Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 Billiards At Half-Past Nine Genesis, Translations This novel, too, appeared first in serialization, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and as a book in the same year, 1959. The German title is Billard um halb zehn. It was a tremendous hit, especially...

If a man's home is his castle, there's a particular house south of Boston with a throne room in the form of a billiard parlor. This is the pride and joy of a man named "Steve." No last name, please, he says. The house...

The background to Heinrich Böll's fine novel [Billiards at Half Past Nine] is one of the most mysterious places in the world, the Catholic Rhineland. He writes with piercing clarity of the chemical smoke blowing over willows and black barges, autobahnen through the beet fields, Romanesque churches, Roman tombs. (p. 887) Robert Faehmel, a successful quantity surveyor, had been involved in resistance in 1935 when he was a schoolboy. Through his friend Schrella he joined a strange pacifist sect, ...

Heinrich Böll's novel [Billiards at Half Past Nine] left me feeling that either he is too clever by half or I am not clever enough: either way, I had the utmost difficulty in understanding it. The place is a small Rhineland town, the time a single day in September, 1958, and the main character is Robert Faehmal, a quantity surveyor, who had briefly engaged in anti-Nazi activities in boyhood and then been forced to conform. In the background is a large and inevitably symbolic Benedictine abbey,...