Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

I just don't get this novel. I hate to say bad things about it, since it won the 2005 National Book Award, but I think it is deliberately obfuscated. It seems to me to be more of an essay than a novel. An 800 page essay with creative non-fiction chapters sprinkled around. The theme is "Europe:bad", or maybe "Fascism, Communism: bad". You really need to be an expert on the footnotes of European history to make much sense out of it. Definitely not recommended by me.