Europe Central by William T Vollmann - 4/81

Category: National Book Award Winners for Fiction (2/9)

Wow. This book was not what I was expecting, but I am glad I picked it up. (I honestly don't know what it was I was expecting, but anyway.) Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award for fiction, and it is easy to see why. The writing is magnificent - I felt swept away, caught up in the stories. The book itself is difficult to describe. Each chapter is a parable of sorts, and the chapters are paired in a way that illuminates the story. Basically the book is about World War II, focusing on Germany and Russia. There is no main character, except perhaps Europe Central. Each story is told from a sort of omniscient narrator point of view, with the voice sometimes changing in the middle of the story. Like I said, it's hard to describe.
Even though it took me longer to read than I would have thought, I am really glad I invested the time in it. I know almost nothing about WWII, so a lot of what is described I had never known, but I only felt lost during one story (Airlift Idylls - that one completely lost me for a bit). Some of the chapters focus on real people, telling their stories as the author envisions it, people such as Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus, Kurt Gerstein, Shostakovich, and then sometimes the story is told by someone who seems to be an individual but is really not (those chapters reminded me of And Then We Came to the End, if you've read that). Basically this book would be enjoyed by anyone who can invest the time, who is interested in that time period, or who loves it when an author can use the language so beautifully (even when describing terrible things). Vollmann obviously did a ton of research for this book, and it makes me curious to see what his other books are like.

Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1 by M.T. Anderson (20/81)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Category: Award Winners

Octavian, a slave owned by Mr. Gitney (aka 03-01) of Boston, and son of an African princess, doesn't realize that his childhood - consisting of Latin and violin lessons, experiments and the measuring of his waste - is odd. His narrative begins with impressions from his younger days and gradually follows a more chronological path as he becomes older and more aware of the revolutionary world beyond the College of Lucidity.

This exceptional historical fiction received the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006. It doesn't strike me as a particularly teen/ya novel (even though it's billed as such), but seemed like one of those books that appeals to adults more, overall. The plot took awhile to get going, especially with the short, impressionistic glimpses we get of Octavian's earliest memories, but the writing is superb and the characters so well-drawn and sympathetic that I couldn't help but read on. In the end, I was ready to start the second book as soon as possible. 5 stars.

Cross-posted on my blog, Born Reader.

The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck

Category - National Book Award Winners (#2/81)

This National Book Award Winner (2004) is historical fiction that takes place mostly in Paraguay, in the 1860's. The story mainly follows Ella Lynch, the young, beautiful Irish woman who comes home with the president's son after his trip to Europe. It is difficult to say whether or not Ella and Franco actually love each other, but they do stay together, though never marry, throughout the fifteen years that Ella is in Paraguay. During those fifteen years Ella gives birth to seven children, five of which live to be teenagers. Franco's father dies, giving him the opportunity to take control of the country and embroil it in a seemingly senseless war against the surrounding countries. Franco becomes a dictator, forcing his people to give up everything for his pointless war, becoming more and more paranoid, arresting and killing people for no reason. Ella continues to support him, more because she doesn't know what else to do, than because she actually believes in the cause. She considers leaving many times, but always stays, until the war has destroyed the entire country, killing almost all the men, including Franco himself.
I really enjoyed reading this book, although it wasn't necessarily due to the story. The book is written in a very interesting way - we are given brief glimpses of parts of the characters' lives, usually in short sections that are only a handful of paragraphs or less. This makes the story feel like it is moving very quickly. Tuck does not just focus on Ella and Franco, either, but gives us pictures of many of the other characters, major and minor, and leaves it up to the reader to make a whole story out of it. Her choices of what to show about each character are very deliberate - some of the characterizations seem rather shallow at first, but get deeper as we get more glimpses of them. This is one of those books that is more interesting to read for the way it is written, rather than for the story itself.
About the story - it is about real events, Ella and Franco did exist, as did many of the other characters in the book. I always find it fascinating to learn about history in this way, and also to learn about what came from history and what came from the mind of the author. In this case, events of the war are not particularly well documented, and many of the minor events were never documented. But the book is obviously well researched, and I think that Tuck does an excellent job of describing Paraguay during the 19th century. In the Author's Note she quotes a friend who says, "Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase 'historical fiction' it is important to remember which of the two words is which."