18 Stories

by Heinrich Böll

Portraits of highly diverse characters explore a wide range of human experience and emotion

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Literature

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Der deutsche Schriftsteller und Übersetzer gilt als einer der bedeutendsten deutschen Autoren der Nachkriegszeit. Er schrieb Gedichte, Kurzgeschichten und Romane, von denen auch einige verfilmt wurden. Dabei setzte er sich kritisch mit der jungen Bundesrepublik auseinander. Zu seinen erfolgreichsten Werken zählen "Billard um halbzehn", "Ansichten eines Clowns" und "Gruppenbild mit Dame". Den Nobelpreis für Literatur bekam Heinrich Böll 1972; er war nach 43 Jahren der erste deutsche Schriftsteller, dem diese Auszeichnung zuteil wurde. 1974 erschien sein wohl populärstes Werk, "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum". Durch sein politisches Engagement wirkte er, gemeinsam mit seinem Freund Lew Kopelew, auf die europäische Literatur der Nachkriegszeit. Darüber hinaus arbeitete Böll gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Annemarie als Herausgeber und Übersetzer englischsprachiger Werke ins Deutsche...

Heinrich Böll became a full-time writer at the age of 30. His first novel, Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time), was published in 1949. Many other novels, short stories, radio plays, and essay collections followed. In 1972 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature." He was the first German-born author to receive the Nobel Prize since Hermann Hesse in 1946. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he is one of Germany's most widely read authors.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

18 gems by the great German fiction writer Heinrich Böll.

My review of The Laugher was removed on this Goodreads website, thus I will make The Laugher (among the 18 stories from the collection) the focus of my review here. Enjoy!

THE LAUGHER
"I have become indispensable; I laugh on records, I laugh on tape, and television directors treat me with respect. I laugh mournfully, moderately, hysterically; I laugh like a streetcar conductor or like a helper in the grocery business; laughter in the morning, laughter in the evening, nocturnal laughter and the laughter of twilight. In short: wherever and however laughter is required - I do it."

The story's narrator is a laugher - as he tells us above, a professional laugher. Such an uncommon profession.

But a laugher in high demand.

To take one example, stand-up comedians pay good money to have the laugher in the audience at their club, functioning as a one-man clack. Oh, yes, the laugher's laughter is highly infectious, so if he laughs at the comedian's routine, he can instantly get the entire room going, everybody joining in, producing a roomful of outrageous, appreciative laughter. Wow! A dream come true for any stand-up comic.

Likewise, for television - think of those Saturday morning cartoons or sitcoms with canned laughter, usually a bunch of people laughing, giving the television viewer sitting alone in their living room in front of the television set a sense they are part of a community of people sitting in the living room enjoying the program, laughing at all the gags and punchlines.

Well, the laughter's laughter is so sophisticated, so nuanced, so developed, he can do much better, laughing in many different ways, each laugh custom-made for the situation. Not only will the viewer watching the program feel as if they are part of a community, the viewer will feel a sense of well-being, a sense of abundance, prompting them to continue watching and even purchase the products advertised. Needless to say, advertisers clamor for the laugher's talents.

However, the laugher's professional schedule has its drawbacks. When he's off duty, he drags himself through his day, hangdog, barely able to smile.

If we read between the lines, there's something deeper going on here. How genuine is the laugher? Think of the laughter of children when surprised. How spontaneous. How gleeful. How open and free. Much different than the laugher's laughter - laughter employed at a designated time for a specific purpose, usually a commercial purpose.

Is the laugher's laughter elevating? Joyful? What does his laughter have in common with true art? As Herbert Marcuse observed, “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” Marcuse would likely judge the laugher's art reinforces rather than challenges or breaks established reality.

Heinrich Böll concludes his tale with this line: "So I laugh in many different ways, but my own laughter I have never heard." An authentic, free life? Reflect on the laugher's admission in light of this Jean-Paul Sartre quote, “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.”


German author Heinrich Böll, 1917-1985

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction

This collection of short stories was a revelation.
I started it as a "wedgie" between "The Pale King" and "Prague".
But it's stunningly written.
It's my second German adventure in a month.
Both books (the other being Homo Faber) were written in the 50's, and the quality of the writing is astounding.
Boll's short stories are like fairy tales or parables for the Technological Era.
Although I'm more fond of Mercs, this is literally "Vorsprung durch Technik".

But first, some rambling Preambles:

Preamble Ramble 1: Why Did I Read this Novel Now?

I studied German in the years 1970-1974 and had a great teacher.
One day, I asked him if he could tell us about the German sense of humour, because we were always hearing about how they didn't have one.
So he told us a story, which I thought was a joke.
It concerned a musician who loved silences.
Especially the silences between songs.
His special skill was to be able to tell from the silence after one song what song would follow it on the album.
That pregnant pause would hold all of the potential of the next song.
Then, hey presto, the second song would slide into the slipstream of the first.
But there was always just a hint of deja vu (or deja entendre?).
He could always hear the second song coming during the silence.
He found numerous examples of these pregnant silences, then one day he decided that he would record them all and line all of the silences up, one after the other, on the one recording, so that he could listen to each silence successively and work out what songs would follow them.
Obviously, what he had created was a tape full of silences.
But for him they were highly evocative silences.
For my German teacher, this tale explained the German sense of humour.
You can never forget a story like this and I often tell people about it.
Then Jennifer Egan's book "A Visit from the Goon Squad" came along and a GR comment on a review pointed to the possible origin of this story.
I had thought it was a joke, but it turned out to be a reference to a short story that I have twisted slightly over time.
It turns out it was one of the stories in "18 Stories".
Here endeth the lesson.
Slight pause.
Now, for some reason, here comes "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen.
It must follow a pregnant silence.

Preamble Ramble 2: Another Story from a Different Kitchen

I once had a girlfriend (or should I say, she once had me), whose father was a diplomat.
For a while, he was based in Switzerland and my friend, a teenager at the time, got a job working in a factory that made strawberry jam.
Her job was very important to the reputation of the company and was highly confidential.
The thing about making jams is that it is often a highly acidic process, and during the maturation of the jam, solids break down and liquify, at least partly.
This is not good for strawberry jam.
Everybody knows that strawberry jam has to have those little seeds in it.
If the jam doesn't have the seeds, it could be any old jam, but not genuine strawberry jam.
Certainly not genuine strawberry jam from the famous, reputable jam factory that my girlfriend worked for.
The problem is that those seeds get dissolved in the acidic process that makes the jam.
So my friend's job was to take bags of woodchips, turn them into finely sliced seed shapes and add them to the jam mixture at just the right moment, so that with a bit more cooking, they would taste, look and feel seed-like.
So that the strawberry jam would be more real, more like what customers expected it to be.

Preamble Ramble 3: Words Cannot Express What I Think

How many times have you heard somebody say, "Words cannot express how I feel about this experience" or something similar?
They might be right, but what annoys me about this expression is that the person who uses it usually has made no attempt to find the words or express what they want to say with the words.
They give in before they make any attempt.
They are intellectually lazy.
Worse still, if they can't find the words, it usually means that they haven't thought the thought either.
They have snapped the thought off at the stem, before it's had a chance to grow.
Before they've put any effort into growing their thought.
For them, thinking and speaking don't deserve any effort beyond the obvious or what comes to mind instantaneously.

Now that I've got these preliminaries out of the system, back to the book itself:

Of Bridges and Bread

This might well be a gross generalisation, but I want to say that most modern literature, say from the last fifty years, hasn't shown much interest in business and work-life as a subject matter.
There haven't been a lot of novels or stories that expressly investigate something that takes up between one-third and one-half of our lives.
Possibly because writers fear that it would be boring or that they believe there is no market for such writing, because in reality we are trying to escape our nine-to-five world by embracing literature.
One recent exception has been David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King", which is set in the IRS and devotes itself, at least partly, to an exploration of boredom or the reasons behind boredom.
But if you only read the reviews, you would associate work with boredom, not an element of daily life and a subject matter for literature.
This background is why it was so fascinating for me to discover that Heinrich Boll saw literary potential in business and work.
Writing in the period from the 50's to the 70's, he believed the lives of employees, business people, soldiers, engineers and sound technicians were worth exploring.
He found broader symbolism and metaphors in their lives and experiences.
Some sort of explanation is contained in his Nobel Lecture from 1972.
In the very first sentence, he refers to:

"...matters which to all appearances are rational, calculable and achieved by the combined efforts of architects, draughtsmen, engineers, workers - accomplishments such as a bridge."

He sees their labour, not as tedious, but as something that builds and achieves something for society, like bridges or bread.
It leads to an accomplishment.
But he also sees it as the arena of rationality, so how insightful would literature be, if it turned its back on human rationality and accomplishment?

Incalculability and the Nicest Precision

This first sentence of his is only a stepping stone to a concern of equal magnitude for him as a writer.
Just as much as construction might be based on rationality and calculation, it also involves a "few millimetres or centimetres of incalculability".
You might be overtly concerned with "the nicest precision" in "a mass of complicated interlocking chemical and technical details and materials in all their possible reactions", but it's inevitable that there will be something outside your control.
He calls the construction process "realisation" or "incarnation", but he is equally fascinated by the "incalculable", the gap in the nicest precision of the mind.
And he asks the questions:

"What lies hidden in this gap? Is it what we usually call irony, is it poetry, God, resistance, or (to use a popular phrase nowadays) fiction?"

He even repeats himself within the same paragraph:

"Should we also call this almost incalculable element irony, poetry, God, resistance or fiction? How can we cope without it?
"Not to mention love.
"No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated."

So, even to the extent that he might explore a traditional concern of literature like Love, he finds his subject matter at the intersection of the rational and the irrational, in the gap between the two.
What is unique about his writing, therefore, is his interest in both sides of the gap.
He extends this concept to the process of writing itself:

"I cannot recreate the context [of my writing process] in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking."

Realisation and Incarnation

For Boll, writing is a process by which he achieves his own realisation and incarnation.
He takes things out of the abstraction of his mental processes and makes them real on the page and in our minds as readers.
He gives flesh to them, he fleshes them out.
His most important tool is "language".
Please forgive me if I quote him at length again:

"It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialise as one writes.
"Yet how might one explain that - as is occasionally demonstrated - something like life appears, people, fates, actions; that this incarnation occurs on something so deathly pale as paper, where the imagination of the author is linked to that of the reader in a hitherto unexplained manner, a process that cannot be reconstructed in its entirety, where even the wisest, most sensitive interpretation remains only a more or less successful approximation; and how indeed might it be possible to describe, to register the transition from the conscious to the unconscious - in the person writing and the person reading, respectively - with the necessary total exactitude, and furthermore break it down into its national, continental, international, religious or ideological details, not neglecting the continually changing proportions of the two, in these two - the person writing and the person reading - and the sudden reversal where the one becomes the other; and that in this abrupt shift the one is no longer to be distinguished from the other?
"There will always be a remainder, whether you call it the inexplicable ('secret' would also be fine), there remains and will remain an area, however tiny, into which the reason of our origins will not penetrate, because it runs into the hitherto unexplained reason of poetry and of the art of the imagination, whose incarnation remains as elusive as the body of a woman, a man or even merely of an animal."

Once again, he is (equally) interested in the gap or the secret, the thing that falls between two stools.

Action, Dynamics and Animation

This leads me to an observation that I made early in the stories and then started to measure at least intuitively.
I noticed that Boll used very few adjectives and adverbs.
That might well be the counsel of good writing classes.
However, equally importantly, he used very few intransitive verbs.
Just about every sentence contained a transitive verb.
Although some of the subject matter is quite abstract, he investigates it in a succession of verbs.
Characters "do" things in pursuit of personal or social goals.
As they build something, so too does Boll (his story, as well as history).
Again, I found the explanation for this practice in his speech:

Writing is - at least for me - movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives - on paper to boot! - towards incarnation.
"In this respect there can be no successful literature, nor would there be any successful music or painting, because no one can already have seen the object it is striving to become, and in this respect everything that is superficially called modern, but which is better named living art, is experiment and discovery - and transient, can be estimated and measured only in its historical relativity, and it appears to me irrelevant to speak of eternal values, or to seek them.
"How will we survive without this gap, this remainder, which can be called irony, be called poetry, be called God, fiction, or resistance?"

This comment starts with "movement forward", but it also highlights movement into the unknown, perhaps what might have previously been thought of as unknowable.
Boll's concern is to move forward into the gap, the remainder, the incalculable.

Work and Money

Later in the speech, Boll clarifies his interest in work and money.
Both concepts have become dirty words, at least in literature.
Yet, he jokes, apart from the Nobel Prize, he has only ever received money when he works.

"Money is the incarnation of [man's] work, and that is clean.
"Between work and what it brings in, there admittedly is an unexplained remainder, which vague formulas such as to earn well or to earn poorly are far less successful at filling than the gap left by the interpretation of a novel or poem."

Even with work and money, part of his interest is the gap.

Using Words to Bridge the Gap

It's at this point that I want to return to one of my Preambles, about the inability of words to express thought or a thought.
Almost instantly I picked up "18 Stories", I realised that I was in the hands of a master craftsman, a consummate wordsmith (whether or not he used many adjectives or adverbs).
If he felt any deficiency in the ability of words to express what he was thinking, it was not for the want of trying.
He consistently pushed his words towards clarity and meaning, but also towards and into the gap.
Remember that his goal was not just to express the calculable in words, he was also trying to express the incalculability of the gap, the remainder, the poetry of life and meaning.
Never once did I see him give up.
A good workman doesn't blame his tools.
His accomplishment was to make it look effortless.

"I have got a bit away from the building of bridges, baking of rolls and writing of novels, and hinted at gaps, ironies, fictive areas, remnants, divinities, mystifications and resistance of other regions - they appeared to me worse, in greater need of illumination than the slight, unilluminated corners in which not our traditional reason, but the reason of poetry - as in for example a novel -lies hidden."

Tipping the Scales

I'm sorry that this review has wafted off into the abstract, but I don't want to spoil the plot of any of these stories.
In a way, I'm frightened that I mightn't have anything to say without a little waft.
However, I wanted to explain why I included the Preamble about my girlfriend and the strawberry jam factory.
SPOILER ALERT
One of the stories is "The Balek Scales".
It concerns a family in a position of importance and trust in a village.
They buy goods from the workers and peasants, and on-sell them to retailers.
Not only do they buy the goods, but they measure their quantity and quality on a set of magnificent scales.
At each level, the seller adds a significant mark-up, so that the seller gets multiples of what the worker or peasant received.
In the story, a small boy discovers that the family has tipped the scales by 10% in their own favour.
Not only were they wanting to achieve their mark-up on a re-sale, they wanted to rip off their suppliers.
Initially, when the boy discloses this to the village, there is shock and anger, but eventually it settles down and people ostracise him for discovering and revealing this secret.
In a way, they had been happy with what they got, and didn't want to rock the boat.
It's this type of story that exemplifies Boll's ability to spin a fairy tale or parable for modern life.
But it also reminds me of the jam factory.
The making of strawberry jam destroys the seeds.
But we all want seeds in our jam.
Therefore, we submit to and become an accessory to our own (self-) deception.
But it's only strawberry jam, and we don't mind the deception.
It's not a big deal.

Murke's Collected Silences

And so I return to my first Preamble.
This is the story that concerns and investigates silences.
Now I realise that, not only was it an intrinsically amusing concept, but it might also have been a metaphor for the gap or the remainder or the incalculable.
There is poetry in the gap, there is poetry in the silences, if we pay attention and look or listen hard enough.

A Gift From the Makers of Dynamite

The other thing I learned was that the character in the story appreciated them for their silence.
While he might have anticipated the future in general (something, anything after the gap or yet to occur), he wasn't necessarily anticipating the actual song that would otherwise have followed the silence.
Maybe my German teacher was actually telling a joke.
Or perhaps, over the years, I had made it all up.
Perhaps I had filled the gap that Heinrich Boll had created.
But in creating that gap, he allowed me to build my own bridge over it.
He allowed me my own accomplishment as a reader and a human being.
And that is probably why in 1972 a German writer received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And it's why he is still worth reading amongst the proliferation of choices available to us today.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I am again, on the bus Tuesday morning, off to the ridiculous place where education is supposed to happen, neurotic traffic itself a sign of our society's OCD. I've seen a lot and nothing at all on these buses, but everything is much nicer with Heinrich in front of me. This great humanist who understood the tyranny, sadness, AND laughable absurdity of our modern bureaucracies, waste, and fads. So it was no coincidence that as I was giggling, trying hard not to break out in early morning public laughter over "Action Will Be Taken," a sizable man went perpendicular to those standing, hard to the floor. He was mad, but if he had been with Mr. Boll, he would have laughed. It was an exclamation point at the end of the story, one of the funniest stories I've ever read. And the subsequent conversation between the fallen rider and the bus driver became even more ludicrous, Boll's hand on the wheel of the entire matter.

"The Thrower-Away" is no less laughable in its mockery of office culture, while "The Laugher" is a story of irony showing how the doldrums of modern life get into our bones. "Like a Bad Dream" is the tragic reality of corruption, "cutting deals," and sacrificing the soul for upward mobility, while "This is Tibetan" shows the opposite: a man who stoops beneath what society would expect of him so that he may support the beauty of antiquity in his own simple way. The more time I spend with this kindred spirit, the more I'm impressed by his observations and ways of turning our all-too-often mundane world into a beautiful feast. As in any collection of stories, not all of them reached me as five stars, but those at the top are pure dream material. And I want to keep my 5 Star run going....Mr. Boll understands the lovely ridiculousness of that.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

this collection of short stories is really strong. BUT...BUT! the short story entitled In the Valley of the Thundering Hooves is outstanding. It is a story about how a boy feels in his given circumstances which starts off slowly enough but before you know it becomes completely gripping! so well told. i love you Heinrich Boll. read the whole thing, it is worth it, but read In the Valley of the Thundering Hooves if you can read nothing else.

[Frank McGirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collections usually take me awhile, especially when they are stories from a single author. I need some time to allow for a change of tone. Plus I mislaid this book for a good 6 months.

However, these subtle stories are worth it. Some are set in the suburbia of Nazi Germany, another is a light-hearted look at the ambition of writing.

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The jacket notes say these stories were "written over a period of fifteen years'. The publication date in 1966. Unfortunately none are not dated. Some deal with German war or post-war issues but most are not specifically German. They are all very 'light' - 'sparse'. One reviewer (bbbbbbrr) used the adjective bland and I agree. Some stories are just the setup of a place and time without any real action. I have not seen the German original but I am positive from the uses of some words that this is not a very good translation. I expected a lot more from a writer who lived through WWII in Germany and grappled with Nazis and Nazism.

[Paul Roper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to find a new copy of this, I lent it to a friend and never got it back. I like just knowing it's nearby and I can pick it up and enjoy reading one of the stories again, my favorite being "Murke's collected silences", but I will not spoil it for those of you who have not read it.

Boll is the consummate storyteller, especially short stories, and these very short stories are wonderful, and perfect for a rainy day.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heinrich's writing is a simple kind of beautiful- raw, honest, and delightfully ordinary. Reading his stories is like pondering the lives of various strangers you've been waiting to know. My personal favorite story is "In the valley of the thundering hooves."

[Lynn Witherington]

Boll means everything to me. He is so funny. He's devastatingly bleak. But if he's not talking about war, he's not bleak. I first read the short story-- the one where it dawns on the men it would be stupid not to sell their watches before they leave for the Front. And that's what I mean by devastatingly bleak. I've never come near to anything like it-- unless it's The Train was on Time.
After these stories I read The Clown, and Group Portrait with Lady. I first read them in my 20's. Now I'm an old woman and I still feel the same. I was studying in France-- pretty miserable because it was a tough place for young US women in the early 70's. Fixing my breakfast one morning I heard on the radio that Boll had won the Nobel Prize. How could I feel alone anymore-- all those dignitaries in Sweden had spoken!
I'm sorry to say he's ruined for many Europeans I talk to--because they read him in school! Their eyes glaze over while I pester them on the subject. To me he seems the most subversive writer-- wouldn't any student be delighted with his intense sarcasm and ridicule of people like their school principles? I guess not. But that needn't affect us. Go ahead and read about Frau Schneier of the Brown-Coal Schneiers of the Clown, and listen to the gracious way she answers the telephone in her anti-Zionist gracious home. You might also love to read the account of Boll's visit to Ireland. He fell in infinite love with the place!

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is selection of 18 Stories includes: "Like a bad dream", "The thrower-away", "The Balek scales", "My Uncle Fred", "Daniel the just", "The post card", "Unexpected guests", "The death of Elsa Baskoleit", "A case for Kop", "This is Tibten!", "And there was the evening and the morning...", "The adventure", "Murke's collected silences", "Bonn diary", "Action will be taken", "The laughter", "In the valley of the thundering hooves", "The seventh trunk".

[Jessica Fitzner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Echoes of Kafka, Kleist, Goethe, etc... probably need more historical context to understand the allegorical function of some characters and stories. The seventh trunk, last in the collection, is excellent

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found a copy in a classroom I was subbing in, got hooked on Boll in high school by a dystopian short story which lead me to "The Clown". So nice to dive back into these shorts, there's a great sense of humor and irony in them with a focus on class. Great work.

[Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love his description of daily lives of people.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtly enlightening.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Country: Germany

[MickPro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wonderful pastiche of stories. Some of these are as good any humor/satire stories as I’ve read.

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

Like a bad dream --3
The thrower-away --
The Balek scales --4
My uncle Fred --
Daniel the just --
The post card --
Unexpected guests --
The death of Elsa Baskoleit --
A case for Kop --
This in Tibten! --
*And there was the evening and the morning --
The adventure --
Murke's collected silences --3
Bonn diary --
*Action will be taken --
The laugher/ Laughter --3
In the valley of the thundering hooves --
*The seventh trunk--
***
Across the bridge --
At the bridge--2
Christmas every day--2
The man with the knives --2
In the darkness--
My expensive leg--
My sad/melancholy face--
Pale Anna--
"Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we ..." --3

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not having read Boll for some years, I had forgotten the strength of his link to Kafka. Instead of hunger artists, burrowers and the like, Boll presents us with a laugher for hire, a collector of silence (superb story) and two kids who can't shoot straight but know a lot about guilt, plus a host of other mundane yet singular souls trying to make their way in the even weirder reality that is post-war Germany.

[Allison Floyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure what there is to say--if you haven't read him, you should. This book doesn't entirely avoid the pitfalls of short story collections--an author has a tone of voice, thematic preoccupations, etc., and this can become repetitious when reading several short stories by the same author--but with writing this poetic, and often poignant, what's wrong with that?

[Kris McCracken · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of stories written in the 1950s by Böll which - for the most part - deal with the changes in German culture following the Second World War. As such, their themes appear quite particular, rather than universal, and at times seem rather dated and quaint. However, they do remain historically interesting.

[Claire S]

Came to this via German language class at the U in the early 80's.. haven't read it yet, remembering all about 'Der Besuch den alten Dame', I think it needed more time before the next episode of German literature. It's been enough time now, just need the moments..

[b bb bbbb bbbbbbbb · Rating 2 out of 5]

17 stories of bitter, confused or dispirited people. Its mostly good writing, but it has a pervasive blandness that mutes emotional connection for the reader. The only standout was Murke's Collected Silences, which was pretty good.

[mayhugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel the just. He would spare Wierzok this year, he did not want to make any child go through what he had gone through, any child at all, least of all this one --whom he had met as if it were himself.

[Gloria · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brother introduced me to Boll when I was a teenager; fantastic.

I need to re-read some of his work.

[Zahra jafari · Rating 5 out of 5]

با عنوان در دره نعره های تندرگون توسط مهرداد مهربان و بهرام فرهمند پور ترجمه شده

[Taniapyjov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mne nravilos' "Glazamy Kloun'a"

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first of his I read. "Murke's Collected Silences" is a masterpiece. I'll have to find the book on our crowded shelves and add at least the quote...."By the third..."

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite simply superb -- as Boll always is.

[Invisrepor101 · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest short story writers of his time. A true genius.