Group Portrait With Lady

This novel by Heinrich Boll is a stupendous achievement. Framed as an investigation by an unnamed Author into the life of Leni Pfeiffer, nee Gruyten, born in 1922 and widowed three times by the end of World War II, it encompasses through her circle of family, friends, lovers, and rivals an entire universe of the German wartime experience. The liberating Americans thought the population could be neatly divided into Nazis and anti-Nazis. As Boll shows, paint stroke by paint stroke over 400 pages, the reality was much more complex, and human. A tone of gentle bemusement ensures that, despite the stark subject, the portrait is never too dark. I found myself imagining all the characters' qualities and actions as individual daubs of paint on a vast canvas, with Leni, radiant, in the center. This is a glorious, deeply affecting work of art.