[.ca] Silent Angel (ISBN 0233989609)

Very Compelling:
I don't think The Silent Angel is as fine a book as The Train was on Time. However, it is one of Boll's most sensitive books, exposing the pain and emptiness felt at the war's end, and demonstrating that there was indeed a future for those who survived.

The first work of a great novelist:
Much as one can feel in the less mature works of Joyce, Marquez and even Shakespeare, there is the distinct feeling in this work that the author is destined for greatness. This novel is the sensitive, first-person account of the events during and after the end of World War II. At a time when Germany had been ravaged by war and the effects of its own over-ambition, Boll gives us the story a man, apolitical and barely alive. He shows us how love can blossom in and around the rubble left by the bombings and the shortages of the war. This love of his is strong, yet odd and difficult to imagine. Boll's setting of post-war Germany is seemingly the only context it could have I recommend this work to anyone looking for a novella that is deep in its emotion and broad in its observations of a culture.

Haunting:
This book left me breathlessly wanting more. Hans, a small, seemingly insignificant soldier, makes his way back home to a devastated Dresden after World War II. He was to be executed, only to have his place voluntarily taken by a war correspondent. His task is to present the correspondent's note of his impending death to the man's wife, Frau Gompertz. Once the note has been delivered, it is up to Hans to keep alive, no matter what the cost. His own wife, we soon learn, died some years ago. They had been just married when he was whisked off to fight. They were only able to share a conjugal bed several months afterwards by the grace of some R & R leave Hans was able to acquire. Hans' recollections of these events, and the minute details of life before the war, make him finally appear human and to have emotions; prior to this, we are left to wonder if he is the silent angel in the title. Boll expertly explores man's most base desires, from food and warmth to love and acceptance. The warmth is gathered through several means - stealing coal, huddling around a candle, tucking in under a blanket, and feeling the warm breath of Regina, who may turn out to be his new love, his new hope and inspiration to keep living in what must certainly have been a hell on earth. This book can't be reviewed fairly without giving a fond tip of the hat to Breon Mitchell. He captures Boll's lyrical descriptions of the simplest of daily items, as well as the very sparing dialogue throughout which the entire story is interspersed. The ending is sweet, almost heavy with imagery, and a perfect capsule for this little book about the little man named Hans.

Bleak, austere, unforgettable:
The overwhelming feeling you get when reading this book is the desperate struggle for short term survival. The background is a German city (possibly Cologne) in the first Days and weeks after the capitulation of the German army in 1945. Every conversation is focused on bread - not even full meals, just slices of bread. The city is bleak and devastated, the characters are transient figures struggling, dazed and nauseous, into whatever the future may hold. Their pasts are briefly mentioned, but the conditions in which they find themselves allow for almost total dislocation from their past lives. The language of the book is austere, the characters are not clearly distinguishable, the colours mentioned - apart from grey destruction - are greenish and yellowish hazes. These tune in with the bilious, nausea of the characters as they continuously search for food and shelter. Throughout the story each character is portrayed as exhausted, struggling, nauseous. The novels main character has deserted the German Army in the final days of the war, and under a certain sentence of death for desertion, has assumed numerous identities as he flees. He has, however, promised a dead comrade that he will return a coat to his comrade's widow. A will is discovered in the lining of the coat and this yields an subplot of intrigue and corruption. The main character meanwhile meets and briefly lives with a dazed, tragic woman who has been psychologically damaged by the war. The novel's main impression is the exhaustion of emotion, the breakdown of society brings about a breakdown of morality and order. Stealing and dishonesty of all kinds are part of daily life, as are small gestures of generosity. In the broken cityscape, there is neither trust nor complete anarchy, just a meandering from one slice of bread to the next. Towards the end of the book , the main character has established a certain routine which allows him to steal coal from trains, which gives him some power to barter. Boll's austere tale, gives us a view of the amoral aftermath of a societal dislocation. While neither describing nor moralizing, he shows us a set of normal characters and the lives they adopt to survive in the much reduced circumstances.

Astonishing:
Heinrich Boll occupies for me the same place Dostoyevski does for many people: a deeply,morally complex writer who tells stories of profound depth involving average people thrown into situations not of their making. In the SILENT ANGEL, Bolls first novel{suppressed in germany for over 40 years},he tells of the immediate aftermath of WWII{the war ends in the first few pages, to his disbelief} on average germans, including the main character, a soldier struggling with fear and hunger to stay alive. In one of the early scens, the protagonist finds a nun in a hospital making soup, who gives him a piece of bread. The ecstasy the bread gives him{also symbolic of Bolls then Catholcism} can only been written by someone who actually expierenced hunger{I think much of this is autobiographical} Later the main character rediscovers love,amidst the falling plaster,the cold the hunger. A kind priest gives him a bottle of wine,which leaves him stunned at first,thenhe brings back to share with his new life. The idea of love flowering among people in such straits is remarkable,as is the ability to make one empathise with average germans, not an easy task after the horror of WWII> A Later scene with his new wife,where she describes a piece of pipe still standing after all the bombing{the unnamed city is Cologne}is marvelous, the touch of a master. That this is his first novel is almost astonishing,for it has true depth without much of the maudlin coming of age nonsense associated with first novels.If Heinrich Boll was not the most important novelist of the last 40 years, he was damn close. The opening act of a magnificent, important writer, thinker and moral witness.