Europe Central is a 2005 National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

-winning novel by William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann

William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award...

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The novel, which takes place in central Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 in the 20th century, examines a vast array of characters, ranging from generals to martyrs, officers to poets, traitors to artists and musicians. It deals with the moral decisions made by people in the most testing of times and offers a perspective on human actions during wartime. Vollmann makes use of many historical figures as characters including composer Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....

, artist Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century...

, film director Roman Karmen

Roman Karmen

Roman Lazarevich Karmen was a Soviet war camera-man and film director and one of the most influential figures in documentary film making; insofar as his propaganda is concerned he could be considered USSR's answer to Leni Riefenstahl, though the comparison is by no means absolute.-Communist...

, poet Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...

, SS officer Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein was a German SS officer and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS. He witnessed mass murders in the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Treblinka...

, as well as German general Friedrich Paulus

Friedrich Paulus

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus was an officer in the German military from 1910 to 1945. He attained the rank of Generalfeldmarschall during World War II, and is best known for having commanded the Sixth Army's assault on Stalingrad during Operation Blue in 1942...

 and Soviet general Andrey Vlasov

Andrey Vlasov

Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov or Wlassow was a Russian Red Army general who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.-Early career:...

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Reception

The Times Literary Supplement wrote that Vollmann "has turned to the historical novel and made it his own, fashioning a work which is cinematic in scope, epic in ambition and continuously engaging, shows that he is one of the most important and fascinating writers of our time."

The New York Times Book Review described it at his "most welcoming work, possibly his best book… part novel and part stories, virtuoso historical remembrance and focused study of violence."