under equally horrifying regimes.  The best that his characters can aspire to is the status of tragic hero, and the mood that he summons up at the novel's opening is never dispersed.  (Only one character shows up who isn't implicated in some way in the crimes of either regime -- the American pianist Van Cliburn -- and he only appears for a handful of pages, inscrutable, leaving the Soviet characters uncertain as to how to react.)

...and, now that I've finished it, I can finally let myself read this article on the author, which focuses on the novel in question.