The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
Author(s): Heinrich Boll
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.
General Information
- :
- : Random House UK
- : VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
- : 0.1
- : 01 February 1994
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Heinrich Boll
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 833.914
- : 144
More About The Product
Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972
Heinrich Boll 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. Boll 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. Boll 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.
