A review by beautyistruth
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll
2.0
Quite a 'black' story and I get how it's a more intellectualised form of a detective or mystery story. The predominant thing I notice is that there's little of the interior life and descriptive prose here, so it's quite bare bones, and the aim is to present it in a documentary style.
It's about a young woman who is suspected of harbouring a criminal and about what happens then as detectives and a reporter try to unpick the story. Her life and associations are gone into - the family she works with, her background and what she does in her free time.
The major storyline of it is that she is consistently misrepresented by a tabloid newspaper for sensationalist stories and this is pretty much what a lot of tabloids do, from the Daily Mail to The Sun (I am British, so I'm using British papers as my frame of reference). They 'troll' in order to get their readers worked up and buying their papers or reading their websites. It's a very effective strategy - it's journalistic crack - and I think what Boll is trying to do here is to criticise this. At the beginning of the book it is stated:
"The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional nor fortuitous, but unavoidable."
But I think we know better.
It's about a young woman who is suspected of harbouring a criminal and about what happens then as detectives and a reporter try to unpick the story. Her life and associations are gone into - the family she works with, her background and what she does in her free time.
The major storyline of it is that she is consistently misrepresented by a tabloid newspaper for sensationalist stories and this is pretty much what a lot of tabloids do, from the Daily Mail to The Sun (I am British, so I'm using British papers as my frame of reference). They 'troll' in order to get their readers worked up and buying their papers or reading their websites. It's a very effective strategy - it's journalistic crack - and I think what Boll is trying to do here is to criticise this. At the beginning of the book it is stated:
"The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional nor fortuitous, but unavoidable."
But I think we know better.