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Second up …

The Lost Honour of Katerina Blum

(or How violence develops and where it can lead)

by Heinrich Böll

Although an old favourite, I had either never noticed or forgotten this book’s subtitle. All his books carry a political message, and this one no less than the others. KB is an ordinary person who, by an innocent association with a wanted criminal, is maliciously slandered by the tabloid press. It seems that Böll himself had a very poor relationship with the German publisher Springer, so he pulls no punches in his description of press carry-on.

We are in the hands of a Nobel laureate here and he doesn’t let us down. Told in the style of a report, it is sometimes opinionated, sometimes detached, always Böll. The humour is black and caustic. Everybody suffers, including the journalist.

Returning to it after more than 30 years, I was a little disappointed; presumably I’ve become worldly-wise in the interim. Nevertheless, at about 150 pages, it is a very nice introduction to Heinrich Böll.

Poetic Assassination

Book: Child’s Play by David Malouf

In despair at my loss of motivation for reading during this depressing pandemic, I've finally set myself the task of rereading a series of books that I read and loved as a younger adult. The criteria for selection are that they should be short (usually less than 250 pages) and I must have recommended them to friends repeatedly over the years. I have selected:

                      Child's Play by David Malouf
                      The Lost Honour of Katerina Blum by Heinrich Böll
                      If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... by Italo Calvino
                      Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
                      The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzatti

And so, to the first …

Child’s Play by David Malouf

Somewhere in Italy, in the eighties, a terrorist/anarchist is preparing his mission. He will assassinate a major man-of-letters, an intellectual giant, a philosopher. I imagined, say, someone of the stature of Umberto Eco or Bertrand Russell. Everything is anonymous; we don’t know his cause; his victim is unnamed; the place too. He shares an office with four other conspirators, all sporting pseudonyms, all preparing their own undisclosed attacks. Eventually one of them heads off on her mission and a new one takes her place. Some unnamed organisation is directing all this.

We pass the book inside the head of this assassin. He does his research on the victim, scours photos of the piazza where the attack will be carried out, evaluates his colleagues, never betrays his motives and eventually heads off on his mission.

This is a fabulous portrait of a man blindly going about his mission, questioning everything but the mission itself. The writing is poetic and thoroughly convincing. In rereading it, I was surprised to find that my recommendation to friends was entirely based on the dénouement. Somehow it erased all the rest for me and left me believing it was the only thing recounted in the book. Memory is so deceptive.

Great German Humour

Book: The End of a Mission by Heinrich Böll

Film: Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade

Do you subscribe to the stereotypical view that Germans are humourless? Well you’re wrong!! Try out these two works for intelligent and nuanced world views.

I’ve long been a big fan of Böll’s writing; his Group Portrait with Lady ranking high in my ten best books ever. The End of a Mission is a lesser work, but a fine treat nonetheless. A small-town trial concerning an act which might be described as a mere prank is blown up into a political farce so that he can poke fun at the kind of nonsense endemic in totalitarian regimes. Journalists are distracted into covering a less-embarrassing child murderer case and an out-of-town politician has his spy on hand to keep the case under review and nip any possible scandal in the bud. You, the reader, will immediately see that the charges are of no importance. The pomposity of all the officials is handled with a deft irony by Böll which makes for no belly laughs but wry amusement and the sense of reading the work of a massive intellect.

In the film, Toni Erdmann is the pseudonym (or alter-ego?) of the main protagonist, a retired, divorced music teacher. A clown at heart, he is clearly sad that his business-consultant daughter takes life too seriously; she is working her way up the corporate ladder and selling her soul in the process. He follows her to Bucharest where she has a very important client and succeeds in inserting himself into a number of her encounters with the client, embarrassing her but eventually, I think, breaking through to change her outlook. The film is a very satirical take on the business of consulting and, from my own experience, an accurate one. The comedy is played with great seriousness to amazing effect.