The language of the book is austere, the characters are not clearly distinguishable, the colours mentioned - apart from grey destruction - are greenish and yellowish hazes. These tune in with the bilious, nausea of the characters as they continuously search for food and shelter. Throughout the story each character is portrayed as exhausted, struggling, nauseous.

The novels main character has deserted the German Army in the final days of the war, and under a certain sentence of death for desertion, has assumed numerous identities as he flees. He has, however, promised a dead comrade that he will return a coat to his comrade's widow. A will is discovered in the lining of the coat and this yields an subplot of intrigue and corruption. The main character meanwhile meets and briefly lives with a dazed, tragic woman who has been psychologically damaged by the war.

The novel's main impression is the exhaustion of emotion, the breakdown of society brings about a breakdown of morality and order. Stealing and dishonesty of all kinds are part of daily life, as are small gestures of generosity. In the broken cityscape, there is neither trust nor complete anarchy, just a meandering from one slice of bread to the next. Towards the end of the book , the main character has established a certain routine which allows him to steal coal from trains, which gives him some power to barter.

Boll's austere tale, gives us a view of the amoral aftermath of a societal dislocation. While neither describing nor moralizing, he shows us a set of normal characters and the lives they adopt to survive in the much reduced circumstances.

As always, Boll's characters are powerfully human and fully realized, and the events are told with a touch that remains light without trivializing.

Place and time of this pamphlet (as Böll calls this book in an afterword) are West-Germany, 1974, so a conservative society at the height of the fear for the Red Army Faction, with an unbridled influence of the pulp press, in particular the notorious BILD-Zeitung. Böll has written a convincing accusation against these type of journals and the fact that people actually believe what they say.

The problem with this book is that it is outdated: in the meantime the world has moved on, readers (even those of newspapers like the ZEITUNG) have become more aware of the fact that these type of newspapers tend to lie and the accusations made in those types of newspapers are nowadays even more outrageous than in 1974. I also had some problems with the style of writing: even though the book is well written (what one may expect from a Nobel laureate), the narrator actively comments on what is going on, which is sometimes irritating and does not add anything to the story.

Sound familiar? The novel may have been startling, and even controversial, when it was published in 1974, but no contemporary reader familiar with the tabloids at the supermarket checkout or with sensational talk shows conducting outrageously one-sided investigations will find this depiction of the press even slightly shocking. In fact, the methods of the press in this novel seem unrealistic, not because they are so extreme, but because they are so obvious, crude, and lacking in subtlety. Boll may have been prophetic with this novel in 1974, but it is a product of its own time. While it may confirm that the conflict between responsible journalism and irresponsible sensationalism has a long history, it offers few useful insights for the present day.

This book is an excellent mind game. Boll uses many subtle tools to focus blame on the entire German populace for the events of World War II. One of the major devices used contrasting irony. Boll places occurrences of totally different perspective next to each other in order to draw out the idiocy of the German soldier. One of the examples I can remember deals with the relationships throughout the book. Every time a soldier wants to have a relationship with a female (a very ordered and structured type of arrangement) there is always some sort of disorderly thing going on in the background part of the story. The soldiers never question the war, but always takes the failed relationship at face value.

One other subtle and enjoyable aspect of the novel is the way Boll interconnects all occurrences. Throughout the novel objects appear in multiple places. One may think that it is just coincidence. Looking deeper it is more than that. A table gets a cigarette burn on it early in the novel. Several chapters later the exact table (Boll points out the cigarette burn) shows up in different locations even after it has been destroyed. This is only one example of many that make the book an enjoyable novel to read.

I do have to admit that the story is slow going at first, but don't give up on it. It is full of subtle irony, and subtle blame of responsibility that takes close reading and following of the story.

Bob Flaherty
Senior at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Terre Haute, Indiana

The story starts out giving us some clear signs of a marriage in trouble; a husband sends just about all of his paycheck to his wife and then drinks up the remainder. We discover more and more problems as the novel unfolds. This is helped by the author's effective use of the narration which alternates each chapter between husband and wife. As I was going along, I sensed a metaphor between the collapse of a marriage and the collapse of Nazi Germany, the soldier returning home to a marriage destroyed as a metaphor to returning to a society destroyed. Oops, that didn't seem to pan out. The husband's military service was "boring" duty as a telephone operator. His personal struggle seems to be with poverty in the present tense rather than post traumatic stress disorder. Then I looked to the marital seperation as a metaphor for the division of Germany into East and West. This, too, seemed to be a stretch. This is the story of a marriage that is failing and of the efforts of the spouse's to deal with the situation. I guess it's the scarcity of hope and the disfunctional nature of the husband that sends one looking for meaning on a larger scale. Yet the title causes one to reflect one last time on the novel's message. We find out that the title comes from the American Negro Spiritual "And He Never Said a Mumblin' Word". I only heard that spiritual once and my recollection of the message was that of Christ taking his pain and suffereing in quiet submission. It is with quiet submission that Fred and Kate Bogner take their pain and suffering. We know that within Christ's pain and suffering is a powerful love. On an admittedly lesser scale we see the same thing in "And Never Said a Word".