Group Portrait with Lady Summary
Heinrich Böll

Group Portrait with Lady Summary

Boll's most subtle satire, Group Portrait with Lady is generally recognized as the single work which best represents the artistic summation of his literary career. Similar in context to most of his mature fiction, the novel reiterates Boll's major thematic concerns and reaffirms his moral chastisement of modern Germany. Written in the mode of documentary, Group Portrait with Lady is elaborately devised as an investigative study undertaken by an ostensibly objective narrator, referred to in the novel as the author or "The Au." The subject for examination is Leni Pfeiffer, nee Gruyten, the celebrated "Lady" of the novel's title. Developed through a series of interviews with numerous individuals having some familiarity, connection, or past association with the narrator's subject, the novel is at once an in-depth character portrayal as well as a social history of Germany in the twentieth century.

In the novel, the...

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