by Heinrich Böll
(I am currently reading Billiards at Half-Past Nine. I thought that Silent Angel was good, I guess, when I read it - because the topic was of interest to me. But now I see it is merely juvenalia and have lowered my rating (from 4) to 3. Nothing in it prepared me for the mature Böll, which is now ove...
Never published during Boll's lifetime because it was considered too much of a downer, he made use of characters and other elements here in his later novels. I think those books were better works--I was just a little too aware of the symbolism in this novel and the sketchiness of the characters.
This was Nobel-prize-winner Boll’s first novel. It was not published when he wrote it in 1950 but in 1992, with an English translation in 1994. Boll had mined the work for use in later works. Hans, a deserter from the German army at the end of World War II, returns to his home town. He is delivering...
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