Böll, Heinrich | William J. Schwarz (essay date 1970)
William J. Schwarz (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: A review of Children Are Civilians Too, in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. LIII, No. 13, March 28, 1970, pp. 38-40.
[In the following essay, Schwarz asserts that most of Böll's early stories depict the dreariness of war ]
Heinrich Böll has written short stories, Novellen, novels, radio plays and drama, but his true talent lies in telling stories. His first "novel," Adam, Where Art Thou, is really a series of terse short stories, held together by a theme—the little man in war—rather than by central characters. In Böll's radio plays several stories are usually told by a commentator to amplify the dialogue. His Irish Journal likewise consists of a sequence of stories about life in Ireland.
Much less convicting than these early works are Böll's ambitious novels, Acquainted with the Night, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, and The Clown. Here...
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