Format: Paperback
Condition: New
Product dimensions: 464 pages, 8.2 X 5.5 X 1.2 in
Publishing Info: Melville House, 2011
Language: English
ISBN - 13: 9781935554332
Available via my network of independent booksellers at Biblio
Cited by the Nobel Prize committee as the “crown” of Heinrich Böll’s work, the gripping story of Group Portrait With Lady unspools like a suspenseful documentary. Via a series of tense interviews, an unnamed narrator uncovers the story—past and present—of one of Böll’s most intriguing characters, the enigmatic Leni Pfeiffer, a struggling war widow.
At the center of her struggle is her effort to prevent the demolition of her Cologne apartment building, a fight in which she is joined by a motley group of neighbors. Along with her illegitimate son, Lev, she becomes the nexus of a countercultural group rebelling against Germany’s dehumanizing past under the Nazis ... and what looks to be an equally dehumanizing future under capitalism.
About the Author:
Heinrich Boll was the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Boll was reared 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 prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences 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 postwar German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974), and The Safety Net (1979). In 1981 he published a memoir, What’s to Become of the Boy? or; Something to Do with Books. Boll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading de fender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.
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