The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

 

Hey! I read this book this afternoon! It's maybe novella-length, and as you might expect from someone who won a Nobel Price for Literature it's unrelentingly pretentious; it's also clumsy as hell; it has things it wants to say and it makes sure you know it, then it's completely unable to get out of its own way and actually say them. It's so uninterested in the story it contains that the story is literally an afterthought. The stolid, almost-wooden prose might be an artifact of it being in translation, but it certainly didn't help.