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Heinrich Böll was one of the trio of great German writers (along with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse) who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Böll was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experience as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-past Nine, Children are Civilians Too, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, And Never Said a Word and The Safety Net. Böll served for several years as president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in 1985.
Posthumous Boll - and not (as least not immediately) impressive. The theme is largely identical to that of The Safety Net (1982) - the fragile existence of power, its paradox of entrapped open-sidedness; but unlike in that major novel, the theme here is illustrated skimpily, in blackout conversations and stagy monologues. The characters are politicians and their women - some more shadowy than others - and chiefly it is the women who have wearied from all the intrigues, bad behavior, hypocrisy, and overt show. A state funeral serves as one central occasion, the other a bizarre series of vandalisms (the historic pianos of a number of wealthy bankers have been demolished by an axe). The first is a means of accession, the second a means of parodic attack on the smugness of culture that the powerful indulge in. Boll never gets beyond the stiff unnaturalness of characters desperately trying to give background in speech - and though there are moments here (Boll's Catholic humanism is in evidence late in the book: The only things that matter are love and loyalty - not faith. I'd do anything for my kid brother, even if he turned out to be a murderer. Law and order, Count, is something we can't afford. . .; and there is the odd confession by a West German diplomat of stealing Mercedes hood-emblems as prizes for Russian informants) - this is, overall, Boll at his least powerful. (Kirkus Reviews)
