A review by marc129
Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll

3.0

Read a first time in 1987 and I was already pretty impressed. Böll shows in a very oppressive way how Germany in 1959 still had not processed the legacy of the nazi past (in the novel there is no explicit reference to the nazis, but the constant reference tot the "Sacrament of the Buffalo" is clear enough). The idea to follow three generations and their dealings with the Abbey of St. Anonius (the grandfather build it, the son demolished it in the war and the grandson restored it) is very well found and sometimes there are really masterful patches to be found in the book. But overall the storyline is too ingenious, the style is hyper modernistic with ongoing interior monologue and regularly changing narrator and time positions, making some fragments quit difficult to follow. Especially the end is pretty faint.