One of those books that I literally couldn’t put down (well, if you ask
my wife, that’s about any book,
except for the remarkably bad ones that I am forced to read for my office’s
book club – this month was the turn of The
Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, the most offensively patronizing piece of poo
poo I’ve ever read, seriously!).
Back on topic. The novel is clearly, yet again, about WWII and
Nazifascism (amongst other things). Its approach (a literary mockumentary?)
remains hilarious and alternative more than forty years after the book’s
publication. In the novel Böll manages to write, always with a hint of irony,
some of the most touching pages I’ve ever read (in particular the coffee scene
and the singing by Boris, the Soviet POW and real love of Leni’s life) and simultaneously
throw in some remarkably humorous comments (at a certain point the author’s
research was delayed by his watching the Clay-Frazier fight…).
And the idea that the entire book revolves not just around a normal
person, but around one who says so little about herself that it can be
contained in one quick page in the middle of the book, is, in my humble
opinion, an absolute stroke of genius. Well, that’s actually not just my humble
opinion probably; Böll did receive the Nobel Prize after Group Portrait with Lady after all…
