Most of [18 Stories] show conflicting interpretations of the world. One set of characters, usually children or childlike adults, is concerned with natural forces and events, no matter how old. The opposing characters are wiser in the ways of the world. They are more concerned with the devious procedures and protective screens used by civilized people to protect themselves from life than with life itself. For example, in "Like a Bad Dream," the narrator (who has "married into the excavating business") is introduced by his wife to a simple method of bribery. Although he catches on only slowly ("perhaps I failed to grasp what was happening at the time"), he learns quickly enough that by the end of the story he can increase his profit on his own. In spite of his success, he seems a bit dismayed at the turn his life has taken. At the end of the story his wife avoids him for a time, and he reflects: "I knew what she was thinking; she was thinking: he was to get over it, and I have to leave him alone; this is something he has to understand." He concludes, however, by saying, "But 1 never did understand. It is beyond understanding."

In both "The Balek Scales" and "The Thrower-Away," the central character not only sees through an accepted but wasteful or dishonest procedure of his society, but he also helps others to do the same thing. In "The Balek Scales," a child discovered and revealed that the scales of the Balek family, the landowners, on which the herbs and mushrooms of the peasant children were weighed before sale to the Baleks, were dishonest. Böll perhaps strains too hard for a universal symbolism here. The situation is made to resemble that of divine law: "One of the laws imposed by the Baleks on the village was: no one was permitted to have any scales in the house. The law was so ancient that nobody gave a thought as to when and how it had arisen, and it had to be obeyed, for anyone who broke it was dismissed."

"The Thrower-Away" is as farfetched but logical as some of Poe's lesser-known stories. A man who strives to seem like everyone else (he says that he looks like "a citizen who has managed to avoid introspection") is hired to destroy junk mail. Both he and the child in "The Balek Scales" see through an aspect of their culture that everyone else has accepted without question, and they try to protect others from the crime or nuisance of that aspect.

Another conflict between appearance and reality appears in "This is Tibten!" Eighteen hundred years ago Tiburtius, a Roman youth, killed himself for love of a local girl. Buried with him were some small carved animals. These animals and the boy's tomb are the major tourist attractions of the town of Tibten, where the narrator of the story is a train announcer. He reveals that he has secretly stolen the ancient carved animals and substituted for them some identical toys from margarine boxes. He then takes the real artifacts home and mixes them with more of the margarine-box toys so that not even he can distinguish the one from the other. In effect, the suicide of Tiburtius had some meaning, but that which tries to perpetuate the meaning does not. As in most of these stories, we find that we must go beyond the accepted and respected to find any real meaning.

Probably the best story in the collection is the longest, "In the Valley of the Thundering Hooves." It treats different responses to guilt, or, more specifically, to the guilt feelings associated with the sexual awakening of a young boy and girl. The girl, Katherine, is growing into her teens and out of her sweaters, thereby evoking the lascivious attention of several older men, most boys, and especially of Paul, the fourteen-year-old central character of the story. The responses are essentially different for the adults and the young people. When Katherine unbuttons her blouse in front of Paul, his mother becomes angry and forbids their being together again. Katherine's mother's response is to send the girl away for a time to live with her father with the advice, "Never do what they think you've been doing." The adults are motivated by the desire to prevent a recurrence of what they consider a sinful episode, preferably by avoiding its possibility. The problem of the young people is that they are involved and therefore must face more intimately the problem. Katherine vows that she will eventually return, implying that the adult attempt to deny some aspect of the human situation will fail.

The case of Paul is more complex. Early in the story he says that he would rather die than sin. He apparently believes that he has sinned, but he flees from church before going to confession. Believing that Paul would prefer death to unrelieved guilt, the reader expects the first (of many) references to pistols to foreshadow the boy's suicide. Böll, however, turns to a use of the pistol, and such objects as jam-pots and tennis balls, which a reading of Freud or his followers probably suggested. The extent to which he over-uses the phallic and other symbols and the occasional artificiality with which he uses them tend to mar an otherwise sensitive story by distracting the reader from what is probably the major theme. The young people are moved by natural and powerful force and are disturbed by it, but the adults are involved in artificial, mundane affairs. Paul's father hides his pistol, the phallic symbol, under "checkbooks and ledger sheets"; Katherine's mother is seen by the daughter as a "monument"; and, at the end of the story, when Paul has fired the pistol at a beer sign and been seized by a policeman who knows him and where he lives, the policeman nevertheless asks the boy where he lives, probably because he thinks the bystanders expect this of him. (Incidentally, there is a minor flaw in the translation from the German here. In answer to the policeman's question Paul says, "My God, you know very well where I live." The translation reads "Hell . . . you know where I live." Reading only the translation, one is not sure whether "Hell" is merely an expletive or whether Böll makes Paul reveal his feelings about the kind of life he has led in the past.)

The world of the adults, as well as being routine and artificial, is also devoted to destruction, the denial of life forces. This is evident, not only in Paul's mother's anger and the exile of Katherine, but also in a thrice-seen newspaper headline the visible part of which reads "Khrushchev" and then "open grave." The reference may be to Khrushchev's "We will bury you" speech. At any rate there is at the international level the same kind of threat of uncomprehending and insensitive negation that exists at the family level for Böll's young people.

The major flaw in these stories is a sense of strain. Böll has tried too hard for a meaning or an effect. As a result, the reader feels either that the author has done too much for him, as in "In the Valley of the Thundering Hooves" and "The Balek Scales," both of which are replete with various kinds of symbols, or that he has tried too hard to let events speak for themselves and thereby omitted something meaningful, as in "Unexpected Guests." In this story we find a household consisting quite casually of dogs, cats, baby chicks, rabbits, Gottlieb, "the baby hippopotamus we keep in our bathtub," Wally the elephant and Bombilus the lion. We can see some of the childlikeness found in others of Böll's stories in the human and animal characters of this story, but the fact that the story simply presents a situation, (and such a situation) with no real development, leaves the reader feeling mocked or cheated.