German Mailer

ADAM, WHERE ART THOU? (176 pp.)--Heinrich Boell -Criterion ($3).

This book qualifies as the German Naked and the Dead on the literary principle of silt by association. Author Boell, 37, known to U.S. readers for Acquainted with the Night (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954), lacks the power Norman Mailer showed in his first novel, but he wallows in the same mud-and-tears and reaches the same inevitable conclusion, i.e., war is a dirty, futile business. Adam has no heroes, only victims. The time is 1944; the place, principally occupied Hungary, as the mighty Wehrmacht comes apart at the tank sprockets. A panoramic miniaturist, Author Boell paints vignettes that are often sharp and sometimes affecting. A sergeant on a liquor foray for his C.O. finds himself on the shifting front lines, but clings to his suitcase full of Tokay until a shell mixes his blood with the wine. A captain with a hopelessly shattered skull keeps repeating a meaningless word, "Bjeljogorsche, Bjeljogorsche." A doctor says, as if he himself were making better sense: "He's up for a court-martial. He crashed on his motorbike, and he wasn't wearing his steel helmet." One man clucks over his buddy's baby picture as they drive a lorry-load of Jews to a crematorium. Irony is a blunt instrument in Author

Boell's hands, and almost every character is killed by it even before the bullets get him. The last to die falls screaming on his mother's doorstep. Having spent seven years as an infantryman with the German army, Author Boell writes knowingly and well of the stench and strain of war. But whenever the underlying self-pity shows through the chinks in his dead-pan mask, he seems bent not only on living the war again but also on losing it again.

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