Women in a River Landscape - Softcover

As West German society increasingly took on a gloss of economic well-being, Boll's trenchant novesl cut through the sleek outward show to reveal festering fears and suppurating physic states excluding poison into the system. WOMEN IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE brings this process to a fierce, fince culmination. . . Boll brings a humane understanding as well as indignation to the predicament of characters who seem not only rainted culprits but also victims of history SUNDAY TIMES.

'As West German society increasingly took on a gloss of economic well-being, Böll's trenchant novels cut through the sleek outward show to reveal festering fears, skinned-over malignities and suppurating psychic states exuding poison into the system. Women in a River Landscape - completed just before Boll's death in 1985 - brings this process to a fierce, fine culmination.

Composed of dialogues and soliloquies from a cast of late-middle-aged or elderly figures, it dramatically portrays a terrified and terrifying world. As its characters whisper, hint, frightenedly hush each other or exchange confidences during sleepless nights, the novel's highly-polished milieu of politicians and financiers, industrialists and PR men takes on a ghastly shadiness like that of some Jacobean drama of covert atrocity, lurking menace, blackmail, eavesdropping and pitiless power struggle ... Böll brings a humane understanding as well as indignation to the predicaments of characters who seem not only tainted culprits but also victims of history' Sunday Times

'This book typifies Böll's virtues: a bold inventiveness of form, a gritty anger at the world's corruption and injustice, a warmly humorous indulgence towards human fragility, a brave determination to face the facts without lecturing us about them. As a man and as a writer, he is sorely missed' Independent