Status Updates From Europe Central

"...a person owns many different sorts of courage stored up within himself like fats; most of them can be exhausted, at which point a man becomes a coward; one must feed one's bravery; it's all a matter of chemicals."

"God does not behave as a human being behaves."

It's for your wife, said Captain Wirth, smiling. You're so impossible about accepting gifts, I finally said to myself, I said, hit the armored man in his wife-fpot

Thank you, said Gerstein, stroking the soft supple leather of the handbag a little absently.

Human skin, said Captain Wirth. Don't worry; it's not Jewish. A good Russian peasant boy. I picked him out myself.

I recently mentioned in a review that I have cried while reading on the subway twice. Make that three times. I have been reading about Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany to contextualize 2026 America. More than any of the nonfiction this has done that. I have never felt so utterly helpless. Vollmann has done an amazing job of not dwelling on what happened, we all know that, but on how it happened.

"For Petersburg remains above all the city of Raskolnikov, who exists only in Dostoevsky's nightmares but whose crime, murder for the sake of an idea, proves its reality again and again."

"Everyone composes his own score, and then we all compare versions."

"How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?"

"The winter days dwindled behind the Sixth Army as steadily as the frozen horse-legs stuck in the snow for road markers. Paulus was almost out of cigarettes. Christmas, naturally, was not very happy he wrote Coca. In times like these, it is better to avoid celebrations.