Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Böll, Heinrich (Theodor) - Paul Pickrel

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PAUL PICKREL

Heinrich Böll's "Acquainted with the Night" is the first nonpolitical German novel I have seen since the war, and a fine book it is. Brief, unpretentious, technically conventional, it is worth reading because it is written out of the part of life that matters. American fiction more and more retreats into the suburbs. Geographically that may be all right, but spiritually it is slow death. Böll, on the other hand, has the courage and the talent to tackle his subject where it is most living.

A man and a woman who are no longer young and who already have more children than they can afford find that they are going to have yet another child. They live in a single room in a bombed-out German city; for some time the husband has come home only occasionally because he cannot abide being penned up in so little space with the children. Sometimes he beats them. He sees the problem of their lives together as poverty, but his wife knows better. She realizes...

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1. Introduction
2. Paul Pickrel
3. Edwin Kennebeck
4. Anthony West
5. Edwin Kennebeck
6. H. M. Waidson
7. Richard Plant
8. Matthew Hodgart
9. Bernard Bergonzi
10. Joseph P. Bauke
11. Frank J. Warnke
12. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
13. Victor Lange
14. Tamas Aczel
15. V. S. Pritchett
16. Robert C. Conard
17. Richard Gilman
18. Robert Alter
19. John Updike
20. Copyright

1. John Updike