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Title: The Silent Angel by Heinrich Boll, Breon Mitchell ISBN: 0-312-11064-2 Publisher: St Martins Pr Pub. Date: 01 June, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.86 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Bleak, austere, unforgettable
Comment: The overwhelming feeling you get when reading this book is the desperate struggle for short term survival. The background is a German city (possibly Cologne) in the first
Days and weeks after the capitulation of the German army in 1945. Every conversation is focused on bread - not even full meals, just slices of bread. The city is bleak and devastated, the characters are transient figures struggling, dazed and nauseous, into whatever the future may hold. Their pasts are briefly mentioned, but the conditions in which they find themselves allow for almost total dislocation from their past lives.
The language of the book is austere, the characters are not clearly distinguishable, the colours mentioned - apart from grey destruction - are greenish and yellowish hazes. These tune in with the bilious, nausea of the characters as they continuously search for food and shelter. Throughout the story each character is portrayed as exhausted, struggling, nauseous.
The novels main character has deserted the German Army in the final days of the war, and under a certain sentence of death for desertion, has assumed numerous identities as he flees. He has, however, promised a dead comrade that he will return a coat to his comrade's widow. A will is discovered in the lining of the coat and this yields an subplot of intrigue and corruption. The main character meanwhile meets and briefly lives with a dazed, tragic woman who has been psychologically damaged by the war.
The novel's main impression is the exhaustion of emotion, the breakdown of society brings about a breakdown of morality and order. Stealing and dishonesty of all kinds are part of daily life, as are small gestures of generosity. In the broken cityscape, there is neither trust nor complete anarchy, just a meandering from one slice of bread to the next. Towards the end of the book , the main character has established a certain routine which allows him to steal coal from trains, which gives him some power to barter.
Boll's austere tale, gives us a view of the amoral aftermath of a societal dislocation. While neither describing nor moralizing, he shows us a set of normal characters and the lives they adopt to survive in the much reduced circumstances.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent!
Comment: I am not a book reviewer; nor do I know how to write a good review. But I cannot let it pass without wanting to share this book with anyone who is interested in reading about the human suffereing due to the ravages and results of war. This book describes so well the aftermath of war; the hopelessness; the futility. It is gaudy, despressing, poignant, shocking, realistic. The Silent Angel leaves you, at times, as you are reading, speechless. Sentences that are shocking; that end abruptly symbolising the crudeness of war;
Rating: 5
Summary: A glimpse of Armageddon
Comment: I enjoy reading Heinrich Boll in part because he offers a perspective of WWII through the eyes of an every day German. Most German perspectives of WWII seem to be written by someone who wants you to know that they are one of the "good guys". In his books I have been given a glimpse of what it was like to be on the losing side. In "The Silent Angel" we get a glimpse of what it is like to return to a home that doesn't really exist any more. The vivid depictions in this novella are the works not only of one whose knows of what he speaks, but also of one gifted to tell the world. Boll is no apologist for Germany but he conveys the world as he experienced it. The destruction and the despair are overwhelming but there is hope in the relationship between the common sufferers. Many will read this book in a single sitting but the impressions will last long afterwards.
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Title: On the Natural History of Destruction by Winfried Georg Sebald ISBN: 0375504842 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Crabwalk by Gunter Grass ISBN: 0151007640 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: A Soldier's Legacy (European Classics) by Heinrich Boll, Leila Vennewitz ISBN: 0810112027 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: After Nature by W.G. Sebald ISBN: 0375504850 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International) by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 0679722661 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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