Dispatch from the Trail: A Depressing Duo

A brief update from the coffee shop, brought to you by the spiced hot chocolate I’m enjoying along with William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central. Except “enjoying” might apply only to the beverage. Just 128 pages in, reading a doorstop of a novel about the lives of various people in the USSR and Nazi Germany, unwittingly (sometimes wittingly) caught up in and worn down by their nations’ civil upheaval, hubris, paranoia, and eventual terroristic despotism, is starting to feel a bit masochistic, considering the climate I currently find myself in.

The prose is dense, deploying approximately 2.3 proper nouns per page that have me running to Wikipedia for more info: names of planes, of tanks, of offensive operations, of places and real people. So many people. And when I look them up, few have biographies that don’t end in murder, assassination, execution, or suicide. It was a bad time, I already knew, and now I’m learning the finer details: the splotches on General Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s written confession, later determined to be splatters of blood from “a body in motion” ; the premature deaths of artist Kathë Kollwitz ’s son (in World War I) and then her grandson (in World War II), and in between the dozens of prints she made of mothers holding dead children; and many other sad little side stories.

It’s a little too easy, at times, to extrapolate from the flood of resonant historical examples. Descriptions of early Soviet Chekists, for instance, can sound an awful lot like modern ICE patrols:

In those days it was the custom for every pass to be scrutinized in turn by dozens of menacing, half-literate faces, none of whom could grant the bearer absolution from fear, but any one of whom possessed full authority to shoot. Under the stipulations of the Red Terror, mistaken ruthlessness would be forgiven; mistaken mercy might not be.

Sometimes I close the book a moment and reset. But still I’m finding the exercise valuable. It’s instructive to understand just how bad things can get, and how people can let it get there.

I’ll also soon be starting Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, my book club’s selection for our April meeting, a memoir documenting the author’s reckoning with the suicides of her two sons.

Between the two books, I imagine it’s gonna be a dark spring of the soul around here.

But we press on. Deep breaths, ocean waves.