WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN - EUROPE CENTRAL

Image: Käthe Kollwitz, “Die Überlebenden”

Research/detail/scope/obsession. This is what I have come to expect from Vollmann, and no less impressive for being expected… But the chapters that thrilled me most were the cabalistic ones: Hitler as a Wagner fanboy-mystic; Stalin as the master of unsolvable riddles; a vast fungal network underlying stone edifices, reminding me that big -isms (Fascism, Communism) often rest on the flimsiest human fictions. Read, April 2019.