Early, minor Boll, first published here as Acquainted with the
Night and now newly translated. His postwar, rubbled German city is
anonymous, and in it wanders Fred Bogner, a switchboard operator, a
part-time tutor, an alcoholic trying to scrape together a few extra
marks so that he can spend a night in a hotel with his wife - whom
he's left, along with their three children, to go on without him in
a cramped one-room. Claustrophobia, physical and religious, presses
this thin story even thinner: Kate, the wife, watching her
children, hears the sounds of the marathon copulators in the next
apartment, sees that "their expressions resemble those of trembling
animals sensing death." When Fred finally manages to pay for a
room, the couple's release has been so hugely awaited that about
all they can do is drop from exhaustion. When they're awake, Boll
fits into their mouths soliloquies that explicitly limn the
bitterness of their portions - a mistake in a book where everywhere
else the desolation and loneliness and desperation is off-lit. But
an earlier scene is Boll at his finest: Kate enters a
half-destroyed church; in the darkness she's frightened by a figure
looming up next to her, which turns out to be a statue of an angel,
its face shrouded with dust: "black flakes. I carefully blew them
away, freeing the entire gentle oval from dust, and suddenly I saw
that the smile was made of plaster, and that together with the dust
the magic of the smile was blown away too." Flawed and small - but
the work of an artist. (Kirkus Reviews)
Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English
vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the
work in its social and historical context.
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