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A review by sloatsj
Pigeons on the Grass by Wolfgang Koeppen
4.0
I greatly enjoyed this, a relief after a string of disappointing books. The setting is a western German city occupied by U.S. soldiers in the immediate post-war period. The style is a flowing stream-of-consciousness that is lively and peppered with marvelous sentences.
Such as: “He drank a little wine, Franconian wine, he had read and heard about it and had been curious to try it, but then the brightly sparkling beverage from the potbellied bottle struck him as all too tart for this midday hour on an overcast day. It was a sunny wine, and Edwin saw no sun, the wine tasted of graves, it tasted the way old cemeteries smell in wet weather, it was an accommodating wine, it made the cheerful laugh and the unhappy cry.” (p/ 91)
There are more than 20 characters and given the author’s approach we never get too intimate with any of them. I found that while I enjoyed the story and the prose, I wasn’t much engaged with the characters. I didn’t find this a shortcoming, really; it results from the author’s collage-like style. Closest I came to caring was Washington and Carla, a black U.S. soldier and his German girlfriend, who gets pregnant. The characters are for the most part sad and downtrodden. They rue what they’ve lost, including Hitler in some cases. They maneuver to improve their lots, and fail.
(Shame about the ugly cover with its dull off-putting colors and uninspiring design. If it were a longer book I would have re-wrapped it. I'm sure the cover is the reason few people have read this book!)
Such as: “He drank a little wine, Franconian wine, he had read and heard about it and had been curious to try it, but then the brightly sparkling beverage from the potbellied bottle struck him as all too tart for this midday hour on an overcast day. It was a sunny wine, and Edwin saw no sun, the wine tasted of graves, it tasted the way old cemeteries smell in wet weather, it was an accommodating wine, it made the cheerful laugh and the unhappy cry.” (p/ 91)
There are more than 20 characters and given the author’s approach we never get too intimate with any of them. I found that while I enjoyed the story and the prose, I wasn’t much engaged with the characters. I didn’t find this a shortcoming, really; it results from the author’s collage-like style. Closest I came to caring was Washington and Carla, a black U.S. soldier and his German girlfriend, who gets pregnant. The characters are for the most part sad and downtrodden. They rue what they’ve lost, including Hitler in some cases. They maneuver to improve their lots, and fail.
(Shame about the ugly cover with its dull off-putting colors and uninspiring design. If it were a longer book I would have re-wrapped it. I'm sure the cover is the reason few people have read this book!)