Billiards at Half Past Nine, by Heinrich Boll
Billiards at Half Past Nine, by Heinrich Boll
When they jumped me, I could smell what they’d been eating, even before they got real close, potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage. And while they were working me over, I used to think, why did Christ die, anyway? What good did it ever do me? What do I care if they pray every morning, take communion every Sunday and hang a big crucifix in the kitchen, over the tables where they eat their potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage? Nothing, that’s how much I care. What’s it all amount to, if they lie in wait every day and beat me up? It’s been going on like this for five or six hundred years. Yet, they’re always shooting off about how old their church is, and they’ve been burying their ancestors in the churchyard for a thousand years, for a thousand years they’ve been praying and eating potatoes and gravy, and ham and cabbage with the Crucifix on the wall. So what? You know what they used to holler at me when they were beating me up? God’s little lamb. That was my nickname.
20th Century Central European literature is my bete noir. It always translates poorly, explores dense philosophical concepts that do not make for a happy life if one accepts them, and if it’s German, my subconscious associates every official or soldier (and there are always officials and soldiers) with Evil Stormtroopers. I admit it; poor Heinrich Boll never had a fair chance with me, never mind that the clear message of the story is an encouragement to question authority, both government and religious.
There are literary techniques that are frustrating to one who wants a quick read. I eventually decided that, like Ulysses, it takes place over the course of just one day, about a decade after WWII. The reason it isn’t clear is that the story has more flashbacks than real time events, and switches the first-person narrator without identifying him or her at least once per chapter, so that one may have to flip back several pages having become utterly lost.
The central characters are three generations in a single family: the father/architect who designs a church; the son/architect who is conscripted into WWII against his conscience and blows up the church during a retreat, inciting beaucoup speculation as to whether his motives were military, anarchic, or oedipal; and the grandson earnestly trying to explain the family history out loud to himself and his girlfriend on the “present day”. The mother, who was put in an asylum after trying to board a boxcar full of Jewish prisoners about to be killed, either escapes or is released and has a gun. There is a sadistic gym teacher (as opposed to, I guess, gentle, nurturing gym teachers. Maybe one of those exists somewhere) who, of course, has a high old time doing nasty things for the SS. And the book eventually gathers everyone together to eat the father’s birthday cake, which is pointedly shaped like the church that got blowed up, and which is equally pointedly sliced by the son.
If that’s your thing, have at it. Recommended for literary scholars in the proper frame of mind.
When they jumped me, I could smell what they’d been eating, even before they got real close, potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage. And while they were working me over, I used to think, why did Christ die, anyway? What good did it ever do me? What do I care if they pray every morning, take communion every Sunday and hang a big crucifix in the kitchen, over the tables where they eat their potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage? Nothing, that’s how much I care. What’s it all amount to, if they lie in wait every day and beat me up? It’s been going on like this for five or six hundred years. Yet, they’re always shooting off about how old their church is, and they’ve been burying their ancestors in the churchyard for a thousand years, for a thousand years they’ve been praying and eating potatoes and gravy, and ham and cabbage with the Crucifix on the wall. So what? You know what they used to holler at me when they were beating me up? God’s little lamb. That was my nickname.
20th Century Central European literature is my bete noir. It always translates poorly, explores dense philosophical concepts that do not make for a happy life if one accepts them, and if it’s German, my subconscious associates every official or soldier (and there are always officials and soldiers) with Evil Stormtroopers. I admit it; poor Heinrich Boll never had a fair chance with me, never mind that the clear message of the story is an encouragement to question authority, both government and religious.
There are literary techniques that are frustrating to one who wants a quick read. I eventually decided that, like Ulysses, it takes place over the course of just one day, about a decade after WWII. The reason it isn’t clear is that the story has more flashbacks than real time events, and switches the first-person narrator without identifying him or her at least once per chapter, so that one may have to flip back several pages having become utterly lost.
The central characters are three generations in a single family: the father/architect who designs a church; the son/architect who is conscripted into WWII against his conscience and blows up the church during a retreat, inciting beaucoup speculation as to whether his motives were military, anarchic, or oedipal; and the grandson earnestly trying to explain the family history out loud to himself and his girlfriend on the “present day”. The mother, who was put in an asylum after trying to board a boxcar full of Jewish prisoners about to be killed, either escapes or is released and has a gun. There is a sadistic gym teacher (as opposed to, I guess, gentle, nurturing gym teachers. Maybe one of those exists somewhere) who, of course, has a high old time doing nasty things for the SS. And the book eventually gathers everyone together to eat the father’s birthday cake, which is pointedly shaped like the church that got blowed up, and which is equally pointedly sliced by the son.
If that’s your thing, have at it. Recommended for literary scholars in the proper frame of mind.