Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Penguin Classics)
Editorial Reviews
The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature
Novel by Heinrich Boll, first published in German as Billard um halbzehn in 1959. In its searing examination of the moral crises of postwar Germany, the novel resembles Boll's other fiction; its interior monologues and flashbacks, however, make it his most complex work. The novel examines the lives of three generations of architects and their responses to the Nazi regime and its aftermath. The present-day action takes place on the 80th birthday of patriarch Heinrich Fahmel, who built St. Anthony's Abbey. At the end of World War II, his son Robert destroyed the abbey to protest the church's complicity with the Nazis; Robert's son, Joseph, is serving his apprenticeship by helping to restore St. Anthony's. All three characters confront their relationship to building and destruction, as well as their personal and historical past.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Penguin Classics),Heinrich Boll,Penguin Classics,0140187243,Classics,German Novel And Short Story,Literature - Classics / Criticism,Literature: Classics,Fiction / Literary,General & Literary Fiction,German,Novels, other prose & writers
Books Info:
Recommended Books