Group Portrait with Lady (book review) Heinrich Boll

020219 from ???: i remember, when reading this at my favorite coffeehouse several years ago, coming across a wonderful, droll, unexpected- though long-prepared-answer to a question that the acute reader will have been wondering for at least a hundred pages: and i laughed out loud! other coffeehouse patrons looked up, looked curious, looked maybe worried, and all i could do was gesture at and say ‘this book’… but the great ironic joke would be impossible to explain in any reasonable way, in the moment, in person, if you have not read the book. i am surprised i have not first put it on favorites. for that moment of pleasure, indicative of the entire book, i must call it one. i guess it is sort of a post-modern work, a deconstruction dossier, one long, involved and involving, narrative joke (not just the one i mention..). this is also something definitely in the appropriate artistic medium: not a film, not a poem, not a painting or a song- something that only works as a book...