Billiards at Half-Past Nine (The Essential Heinrich Boll) Paperback by Heinrich Boll (Author), Patrick Bowles (Translator), Jessa Crispin (Afterword) (Melville House)

There is a good reason Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972), and Billiards at Half-Past Nine contributes mightily to that reason. In fewer than 300 pages, the novel delivers a searing look at life for middle class Germans as their country went through two punishing World Wars and recovered itself in the wake of Hitler.

The plotline is like a thin aluminum railing that runs around and through panels of its characters' internal narratives, taking place across a single day (6 September 1958) during which the extended Faehmel family comes together for a public celebration. From the first sentence, it is known that forty-something architect Robert Faehmel insists on one thing of the few who know him, that from 9:30 - 11 a.m., his whereabouts never be disclosed except, if need be, to his father, his son, his daughter and a person named Schrella. That would be the time he spends shooting billiards alone at a local hotel, except for the company of a bellhop. You wonder, why aren't his wife and mother on the short list? Who is Schrella?

Through the narratives that hop from character to character, arcing across the first half of the 20th century, Böll reveals what happened to ordinary people under the crucible of Fascism; some would embrace it and die fighting; some would survive as government panderers no matter what the leadership; some would be forced to compromise their ideals; some would stick to them but at costs; some would fight it; innocents would be killed, collateral damage. The youngest generation would not emerge undamaged, either. The actions and choices of individuals impact each other and the future much as the billiard balls strike off one another. What makes this so very readable are the fully realized Faehmels, a flesh and blood clan rendered with sympathy. However tragic, it is also life affirming.

Notes on this edition: Jessa Crispin's afterword considers how the German cultural reverence of motherhood fared in these years and its import for the characters. I don't speak or read German, but the translation seems quite authentic and lucid.