THE STORIES OF HEINRICH BOLL

Here, a collection of all of Boll's shorter fiction--62 stories, 5 novellas, with 15 heretofore untranslated pieces. The novellas retain the most charge, composed for the most part during Boll's strongest period and being about his most striking subject: defeat (Germany's, after WW II). ""And Where Were You, Adam?"" and ""The Train Was On Time"" and ""A Soldier's Legacy"" all have a gray amplitude of guilt and survival. Soldiers who are losing, who have lost, may not ever have been so well limned. Later Boll has less visceral power. Not an especially comic writer, he did very well, though, with ""Murke's Collected Silences""--a story about the intellectual vanities and pretensions and absurdities of a state broadcasting service. The shorter the story, however, the more cute and sometimes clumsy it's likely to be, a bagatelle. For the early postwar novellas, then, of real interest.