Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) [Mass Market Paperback]

Heinrich Boll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1995 | Series: Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin

Boll's well-known, vehement opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of Robert Faehmel. After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at war's end. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards. When his routine is breached by an old friend, now a power in German reconstruction, Faehmel is forced to confront both public and private memories.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Novel by Heinrich Boll, first published in German as Billard um halbzehn in 1959. In its searing examination of the moral crises of postwar Germany, the novel resembles Boll's other fiction; its interior monologues and flashbacks, however, make it his most complex work. The novel examines the lives of three generations of architects and their responses to the Nazi regime and its aftermath. The present-day action takes place on the 80th birthday of patriarch Heinrich Fahmel, who built St. Anthony's Abbey. At the end of World War II, his son Robert destroyed the abbey to protest the church's complicity with the Nazis; Robert's son, Joseph, is serving his apprenticeship by helping to restore St. Anthony's. All three characters confront their relationship to building and destruction, as well as their personal and historical past. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

About the Author

In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared 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 prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences 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 (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), and The Safety Net (1979). In 1981 he published a memoir, What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com. She is also a reviewer for NPR’s “Books We Like,” and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Toronto Globe and Mail, among other publications. She lives in Berlin. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140187243
• ISBN-13: 978-0140187243
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #892,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping panorama of German life, June 13, 2001

By 

Douglas Turnbull (Fallston, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

This work, in my opinion Boll's greatest, takes place duirng a single day in the life of Robert Faemel. He is an architect and ex-soldier who since WWII has turned inward, relying on routine to get him through the days. As the story unfolds, the reaader learns of the difficult and tragic events in his life that have led Robert to seek escape from the world, and ultimately gives hope that even these darknesses can be overcome.

Through his memories and those of his family, the book paints a remarkable panoramic picture of German life from ~1920 through 1960. The book really presents 3 generations of a German family and their experiences through this harrowing period. It shows both the dark side of postwar Germany, where many ex-Nazis had risen to positions of power and influence, as well as the lonely lights of human goodness and decency that remained throughout the dark period of the Nazis rise to power and the second world war.

As always, Boll's character's are expertly drawn and powerfully human. The storytelling can be difficult, requiring attention to keep up with the flashbacks and change in narrators. But it is absolutely worth the effort, as reading it will be a powerful experience that will stay with you.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling post-war masterpiece, December 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Through Robert Faehmel,the subject of Boell's stark description of life in post-war Germany, the modern reader can truly feel the same sense of unsettlement and social insight. Boell depicts a society where former Nazis, barely unfit to be tried at Nurenberg, now rule over Germany's biggest cities as mayors and serve in the modern beaureacracy. Faehmel is a man who can not survive here without his own rigid regime and almost stereotypic German precision in order to escape his fate in the present and his decisions and losses in the past. In "Billiards at Half-Past Nine," brought to the Engish reader by Pulitzer Prize winning translator, Leila Vennewitz, Heinrich Boell, Germany's conscience and master story teller, presents perhaps his greatest work.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pervasively amazing, November 11, 2005

By 

Michael David "Salmon" (Quezon City, Philippines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Billiards at Half-Past Nine is an encompassing view of post-war Germany, both in the First World War and the Second. It chronicles the lives of the Faehmel family, and is quite challenging with its multitude of internal monologues. It only occurs in the span of one day, but this single day is enough.

We start with Robert Faehmel, a prosperous second-generation architect. We can already see in the beginning that he is not unlike a machine: his life is set like a clock. Every single day he works for only an hour, but there is little disparity, little uniqueness in his schedule. One could easily dismiss him as one who has an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but later on, one sees that this is only Robert's facade: he is trying to forgo of his guilt-laden and tragic past by offering himself no time to think about it.

This guilt-laden and tragic past comes from Nazism and Nazi Germany. Euphemized by Boll as 'the host of the Beast,' this is what mars the lives of the Faehmel family. The young ones who do not take this are battered and tortured, while those who do take it become strangers to even their own family. Robert did not take it, and he was whipped in the back with barbed wire, bloodied, and was to be executed if not for the help of friends. His brother took it, and such was the powerful psychological re-education of the Nazis that his brother was the one who told on his family - his brother was the one who wanted their family imprisoned. He became 'the husk of a child,' from the words of Robert's father, Heinrich.

The different lives of the Faehmel family are delved into with this book, and each one of them carries emotional and psychological scars from the past war. Some scars belong to Robert, who could never accept his country turning his back on him, some on his relatives, some on his friends, and in the end Boll reveals that no one got out of the wars unscathed. Not Germany. Especially not Germany.