The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

by HeinrichBoll (Author)

Synopsis

Katharina Blum is pretty, bright, hard-working and at the centre of a big city scandal when, at a carnival party, she falls in love with a young radical on the run from the police. Portrayed by the city's leading newspaper as a whore, a communist and an atheist, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and sexual threats. Her life ruined by the distortions of a corrupt press, she shoots the offending journalist and gives herself up for arrest. Step by step and with an affecting forensic clarity, Katharina's story is reconstructed for the reader, gradually disclosing and entire panorama of human relationship and motive. The novel is a masterful comment on the law and the press, the labyrinth of social truth and the relentless collision of fact and fiction.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Edition: 1
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published: 15 Nov 1993

ISBN 10: 0749398981
ISBN 13: 9780749398989
Book Overview: This chilling and unforgettable novel, which shows how easily a life can be ruined when the police, and more significantly, the media, are allowed to run rampage, resonates as strongly today as it did in 1970s Germany.

Media Reviews
Boll sustains a masterly and insidious tension to the end. He is detached, angry and totally in control * The Times *
Such is the force of Boll's conviction, the clarity of his vision and the icy economy of his unemotive prose that within this short space he has distilled a spirit that burns into the palate the unmistakeable and lasting tang of truth * Sunday Times *
A marvel of compression and irony * Sunday Telegraph *
Author Bio
Heinrich Boell was one of the trio of great German writers (along with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse) who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Boell was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experience as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-past Nine, Children are Civilians Too, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, And Never Said a Word and The Safety Net. Boell served for several years as president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in 1985.