Women in a River Landscape

Description

As West German society increasingly took on a gloss of economic well-being, Boll's trenchant novesl cut through the sleek outward show to reveal festering fears and suppurating physic states excluding poison into the system. WOMEN IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE brings this process to a fierce, fince culmination. . . Boll brings a humane understanding as well as indignation to the predicament of characters who seem not only rainted culprits but also victims of history SUNDAY TIMES.

Heinrich Boell was one of the trio of great German writers (along with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse) who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Boell was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experience as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-past Nine, Children are Civilians Too, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, And Never Said a Word and The Safety Net. Boell served for several years as president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in 1985.