SOURCE: "When They Were Wrong They Were Right," in The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1986, p. 42.

Enright is an English man of letters who has spent most of his career abroad, teaching English literature at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. His critical essays are frequently marked by sardonic treatment of what he considers the culturally pretentious in literature. In the following favorable review, he examines the plots, characters, and major themes of the stories collected in The Stories of Heinrich Böll.

Born into a liberal Roman Catholic family in Bonn in 1917, and the least military of men, Heinrich BÖll was drafted into the German army in 1939 and eventually taken prisoner by the Americans. His first novel was published in 1949, and in 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that, in its emphasis on life and a...