Review by Choice Review
The first American edition of short prose fiction written by Boll between 1946 and 1952, first published in German in 1983 as Die Verwundung. With this narrower focus, the volume does not duplicate any of the prose fiction in the comprehensive Stories of Heinrich Boll (CH, Sep '86), which presents nearly four decades of his work. Some of the 22 stories in the present volume (``The Embrace,'' ``The Cage,'' ``The Raingutter'')might more appropriately be called sketches or vignettes, which capture fleeting moments or place a single experience, mood, or impression in sharp relief. The themes are vintage Boll: the experiences, thoughts, and emotions of soldiers at the front, and of ordinary Germans in the aftermath of WW II. Some of the stories have a first-person, others a third-person narrator, but the perspective is almost always that of the wartime soldier or the dislocated veteran. Stylistically, the stories lack the more sophisticated craftsmanship of Boll's later work, but they have a freshness and vigor, and a stark realism, that produce powerful effects. That these ``come across'' undiminished is due largely to the skill of Boll's longtime translator, Leila Vennewitz. Appropriate for upper-division undergraduates and general readers.-E.N. Elstun, George Mason University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobel Prizewinning author Boll (19171985) wrote these stories between 1940 and 1952, focusing on the miseries of the German soldier during World War II and the postwar plight of the ordinary citizen. An almost crazed sense of nightmare warps and heightens the realism of many of the collection's 22 tales. A man becomes fatefully obsessed with the lacy beauty of barbed wire in ``The Cage.'' A sentry pacing a French village in ``Vive la France'' feels endless time, dark and silence flowing tangibly around him before he shoots his hated drunken lieutenant. The ambitious title story weaves a dark, picaresque account of a 19-year-old soldier, jubilant because of a wound which helike his comradeshas purchased ``to order.'' The others are superficially disabled, but the young soldier carries a surrealistically deep, festering hole in his back. Countless trains carry him toward home through Hungary, where he drinks and riots in the local bars to keep the wound infected. These are rich, stunning tales told by a master. (April 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Death and dismemberment are the lasting images of this latest collection of Boll's short stories, all written between 1946 and 1952. Himself a veteran of the eastern front and the war's desperate aftermath, he draws on his experiences in creating these stories (some stark vignettes) of war's carnage and life's mayhem. ``Story,'' in fact, seems too light a label for these darkly brooding pieces. Soldiers rejoice when wounded, while in postwar Germany a young boy attempts suicide after losing his family's ration cards. Throughout this collection, life takes on meaning only as a commodity bartered for fair exchange: a loaf of bread, an acre of ground. Boll's powerful writing is once again masterfully translated by Leila Vennewitz. An important addition to The Stories of Heinrich Boll ( LJ 2/1/86). Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Not published in Germany until 1983, these 22 sketches and stories were written by the Nobel laureate (who died in 1985) between 1946 and 1952--and they reflect his experiences as an infantry corporal during WW II, along with almost equally grim perceptions of everyday life in postwar Germany. Four vivid war pieces evoke terror and wretchedness on the Eastern front: a foot soldier longing to be put out of his misery by a Russian bullet; a panicky new recruit, recalling his past as a benign pimp to distract himself from the imminent Russian assault; soldiers utterly doomed, waiting for death, driven to murdering their commanding officers. Another wartime vignette captures the stupefying tedium of sentry duty in a French town. In ""Cause of Death: Hooked Nose,"" an officer in Eastern Europe, sickened by the genocidal slaughter of Jews (the well-known horror is made freshly dreadful), goes mad--while trying to save the life of the one non-Jew who is being exterminated by mistake. And the collection's title story follows two wounded soldiers--one a genuine hand-grenade victim, the other a cynic who paid to be wounded by an obliging gunman--as they drink, smoke, meet Hungarians and revel in relative freedom, moving away from the front. (""It was warm and summery, and we'd been wounded, and they couldn't touch us, we were in a proper hospital train--oh God, how wonderful it all was."") The postwar slices-of-life are, inevitably, somewhat less riveting. One ex-soldier feels the loss of camaraderie; another can't bear to visit the widow of a dead comrade. There are some sad little postwar comforts: the reassuring familiarity of a broken rain gutter; the ""blissful solitude"" (impossible to find as a soldier) of a noisy train station. But Boll focuses primarily on the deprivations: a young man, having lost his family's ration cards, attempts suicide--only to be saved from drowning by an uncomprehending G.I.; clothing is traded for bread, liquor, cigarettes. And a couple of stories foreshadow the Boll who would expose the hollowness of Germany's postwar ""economic miracle"": here he sardonically lampoons the latest approaches to civil-service advancement and social-climbing (including the cultivation of a ""government pedicurist""). Small, undeveloped close-ups, without the edge and shapeliness of Boll's later stories--but strong glimpses of the tough, terse writer-to-come, and real fierceness in those memorable Eastern front tableaux. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
