Heinrich Böll's novel [Billiards at Half Past Nine] left me feeling that either he is too clever by half or I am not clever enough: either way, I had the utmost difficulty in understanding it. The place is a small Rhineland town, the time a single day in September, 1958, and the main character is Robert Faehmal, a quantity surveyor, who had briefly engaged in anti-Nazi activities in boyhood and then been forced to conform. In the background is a large and inevitably symbolic Benedictine abbey, which Robert's architect father had designed before the 1914 war and which he himself as an army officer had been responsible for destroying in 1945; it is now being rebuilt by the youngest generation. There is more to the novel than this, but Herr Böll's devotion to the most dated techniques of experimental fiction means that much of the story is lost in...