You know when they make you read books at school and you hate them for the rest of your life? The University of Birmingham did that with Heinrich Böll for me. His writing is like bread and butter pudding to me - something forced on me at an impressionable age that I can therefore no longer stomach. Also, it's been very liberating to just go ahead and say, "I can't stand Heinrich Böll" for all these years.
So reading Jessa Crispin's conversation about the writer with Melville House publisher Dennis Loy Johnson in Bookslut has been a bumpy ride, exposing my own puerile prejudice. How can it be that two sensible people, one of whom I actually know and like and respect, can find such inspiration in the work of Heinrich Böll? That unsexy guy who wrote about German guilt and hung out with the Gruppe 47, a group so ridiculously male that it really only tolerated Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger within its ranks? (There's a wonderful photo of a Gruppe 47 meeting up at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, which I find myself gazing at during readings. Rows and rows of chubby men in ill-fitting suits.)
But of course literature isn't a nursery pudding. To some extent it certainly is a matter of taste - but then there are times when one has to stand back and say, "Well, Böll certainly knew how to layer his bread with his raisins, and he never left his books in the oven too long until they were all black on top." And if Jessa Crispin says his female characters are strong, I may have to have another wee taste in case I do actually like his writing after all.
So here, for all to read, is my painful admission: while I find Böll's earlier writing uninspiring and no amount of money will ever make me read his Irish Journal, I do grudgingly admire both The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Safety Net (Fürsorgliche Belagerung).
You lucky unfettered readers can now dip into Heinrich Böll at will, as Melville House are publishing eight of his books in English translation. First up: The Clown, Billiards at Half Past Nine and the Irish Journal.
7 comments:
Oh dear - I do agree. I haven't even read Katharina Blum, and I do suspect it's better, but I spent a couple of years teaching two or three early Böll books to undergraduates with subsidiary German, and I loathed them. I had a feeling that they were just not suited to close study, and that I was being unfair. Kafka's stories and Novellen were right up my street. Reading the linked interview, I still think Böll is a weak writer. He can manage a certain limited range of atmosphere, and then he has stories with conclusions that are too pat. Maybe I've just read the wrong ones.
Well, that is rather historic, isn't it? I mean, isn't that the very first translation ever of his Irisches Tagebuch into English? I'm glad of that. I don't know about his other books, but I wonder what -specifically- you don't like about the Irisches Tagebuch, if you would want to say? : it was one of the first books I read through in German as I was first learning German back in 2004/05 semester in Trier. That, and Goethe's Die Leidenschaften des jungen Werthers. I always enjoyed it, although perhaps I didn't know any better.
*Sigh* - Daniel, OK, I'll bloody read the bloody Irish bloody Journal. Just so nobody can say I'm missing anything because of my puerile prejudices. I'm reading it in English though.
@MM - maybe that's the problem. Maybe all lecturers secretly hate Böll and can't instill any enthusiasm in their students for that very reason.
Scary thought.
KJD, really -- don't read it if you don't want to: honest! I won't say anything. I'm willing to admit that it gained a special place in my estimation (perhaps) for entirely accidental reasons (i.e., it was the first serious book I read in German more or less without a dictionary). Oh, and did I mention I have family in Ireland? Yet, I imagine, if you had handed it to me in high school or college, in an English translation, I wouldn't have found it necessarily to be anything special.
KJD, really -- don't read it if you don't want to: honest! I won't say anything. I'm willing to admit that it gained a special place in my estimation (perhaps) for entirely accidental reasons (i.e., it was the first serious book I read in German more or less without a dictionary). Oh, and did I mention I have family in Ireland? Yet, I imagine, if you had handed it to me in high school or college, in an English translation, I wouldn't have found it necessarily to be anything special.
Daniel - I thought I'd bite the bullet and go for the Böll book I find the most terrifying. For my karma, or something.
Also, it turns out that the three titles Melville House are releasing first are Ansichten eines Clowns, which I gave up on many, many year ago, Billard um halb zehn, which sounds even worse, and Fürsorgliche Belagerung, which I read and actually appreciated.
So the Irish Journal sounded like a good bet. On top of which, it's really had a seminal influence on German culture (see Derek Scully's piece in the Irish Times, link below).
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