Group portrait with lady
(Book)

Previously published: New York : McGraw-Hill, 1973. With new afterword by William T. Vollmann.

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.