Böll, Heinrich | Lynton Lesserday (essay date 1986)
Lynton Lesserday (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: A review of The Casualty, in Punch, Vol. 291, No. 7607, October 8, 1986, p. 72.
[In the following posive review, Lesserday compares BÖll's early war stories to those of Ernest Hemingway.]
How surprising it is thatThe Casualty, this little book of early (1946 to 1952) stories by the German Nobel Prize winner, Heinrich BÖll, has never been published in English before. But then they were not published in German until 1983, two years before BÖll's death. One can perhaps see why the Germans would feel uncomfortable with these tales of the 1939-45 war. They are raw, straightforward, brutal stories told without any frills. They are rather like that Solzhenitsyn story "We Never Make Mistakes", in the way the brutality of the Nazis is presented in such an off-hand manner. Indeed, one story "Cause of Death: Hooked Nose" is practically a twin of the Solzhenitsyn story, but the BÖll...
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