About book What's To Become Of The Boy? Or, Something To Do With Books (1996)
Heinrich Böll ganó un Nobel de literatura por ser uno de los representantes literarios más importantes de la Alemania de la posguerra. Yo no sabía quién era. Compré Pero ¿qué será de este muchacho? porque el título me llamó la atención. Tiene solo cien páginas. Böll recuerda sus días de instituto, en Colonia, justo cuando Hitler ascendió al poder (podría haber ascendido a los cielos -o a los infiernos- directamente y nos habría ahorrado a todos mucho sufrimiento). También las hogueras de libros, las premoniciones de su madre sobre la guerra en el 36, los paseos en bicicleta por Colonia y sus tonteos con las mujeres.Es un relato corto que tira de la memoria y que deja con ganas de más. De más anáforas, si he de ser más concreta. Es un recurso estilístico más poético que narrativo, pero me ha entusiasmado cómo lo utiliza Böll. Empieza a partir del cuarto “capítulo” (son tan cortos que no sé si denominarlos así). Finge que su única intención es hablar de sus días de colegio, después se deja llevar por el recuerdo y, cuando quiere retomar la remembranza escolar, utiliza frases del tipo “Sí, y la escuela, en efecto, ahora vuelvo al tema” o “Ah, sí, la escuela”. Me gusta el ritmo y la estructura. Quiero leer más cosas de Böll. Por esto leo.
A short memoir by Heinrich Böll, born in Cologne in 1927, whose proletarian, Catholic, and staunch anti-Nazi family went through all the trials of Nazism and WWII. The memoir covers his four years in high school after Hitler came to power in 1933, through the burning of Reichstag, and Prussian occupation of Rheinland, events leading up to the war. Böll himself, coming of age at that time, in severely limited circumstances, faced with the choice of career and a future in the environment where, it was clear, he had no future. His choices closely tied up with that of his parents and siblings; a tight-knit family whose experiences Böll frequently describes in the first-person plural -- "we" and "our." A moving, important book.
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Another book I bought for myself on Mother's Day, from a little shop in Ann Arbor specializing in well-preserved first editions. I picked this up hoping for hints on how to live in a time when all around you seem consumed by power and hate and scapegoating. What I got was a somewhat disjointed memoir of a man looking back at his teen years from many years distant. It was as much of a memoir of the ways memory deceives and disorders and lumps impossible things together as it was a memoir of coming of age during the rise of the Nazi party.It's very stream-of-consciousness and rambly. And while that did often leave me wishing for more context or thoroughness, it did pretty effectively convey that for the most part, life just goes on. It's hard to see the context when you're living that context every day. How much time can you spend wondering what's to become of the country, or the world, when the question of "What's to become of you?" is so uncertain.But this book isn't going to connect the dots for you. If you want to derive any meaning from it, you're going to have to do the work.
—Jennifer
