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Absent without Leave (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R236
Discovery Miles 2 360
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Absent without Leave (Paperback, New edition)
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Loot Price R236
Discovery Miles 2 360
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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To be absent without leave from the army is to become human, opines
this survivor of service in the German forces during World War II.
Heinrich Boll's present protagonist is a forty-seven year old
widower, grandfather, devoted son-in-law, who declines himself as
neurotic, romantic, resigned. Alienated from his national identity,
allied with the Jews against the Nazis in his mind, he seeks
sanctuary and sanity in his familial associations. He was born on
September 22, 1938, at age of twenty-one, a date memorable
historically for Chamberlain at Munich and the discovery of nuclear
reaction, but for the narrator marked by his welcome into the
Bechtold family, whose daughter Hildegard he marries. Henceforth
his identity is merged with their lives. The author refers to his
"little work" as a "memorial chapel" constructed on multiple levels
of ambiguity and compares it to a child's coloring book in which
one may move from dot to dot to create the picture. The readers who
accept the invitation to play will find it a teasing exercise with
a certain reward - Boll is a mood-master and even in a minor work
attains a mysterious sense of significance, evident if undefined;
he has a sense of irony. Two stories, of the day the war began and
the day it ended, carrying less freight and more narrative
satisfaction, complete the volume. (Kirkus Reviews)
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