The Irisches Tagebuch occupies a somewhat ambiguous place in Böll's oeuvre. Chronologically and stylistically it stands closer to the early stories and novels, with their studied, stark simplicity, than to the major novels, with their modernist interweavings of narrative perspectives and disruptions of temporal and spatial continuities. The travel book likewise occupies an intermediate generic position between Böll's essays and his novels, for it uses traditional conventions of both non-fictional travel journalism and those of fictional narration….

The book's title, suggesting a traveler's tedious day-to-day jottings about strange peoples, landscapes, and mores, seems to belie the text itself, which is organized in topical chapters and not simply in temporal or spatial segments…. Böll has chosen [a title] graced with a peculiar linguistic symmetry: two eight-letter words of identical syllabic stress. This simple balance of two sides anticipates the duality which marks the German's encounter with...