Vollmann wins National Book Award

[Matthew Ryan]

 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=1321149

Few were surprised by Didion's victory. Few were not surprised by the
announcement for fiction: William T. Vollmann, cited for "Europe Central,"
an 800-page novel, complete with footnotes, about Germany and the Soviet
Union in the 20th century. E.L. Doctorow's "The March" and Mary Gaitskill's
"Veronica" had been regarded as the leading contenders.

"I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech," said Vollmann, 46,
who then turned serious as he said his book was inspired by a film he saw in
elementary school "about burned corpses being pulled out of ovens."

Vollmann noted he was part German and wondered what he would have done had
he lived under the Nazis.

"I'm very happy it's over," he said of his book, "and that I don't have to
think about it anymore."

Vollmann, whose Web site refers to him, perhaps in jest, as a "future winner
of the Nobel Prize for literature," is a prolific writer with a history of
going long, his many works including a seven-volume, 3,000-page work on the
history of violence.

"It makes me happy to try to do something beautiful. The world doesn't owe
me a living," he said after the ceremony.
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