The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Boll

Well this was a complete impulse buy for me. I had never read anything by Boll before, and in fact all I knew about him was that at some point he'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But, I'm a sucker for a good recommendation, and Mr B's had just that. Plus the cover was all austere looking and made me think of 1984. So buy it I did.

When it arrived I was surprised (for reasons I don't quite know) to find it a very slim volume - only 140 pages - so it was a very quick read. Though this is not to say that it didn't managed to pack an awful lot into those pages.

It tells the story of Katharina Blum, a domestic in 1970s Germany. She goes to a party at her godmother's house, where she meets a man, spends the evening dancing with him, then goes back to her apartment with him. The next morning, police break into her flat to demand his whereabouts - turns out he is a wanted criminal. Blum is taken in for interrogation as the police believe she must have helped him to escape her apartment block, which has been under surveillance all night.

The rest of the story tells of the interrogation, the ensuing press reporting of the case that is horrible flawed and utterly smears Blum, and Blum herself, who finally murders the reporter writing all the slurs about her.

But the plot isn't the point of this novel - indeed you are told all of the above on the back cover of the book. It's the narrator that makes this book special. It can only be assumed that the narrator is Boll - there is no reason to think otherwise. He tells the story in a completely clinical way and seems to remain emotionless, in juxtaposition to the frenzied, sensational reporting of the newspapers. But there is a certain anger bubbling below the surface, just detectable, that carries the reader along.

I'm aware that I'm not explaining this terribly well, which is why I'm not a professional book reviewer. Hmm.  But it's very good. Promise.

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