Europe Central finds Vollmann compressing and then stretching the titanic, media-saturated Eastern Front of the Second World War into brief vignettes, expressing the urgency and loss of life experienced during wartime with themes of aesthetic, dignity, and love. This is a fascinating and sweeping work of historical fiction. Yes, fiction, but take a look at the sources really quickly. What is it, around 50 pages? The impressive amount of research conducted in the writing of this book is reflected in the subject matter; Oftentimes it can feel like an objective history. The liberties taken are valuable. Elena Konstantinovskaya never lived in the capacity Vollmann imagines, but a book like this could not exist without her place in the Shostakovich-Karmen love triangle. How do we actualize an event we learn from between the scribbled-in pages of somniferous social studies textbooks? Western propaganda shows us the American bride waving her kerchief from the navy docks, western propaganda shows us the lovers’ embrace at the end of the war. Western propaganda shows us the mechanical march of Hitlerites and the dangers of soviet communism. How do we color in scenes captured before household technicolor? What is the driving force of anything? Vollmann tells us to think about this conflict less in terms of groups and armies and more in terms of humans with human motives.Europe Central’s coda takes form through Shostakovich’s composition of his Opus 110 in Dresden. “What’s that sound? The very first moment that Shostakovich arrived in Dresden, music flooded his skull in a hideous scream; he clutched at his chest and the world whirled, but nothing else did.” Unyielding in frenetic angst, Vollmann, or, Shostakovich, synthesizes the most grotesque and excruciating facets of human existence into a single stream of ugly beauty. “So in Opus 110 he self-loathingly quotes himself: the opening motif of the First Cello Concerto, the ‘Jewish theme’ from the Second Piano trio: Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.” There is an urgency to convey something that cannot be communicated, there is a desperation to reach out. The words of Vollmann’s “Opus 110,” the notes of the 4th movement of Shostakovich’s Opus 110, they feel as though they could almost leave tangible marks on the skin of the receiving party, there is violence in the anguish and despair with which the opus takes form. “And whenever there’s any beauty at all in Opus 110, it’s dismembered; it drips with death like shitty guts hanging out of a woman’s marble-white torso.” Post-war life fails to make sense of the images of children dragging fallen peers on makeshift sleds, the tiny blue hands tugging on the fraying length of cord by which the living carry the dead. “And death oozes out of the silences between notes, too, the silences of secret Nazi documents, the eight-beat rest which hung between himself and [his son] when the boy confessed to having denounced him at school.” The screams of the violins in b-flat echoing the screams of the dying (was that Elena?) are mirrored nearly wholly by Vollmann’s accompanying written word. “Of course I’ve failed to describe Opus 110 just as I’ve failed to describe death; music remains ultimately indescribable unless Khrennikov and the other artillerymen of Soviet culture compose it for us in pre-measured clips of glittering copper-jacketed mediocrity.” Harmony, compounded, is relayed from an unknown source; we strain to capture it. “That flash of prettiness near the end, perfumed by Elena Konstantinovskaya, affords the listener scant relief; rather, it reminds us the D. D. Shostakovich is dying with his eyes open. He knows what happiness is. He knows that he’ll never possess it.” The lead-up only sweetens the payout, a 700 page overture that crescendos into one of the most important passages in 21st century literature. “Every place leads here. Hence Opus 110’s horror as intimate as the throat-slime of music, the strings dripping with bitterness and hate.” And the piece ends. The wheel has spun. There is brief illumination that lasts only as long as it takes the paraffin to burn off before the match head ceases to exist but only as a fading imprint on the retina before we are once again endeavored with the Sisyphean task of tripping in the dark.