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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Few American writers infuse their writing with similar urgency. [7 Feb 2005, p. 38]
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Outstanding
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Review Of Contemporary Fiction James Crossley
Read it. It stands with Vollmann's best work, and his best work can stand with anyone's. [Summer 2005, p. 137]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Tom LeClair
Part novel and part stories, virtuoso historical remembrance and focused study of violence, ''Europe Central'' orchestrates the best of Vollmann's past impulses into one large-minded and bighearted ''Opus 15.'' Or ''Opus 21.''
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Outstanding
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Daniel Lukes
William T. Vollmann is at his best when conveying a sensual immediacy in prose... That he 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.
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe John Freeman
With this profound and fully realized new work of fiction, Vollmann asks us to put aside what we think we know of history and immerse ourselves in it once again. He posits that even if it is the devil that lives in St. Petersburg, not God, it is our duty to know him, too.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Melvin Jules Bukiet
Vollmann has created a book that aspires to the highest possible potential of literature. "Europe Central" is more than physically enormous; it is morally significant. [20 Mar 2005, p.R5]
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Steve Kettmann
"Europe Central," angry and vivid, claustrophobic and consuming, mesmerizing and meandering, has an emotional force capable of ripping almost any reader from his moorings, or at the very least, inspiring a strange and overpowering urge to sit sobbing over Dmitri Shostakovich's heartbreaking, dead-man-walking Opus 110 for days on end.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Steven Moore
I've reviewed nearly all of Vollmann's books over the years and am running out of superlatives; suffice it to say, if you've been following his extraordinary career, Europe Central may be his best novel yet.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Matt Thorne
Europe Central is an enormous accomplishment, but really only offers a starting-point to understanding this author's oeuvre.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Brandon Stosuy
It's likely up to Vollmann to carry the torch of post-pomo overambition. Even if he does drop it here and there, he's created something of both beauty and historical use value, a visionary textbook on human suffering.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Michael Wood
The book is always lucid, even as it hovers between the obvious and the recondite, and the under- and over-examined, but it is not seeking a conclusion, only a new framing of moral options, and the pathos of Europe Central is that it reminds us that a moral calculus is only as good as its local practitioners can make it.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews Bruce Allen
Overlong, redundant, accusatory and harrowing, part hubristic overkill, part unruly masterpiece, this startling fever dream is another astonishment from one of the world's maddest, most commanding and necessary writers. [1 Mar 2005]
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Darryl Whetter
Sadly, dubious narrative strategies and undirected characters deny much emotional or intellectual depth to the novel's ambitious historical breadth. [30 Jul 2005]
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