While there are more sophisticated writers at work in Germany, some of whom are of great promise, Heinrich Böll has no peer as a storyteller. Equally free from the chilly academism of his younger colleagues and the blindness to historical reality so obvious in the novels of the older generation, his is straightforward and unsparingly honest in his scrutiny of character and situation. He is a disciple of Hemingway rather than of Mann or Kafka, and it is not surprising that his sturdy realism occasionally earns him a laurel twig on the other side of the Iron Curtain….

["Billiards at Half Past Nine"] differs in scope and setting from his previous works, and should win over readers to whom the typical Böll milieu, with its slightly proletarian aura, does not readily appeal. With an ambition few critics would have credited to him, Böll writes about...