Grupporträtt med dam : roman (1971)

Protagonista femenina de la acción es, en la primera parte, una mujer de cuarenta y ocho años, alemana; mide 1,71 metros y pesa 68,8 kilos....

> Une grande fresque de la société allemande, de l’ère wilhelminienne à nos jours dont une femme « pure », indestructible, demeure le centre. --Nuit blanche

Безспорно заслужилият Нобеловата награда за литература немски писател Хайнрих Бьол дава на своята най-обемиста творба името "Групов портрет с дама", което несъмнено е най-удачното заглавие, което може да се даде на романа. С библиографска пунктуалност авторът описва живота на дамата Лени Грьотен, чрез "показанията" и "свидетелствата" на буквално всички хора, били нейни спътници в живота ѝ. Обстоятелствеността и многословността на Бьол правят творбата тежка и трудна за четене, неподходяща за начинаещия читател. ( )

This is a novel for advanced users only. It reminded me at several points of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon in that I was aware I was engaged upon a great piece of art so serious its creator was prepared to make absolutely no allowances for pacing and had complete confidence in his audience to submit to this. I consider myself an advanced user and for much of the novel I struggled with the pace. Frankly, I could have done with a little more Blitzkrieg and a little less Cold War.

Still, there is much to enjoy here. There's something unusual going on. It took me a while to figure it out. My theory is as follows:

The novel is about construction and deconstruction. The chapter divisions make no sense. They are arbitrary divisions as blocks of text are moved into or out of place. The scaffolding is still up, so to speak, and it is not clear if the novel is in the process of construction or deconstruction. Böll writes at one point about the computer as big as Bavaria, a sort of astro-philosophical verberator that produces life stories. Is the novel under construction? Has Böll not finished novelising the information from his transcripts or has the verberator delivered the novel perfectly, only for Böll to deconstruct it into transcripts?

This motif is reflected again and again in other ways, perhaps most obviously in Leni and her father (who runs a construction company of course) but also more subtly in other characters. And also in the setting of Germany itself, where Nazism constructs the country from the ruins of the Treaty of Versailles but in the process destroys it.

This is a complex novel and having read it only once this must remain a theory but I see some confirmation in the opening passage where Böll describes Leni. At the same time as he constructs her in the reader's mind by giving information he is also deconstructing her from a person into a few pieces of information. ( )

Another review here gives a good outline of Group Portrait. All I can add to it is that the story is pieced together a bit as a documentary would be rather than being a straightforward narrative, and that virtually all the book is what an unnamed author has learned in interviews with people who have known Leni.

If I said that Group Portrait is an author's account of his attempt to learn all he could about a woman, telling us of the course of that quest and of what he learned along the way, giving vivid accounts of the various characters he encountered whilst doing so, it could well sound like a book club selection. It's far from it: this is unmistakably a literary novel with ambiguities and authorial games, and not only do we not get a strong sense of Leni but she seems (as I read it) nearly a cipher. Where the writer of a lesser book would have made her into saint or goddess, as could easily have been done, Boll shows us little more of her personality than suggestions that she's a free spirit and--again, by my reading--a bit simple. (And in the same way, episodes that a less subtle author would have striven to make heart-wrenching, e.g., are handled not coldly but nonetheless without any attempt to manipulate the reader's emotions.) This treatment of the main character is refreshing and one not many authors would dare, I think.

I'd read a couple of other novels by Boll and hadn't gathered from them that he has a good sense of humour, but he does. Indeed, his 'happy endings' take on the flavour of those in farces, though the one truly touching moment occurs amidst those endings. I don't know whether this is something I'd ever re-read but in the short term I'll be intently thinking over the novel and in the long term I doubt I'll ever forget it.

And by the way, a reading of Group Portrait would no doubt be enriched by some knowledge of political and everyday life in Germany in the first three quarters of the last century but my having none at all didn't detract from my enjoyment of it.