‘…the high priest of contemporary underground American fiction, William T. Vollmann, now turns his voracious eye to the Old World, ravaged by the Second World War, and presents us with his latest novelistic expanse, Europe Central. Wide-reaching and hugely ambitious, this work tells the stories of major and minor figures on the German and Russian Fronts. They include people such as the Sixth Army commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who led the Germans at the siege of Stalingrad, the Russian General A. A. Vlasov, who crossed over to the Reich after his capture and formed a German-collaborationist Russian army, and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life in an attempt to inform the world about the Holocaust as it took place. There are also portraits of artists, poets and film-makers: Kathe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova and Roman Karmen.’
From Daniel Lukes’ review in the TLS.