Discussion - Week Six - Europe Central - p. 532 - 621

[Jim]

This discussion covers Denazification –thru- Operation Wolund, pg. 532 –thru- 621

[Zadignose]

Somewhere along the line I intended to pop in and say that I thought Operation Airlift was one of the most entertaining and bizarre chapters in the book, and I really ought to go back and read it again. I though it was excellent... masterpiece material?... maybe... and what surrounds it, the rest of the book is context to add to the effect of this chapter... I may be alone in thinking so...

The Red Guillotine chapter was not quite as rewarding for me, as I felt Vollmann was leaning on schtick a bit too much (again with the one defining trauma/fixation that defines a character and motivates her actions), but I still noted that it was an odd kind of accomplishment that near the end of the chapter, I almost regretted the end of authoritarian brutality and felt sorry for this beast's sense of persecution even though she's responsible for atrocities and hardly deserves that I sympathize. What I was most interested in was the horrible thought that the same idealist with humanitarian sentiments at the beginning would grow up to be inhumane and arbitrarily cruel, yet I'm not sure that the transformation was... well, approached as it should have been, or communicated quite as effectively... well, I dunno.

Let's Never Speak of it Again (I may have mangled the chapter title a bit) was a brief chapter that I didn't enjoy much, but perhaps it's a necessary bridge to what may come in Opus 110, which I haven't read yet... Tutuola has distracted me, but this month I'll get in the final chapters.