The Safety Net - Heinrich Böll

[Kristel]

Read 2014
The story is about security. There are many characters in this book, some are family, some our business people, some are political, some are law enforcement. This is Germany from the time period following WWII to the seventies. Security would seem to be a good thing but security robs you of your freedom. You no longer can move about freely or enjoy things like birds flying. Only one person enjoys the security system and that is the one who sees it as a measure of her importance. The rest struggle with the loss of their freedom. Though this book was written in 1979 it addresses issues of today; terrorism, political security, freedom, environmental abuse for the sake of energy, I’ve read two books by the author and both books address the pressures of newspaper and law enforcement on the human spirit.

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars

A thought-provoking and somewhat dystopian book about 1970's Germany in which people are under an oppressive "safety net" of suveillance and countless security guards to protect them from terrorist acts and violence. This increased security stifles freedom and imposes a pervasive sense of dread and mistrust among the citizens.

This book has a huge character list, but does provide a list of the characters and their relationships to one another at the beginning of the book.

[Patrick]

Pre-2016 review:

*** 1/2

Over the years, I kept a habit of discarding any old electronics cables, cords and wires in a dedicated bag, just in case I might suddenly need one on a new piece of hardware where one such cable, cord or wire was required or missing. Every time I need to visit this bag, I am confronted by an inextricable mess of intertwined cables, where many ends are seen without discerning exactly where the rest of a cable might lie or which end belongs to which other end.

After I read the first two chapters of The Safety Net, I felt I was actually sifting through my bag of cables. There were tons of characters (luckily, there was a helpful list at the beginning, which I used almost until the end) with various interactions and importance in the main plot and sub-plots. It became easier to follow the stories as the chapters went on and became shorter and probably more to the point. It was quite interesting to be allowed the various perspectives offered by several characters, each one being specific mesh(es) of the overall safety net (some solid, some not so solid). I read The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum in college and did not really like it back then (the only thing I remember was that the old fart with whom she had an affair started to develop some acute BO problems after the affair was made public). However, this book has given me hope that there is probably more good Böll than bad Böll to be read off the List.

[Amanda]

3 stars for me. I think it summarized very well here above, and while I respect a lot of the themes it got across, I just had a bit of a problem really 'getting into it'.