Among his most audacious works are the Seven Dreams series of novels, comprising a "symbolic history" of North America, and The Royal Family (2000), a harrowing gumshoe tale of sordid sorts set amid the denizens and dregs of San Francisco, the who-done-it inspired by a who's-who of such disparate influences as Ovid, Dante and Melville. The nonfiction Rising Up and Rising Down is Vollmann's doorstop magnum opus, an elaborate and exhaustive seven-volume analysis and history of human violence.

Bringing similar historical insight in the endeavor to "invade the meaning of Europe," Vollmann, calls to mind Pynchon's view of history (from Mason and Dixon) as a "great disorderly tangle of lines." He attempts and largely succeeds in Europe Central in synthesizing and reconciling varied factual, cultural and imaginative strands. Against the backdrop of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 German advance into Russia, and the eventual German defeat at Stalingrad, Vollmann presents 36 intertwined paired narratives reflecting the impulses and actions of an assortment of German and Russian military, diplomatic, and artistic characters.

He riddles us thusly: "The winged figures on the bridges of Berlin are now mostly flown, for certain things went wrong in Europe."

And certain steadfast positions of principled and faithful men (of the just-following-orders variety) weaken into wavering loyalties as campaigns of attrition exact a personal toll. In the linked counter-narratives "Breakout" and "The Last Field Marshall," Russian general A.A. Vlasov and Friedrich Paulus, commander of Germany's Sixth Army, find that impossible circumstances force their hands to such an extent that collaboration must result. Vollmann, with minute attention to detail and psychological probing, traces the evolution of events and the differing fates with dramatic and compelling effect. He allows for such then-rationalizations as the abstract intangibles constituted in "the bourgeois-reactionary ideology of so-called world citizenship," and on the other hand, a loaded guilt-by-dissociation charge that there was "nothing more dangerous than an old man's self-justifications."

In addition to vibrant portrayals of such cultural luminaries as Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, translator Elena Konstantinovskaya and the socialist artist Kathe Kollwitz, another particularly powerful one-two counterpunch is found in "Zoya" and "Clean Hands." Here, Vollmann outlines the heroics of a female Russian martyr whose fate inspired and hardened Soviet resolve, and more vividly recounts the rousing and courageous story of Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who, while working as the supply agent for the gas chambers, risked his life to tell the world about the concentration camps. Giving an impassioned and nuanced account of Gerstein's mounting apprehension and course of action, the author avers, "The first time he joined the Party, it was out of true German ardor. ... Then he'd volunteered to be a spy for God."