Group Portrait with Lady (The Essential Heinrich Boll) - Tapa blanda

"His most grandly conceived [novel]...the magnum opus which so far crowns his work."
--The Nobel Prize Committee

"Extraordinary ... A powerful work of the imagination."
--The Los Angeles Times

"Böll combines a mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique."
--Joseph Heller

Cited by the Nobel Prize committee as the “crown” of Heinrich Böll’s work, the gripping story of Group Portrait With Lady unspools like a suspenseful documentary. Via a series of tense interviews, an unnamed narrator uncovers the story—past and present—of one of Böll’s most intriguing characters, the enigmatic Leni Pfeiffer, a struggling war widow.
 
At the center of her struggle is her effort to prevent the demolition of her Cologne apartment building, a fight in which she is joined by a motley group of neighbors. Along with her illegitimate son, Lev, she becomes the nexus of a countercultural group rebelling against Germany’s dehumanizing past under the Nazis ... and what looks to be an equally dehumanizing future under capitalism.