Acc to Vollmann's afterword, the novel is "a series of parables about famous, infamous and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision." It is Pynchonesque in its density and historical precision that is enriched by fictitious anecdotes. It was a hard read, but sufficiently fragmented as to be somewhat more approachable than Gravity's Rainbow. The structure of encircling vignettes with occasional offshoots to explore one off (or otherwise minor) characters helps break up the monolithic oppression which is thematically and narratively central to the book. Whereas Pynchon's maximalism is psychedelic and overwhelming at times, this novel seems sounder (?) or more cohesive. The half-dozen overtly monolithic chapters are spaced apart (except for the duo of Breakout and The Last Field-Marshal as well as the trio of Clean Hands, The Second Front, and Operation Citadel which all employ the inescapable length to their narrative ends). Opus 110, sacramentally speaking, is the novel. It is what it is about, and Vollmann –by this point in the final throes of anguish of the book– has educated the readers about all the necessary subtleties and themes which much be apprehended to treat Dmitri Shostakovich's masterpiece.

There is very little historical handholding or contextualization that takes place in this book. I don't think I would've appreciated it as much had I not already written read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and other WWII lit-fic (GR is, surprisingly, pretty disjoint in its focus on the Battle of Britain and then random-ass escapades throughout Russia. Comparatively, the setting of that book is incidental to the plot, which should say something about the comprehensive tyranny of Central Europe to Europe Central). That is also to say that there is probably ample historical significance to many of the characters which fell upon my own deaf years. It is highbrow intellectual academic fiction for sure.

Whereas The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich depicts Hitler's political rise to power and command of the masses, this book does a better job at indirectly describing his interpersonal charisma (as "the Sleepwalker") which made it so that so many of the leaders he was surrounded by fell in love with his vision and truly believed that only through the Führer could the crazy things they were attempting ever come to fruition. In The Last Field-marshal, they talk about plans for when they take over Moscow in a losing war, but when the Führer starts to talk about what to do once they've captured Moscow in the eyes of the general surrounding him, it is as if Moscow is already theirs.

Steel in Motion

Really enjoy the personification of the telephone as the black octopus enabling Hitler's panopticon:

The sleepwalker’s all eyes; the realist is all ears; their mating forms the telephone.

and

“What about the mouthpiece? Is it true that it can hear your every breath through its black holes? In his underground headquarters with its many guards, the realist sits tired behind a large desk, awaiting the telephone’s demands. Although he’s good at hanging up on people with as much force as the soldier who slams another shell into our antitank gun, he’s hanging up on them, not on the telephone itself, which he can’t live without. He subsumes himself in it, all-hearing; he knows when Shostakovich takes his name in vain. At the first ring he’ll summon his generals to attend him at that conference table with its green cloth.”

And then also the steel.

In a moment steel will begin to move, slowly at first, like troop trains pulling out of their stations, then more quickly and ubiquitously, the square crowds of steel-helmed men moving forward, flanked by rows of shiny planes; then tanks, planes and other projectiles will accelerate beyond recall. Polish soldiers feebly camouflage their helmets with netting. Germans go to the cinema to fall in love with film stars; when Operation Citadel fails, they’ll be swooning over Lisca Malbran. Russian cavalry charge into action against German tanks; German schoolgirls try to neutralize Russian tanks by pouring boiling water down the turrets. Barrage balloons swim in the air, finned and fat like children’s renderings of fish. Don’t worry; Europe Central’s troops will stand fast, at least until Operation Barbarossa! (Their strategic dispositions are foxed and grimed like a centuries-old Bible.) Steel finds them all.

Steel, imbued with the sleepwalker’s magic sight, illuminates itself as it comes murdering. (Amidst the cemetery snowdrifts of Leningrad lie the coffined and the coffinless. Steel did this.) The broad rays of light as a Nebelwerfer gets launched from its half track, those inform steel’s gaze, mark steel’s reach.

The Saviors: A Kabbalistic Tale

Insane prose. A dissection of typography and glyphage onto the statements and sounds the letters describe. Emphasis on the jewish alphabet is no mistake.

The tale of Fanya Kaplan, that darkhaired, pale-faced, slender idealist, tells itself with grim brevity in keeping with her times. For just as tyrannicides spurn slow justice, so likewise with tyrants. Between exploit and recompense lay only four days, which in most histories would comprise but an ellipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: . . . .—but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice; and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words—which at the close of this interval, Fanya Kaplan was carried beyond Tau, final letter of the magic alphabet. Her attempt took place on 30 August 1918. It is written that after Lenin fell, the young assassin hysterically fled, but then, remembering that the moral code of the Social Revolutionaries required her to give up her life in exchange for her victim’s, stopped running, turned back, and in trembling silence surrendered to our security forces. On 3 September, Fanya Kaplan, who happened to be noted for her “Jewish features,” was led into a narrow courtyard of the Lubyanka and there shot from behind by the commandant of the Kremlin himself, P. D. Malkov. (That luminary I. M. Sverdlov, who’d already played so indispensable a role in the liquidation of the Romanov family, instructed Malkov: Her remains are to be destroyed without a trace.) Thus the life and works of the blackhaired woman.

and the whole chapter continues this way. Let yer nuts hang Bill

Woman with Dead Child

A commentator notes that in the diaries one finds almost nothing about this journey, and even her son in Berlin, to whom she so often reported in such detail on all her trips, seems to have received only one letter from her. All the same, she must have been contented with her experience, because the following year, while the sleepwalker, wearing a business suit and a fancy hat, was giving another speech in Hamburg, striding back and forth in a frenzy, with a short riding-whip in his hand, Käthe finished chiseling out a woodcut of Elisabeth pregnant with Johannes and Maria pregnant with Jesus, took off her apron, sat down at the wide wooden table in the living room, then wrote Gorki: All that I saw in Russia I saw in the light of the Soviet star. Coming from a German, her next sentence now seems ironic, to say the least: And I have a longing to go again, deep into the land, to the Volga. Fourteen years later her grandson, who was also named Peter, would die there, drowned in an eddy of bullets and bombs near the great whirlpool called Stalingrad.

Elena's Rockets

Elena Konstantinovskaya (1914–1975) was a Russian translator and linguist best known for her passionate, lifelong affair with the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which began in 1934. This chapter name is a pun about her breasts. The music innuendo's throughout or similes of symphonic lovemaking are as beautiful as they are absurd:

Do you want to know the difference between Vera Ivanova and Lina? Elena did the same thing, performed the same sexual act, with both of them. But with Lina, because she was now more adult and more experienced, she did it in much the way that von Karajan conducts Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: more smooth, rounded, polished, elegant (one hears this especially in the brasses), less harsh and desperate than as André Previn does it. The ferocious second movement especially, although Karajan’s tempo is actually faster than Previn’s, sounds richer, more modulated than his. (I myself prefer Previn’s starkness here.) In the third movement all irony is lost, resulting in what I consider to be a serious misinterpretation of Shostakovich; but in exchange Karajan imparts a haunting sweetness to the music quite unlike what Previn achieved. Uncanny how different the same notes can sound!

The Palm Tree of Deborah

How to be musically sophisticated under totalitarianism?

It is, I am sure, no aspersion on Mitya to remark that for the sake of financial self-sufficiency, prestige, and above all, the leisure to whirl down within the secret well of his own mind’s ear, hunting for that “Beauty which alone defined his life, he’d kept compromising with the world. For example, he now wrote program music on occasion. How was that any different from playing the accompaniments to silent movies at Bright Reel? Besides, as Sollertinsky loyally pointed out, the employment of a motif was not at all inconsistent with sophistication, or even with the outright obscurity which Mitya still found so hilarious. Even Wagner wasn’t bad at times, and if we could take his leitmotifs and run rings around them, maybe play a few ventriloquists’ tricks so that nobody else could even imagine that this could be Wagner, what a laugh! That was how Mitya looked at it. Although it might be irritating to him to do as others told him to do, as long as he could build secret trapdoors and escape hatches into every score, so that the world beneath the piano keys hadn’t been forgotten, he was still living on his own terms. Ancient masons used to wall up a live victim in each temple or bridge they built; when he was much older Mitya would immure himself in just this way in the cornerstone of his Opus 110; “but for now there was no need to be as drastic as that. He might not enjoy his audience’s full comprehension; but he still enjoyed its indulgence, which, now that I think of it, is not such a bad thing to have. If I bow to Lenin’s memory and then create what I please, have I been any more constrained than a poet would be by the arbitrariness of rhyme? And so Mitya could still go on thinking rather well of himself.

Narrated about/by Dmitri Shostakovich, Vollmann interpolates his social retardation and charisma by narratively trailing off mid-sentence. It is very endearing and is painted in elsewhere in chapters not-about-Mitya to capture the same sense of ennui, absentmindedness, or trauma-response. The composer, who seems to have an absolutely savant gift for musical composition, apparently has very little to do in the way of descriptive words:

He wondered whether he should avoid her completely from now on, for the sake of his wife and the child in her belly. It was, so to speak, a sad situation, really, one might say almost a desperate one but I, you see, I exaggerate. Once he told Glikman, who was one of the few people not to shun him in those days: The things you love too much perish, my dear Isaak Davidovich. That’s why it’s necessary to, well . . .—Evidently he hadn’t loved this E. E. Konstantinovskya too much, or he would have, you know. Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me. So he didn’t have to worry; she wouldn’t perish if he failed to keep her at arm’s length. He decided to visit her again, just to, you get my drift, but a familiar-looking man boarded the streetcar behind him and got off when he did, so . . . Actually it was just as well, because . . .

In response to the election of the supreme Soviet leader in part 14 he says:

On the sixth of December, during the celebrations in honor of the new Stalin Constitution which guaranteed the rights of all peoples, he whispered to Glikman: If they chop off both my hands, I’ll keep writing music with the pen in my teeth . . .

The Last Field-Marshal

This is is at the same time a touching father's account of the betrayal of the Reich against itself because of the same blind loyalty to the Führer and the unwillingness to correct his own mistakes which carrier the Reich to this brink of inner failure. Centered about Friedrich Paulus and the surrender at Stalingrad. Vollmann paints him as the only person who realizes that the emperor has no clothes, or rather the most powerful man who might be able to do something about the fact that the emperor has no clothes (Rommel is not really depicted, but he famously mentioned that the emperor had no clothes). Really, he is just one entrypoint into the drama of the Reich wherein most people seemed to know (by Stalingrad), but were too pot-committed, or terrified, to do anything about it. As a father, he worries about his sons who look up to him who is now watching his men starve to death for ???? no good reason. As a general, he remains circumspect and analytic. This comes together as one of the more touching monolithic vignettes. I do believe Vollmann was partially trying to honor him here, and despite being a fucking nazi, he does a good job of reducing Paulus in his final moments to be a man who was trying to save his own men's lives. Few places in history where you could be sympathetic with the abject villains, but Stalingrad is probs not a bad place to start:

“On 19.12.42 he dispatched a warning to Army Headquarters that the maximum range of his Panzer tanks had now dwindled to twenty kilometers. The Bolshevists were pressing him hard at the Myshkova River. Field-Marshal von Manstein had just issued a top-secret order to launch Operations Winter Storm and Thunderclap at the first possible instant. On 23.12.42 the teleprinter chattered: Good evening, Paulus. It was Field-Marshal von Manstein. The day before yesterday, you reported that you had sufficient fuel for a 20-km sortie. Zeitzler asks, would you please re-check and confirm this?

Dread began to pulse in Paulus’s guts.

Now, if during the next few days we could fly in a limited amount of fuel and supplies, do you think that if worst came to worst you could launch Operation Thunderclap? I don’t want an immediate answer. Think it over and get in touch with me again, please, at 2100 hours.

Staring at the wall above the head of the military typist, who in turn stared nowhere, his bluish white fingers obediently convulsive against the teleprinter keys, Paulus paced and dictated: Thunderclap has become more difficult than before, because during the last few days the enemy has been digging in on the south and southwestern front, and according to wireless intercepts, appears to have concentrated six armored brigades behind these new positions.

Now, shockingly, the typist was gazing full into his face, and the gaze was pleading.

Preparations, he continued, would take—let’s see—six days. It will be a very difficult operation, unless Hoth manages to tie down really strong enemy forces outside. Am I to take it that I am now authorized to initiate Operation Thunderclap? Once it’s launched, there’ll be no turning back. Over.

The typist was praying.

I can’t give you full authority today, replied the teleprinter, and a single tear began its progress down the typist’s white, white face. Paulus pretended not to see; that would be kindest. He himself felt nothing but relief. Whenever he thought about breaking out, a horror which seemed somehow dirty burst out like sweat; he knew to his bones that the thing was impossible; as long as he could hang on here, there’d be no further shame. And he felt that our Führer far away at Wolf’s Lair understood him. If he only continued to do his best here at Stalingrad for as long as he could, our Führer would forgive and preserve him. Certainly, nobody who stayed here could be called a coward . . .”

He believes he is able to win if he were to have received the troops that he was assured by Goerring, but they must remain obedient, and therefore his army Fucking dies due to: "Alimentary dystrophy, also known as starvation."

Clean Hands

Focusing on SS officer Kurt Gerstein who in 1942, after witnessing mass murders in the Belzec and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps, Gerstein gave a detailed report to Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, as well as to Swiss diplomats, members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII, and to the Dutch government-in-exile, in an effort to inform the international community about the Holocaust as it was happening. In 1945, following his surrender, he wrote the Gerstein Report covering his experience of the Holocaust. During his imprisonment in France later that year, he was found hanged in his cell under circumstances that were never fully clarified.

Bone chilling description of his assessment of various concentration camps and their capacity to kill Jews. It includes historical documentation about how these men escaped any sort of convictions for their war crimes and is intermixed with bible verses because Gerstein's superior inquire's whether or not he's a Catholic and that apparently matters to him.

He convinces himself that he's not doing evil. He's bearing witnessed evil so that he may testify against it or about it later. A spy for God, he refers to himself all the while, continuing to remain an accomplice of the SS. He's maybe a hero, but Vollmann certainly probes the grey area of "just following orders" and "how to be good within evil" and it comes across with a pretty full minus column for ol Kurt.

Operation Citadel

Operation Citadel is about the narrators (same one as Steel in Motion, who is most prevalent throughout the novel I believe) participation in what amounts to be a suicide mission by the ninth panzer division of the ninth German army offensive in Kursk. It's just a bunch of people getting fucking annihilated. German soldier yearns for the sea as he continues to circle back to similes of crabs to describe the horrors of the eastern front:

Rüdiger, soulful Rüdiger was now in the truck ahead of me and Volker was behind. According to his guidebook, the Tverskaia quarter of Moscow is supposed to be very nice; Stalin widened the streets just for us! As for the old cripple, I initially supposed that he was with Sergeant Gunther, which couldn’t have been the case; to tell you the truth, I couldn’t have cared less about him right then. We could almost hear the breathing of the Slavs all around us in the wheat fields. That made me sick with fear. And here I want to state that the sleepwalker made sure that the best new assault guns went to his pets in the Waffen-SS; we were under strength and certainly didn’t get to ride in armored half-tracks, I can assure you! As I’ve already inserted into the record, I was only a telephonist; I had to ride in an open truck. I kept saying to myself: If there’s only something I can do; if I can only reason it out! I’m not a good person but I’m not such a monster, either. “I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders. I deserve to live. What measures can I take? Hermit crabs become all helmet whenever they want to; smugglers invent a hiding place that no one has ever thought of before; tank crews get themselves transferred into Tigers. And tanks protect themselves with anti-magnetic paste, so that Russian mines can’t—

and

Have you ever seen an injured bird at the seashore? Here come crabs from nowhere—they wait under the sand—and ring it round, cautiously at first; before you know it, the first crab has leapt onto the broken wing and pinched off a morsel. The bird struggles, but here come other crabs in a rush. That’s how it is when T-34s surround a Tiger or a Ferdinand, probing with their seventy-sixes until a close-range shot gets through; if that doesn’t work, the Russian infantrymen, who ride on the backs of those tanks like eggs glued down to a mother beetle’s shell, board us and shoot into every ventilation slit, or pour in gasoline and light it—oh, there’s nothing those Slavs won’t do! Then what? From a hole in a Panzer a hand dangles, half connected to a black puzzle of bones.

with the footnote:

“Why couldn’t the human factor have been eliminated entirely? World War III, which I expect Germany to win, will be fought with robots. Then we can all hide in deep bunkers; we’ll be invulnerable. On the first afternoon of Operation Citadel, our Goliath radio-controlled explosion machines broke through at Maloarkhangelsk, but One Hundred-and-Twenty-ninth Soviet Armored Brigade defeated further penetrations. Does that fact invalidate our Goliaths? Not at all. It’s merely that we didn’t have enough of them.”

It's the last paragraph before part seven of the chapter operation Citadel

When you separate from a woman, what you have to do is kill your love for her; you have to blockade it and starve it to death, just as the sleepwalker set out to do in Leningrad; that’s the only way

Which is just Mark from peepshow

Airdrift Idylls

If I'm not mistaken, this chapter is about the narrator being put to task to assassinate Shostakovich, which is a very interesting clash of characters. There emerges a very intriguing love triangle between Elena Konstantinovskaya, her husband Roman Lazarevich Karmen, and Mitya, and maybe also Alexandrov the Communist spy/narrator.

At some point Alexander, the narrator mentions that he would be willing to go so far as to have Shostakovic's stutter if only it could keep him from having to assassinate him:

I would have done anything for him then; I would even have stuttered like him.

This comes after he mentions being Shostakovich's shadow so much so that the solution to being put in the sticky situation of having to assassinate him, could perhaps simply be solved by killing himself. And then towards the end of the chapter, he starts to assume or affect the same verbal stutter of trailing off that Shostakovic himself has, which is a brilliant way to foreshadow what's going to happen to our narrator.

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