Customer Reviews

The Clown (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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This book captures magnificently the feeling of being down and out and rootless. It is set specifically in post World War II Germany and describes well what surely were the feelings of many. But the sense of loss, alienation, lack of love, religious doubt set forth in the book go much deeper than that.

The book is told first person by its hero, a clown, Hans Schneir, who has enjoyed some success but has fallen to the state of pennilessness and drink after abanonment by his love, Marie, and an injury. The stuff of which romantic novels are made, but also the stuff of realism and symbolism too. Hans is from a wealthy but emotionally impoverished family who establishes a romantic liason with Marie, a young promising student who abandons her studies for him. She in turn ultimately leaves him based in part on her attachment to Catholicism. Schnier is an unbeliever but a"monogamous" unbeliever and can't adjust himself to the loss of Marie. He looks to friends, family, and others for comfort but finds none. Schneir says near the end of the book in an important passage "If our era deserves a name it would have to be called the era of prostitution. People are being accustomed to the vocabulary of whores." This theme is pervasive to the book together with hints about a way out. For example, in the course of a pivotal discussion between Schneir and his father Schneir alludes to and rejects the possibility that he must "lose [his] soul -- be totally empty, then I can afford to have one again."

The book is full of flashbacks from the narrators part interspersed with his reflections on his current actitivies and situation. His thought center on his own spiritual and emotional poverty, on the loss of Marie, his ambivalence towards religion, and the attempted change among Germans following their defeat. In some ways, the book and its end remind me of Schubert's great song cycle, Die Winterreise. The translation seems to me not of the best but it serves to convey the book. This novel is thoughtful, moving and worth reading.

Heinrich Boll's 'The Clown'is an impassioned, tragic, poetic fable of innocence and purity in a world of hypocrisy and double-dealing inhumanity. The Clown is a hugely life-like figure; his pain bleeds through the paper, his tears smear the words. He is an artist, destroyed by loss and betrayal, an artist who has reached the lowest point of his existence and now despairs in the knowledge of his own pathetic tragedy.

He phones for help or consolation as he huddles in his terra cotta apartment, swelling with nausea, a bruised knee, a headache, and a broken heart. He tilts back his cognac and sucks on a drooping cigarette, brooding over his loss, and trying to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and his own frantic imagination.

'The Clown' is brilliant social commentary; philisophically aware, lucid prose- it exposes the heart of post-war German schizophrenia, delving into the dogma and denial which plagued the nation, infecting it with a warped sense of itself. It is a tragedy of heart-rending pain; the clown's mask cracks and a tear carves a furrow through the white flakey paint. His coffee spills on his slippers amd he clutches his knee, his hands shaking in loneliness.

Rash as it is to say this is the finest novel I've ever read. It is Catcher in the Rye for adults and it's depth of feeling is unsurpassed. Boll is a magnificent writer and translation in no way diminishes his gifts. The creativity, an example would be Schnier's ability to smell odors through the phone, is remarkable. I couldn't put it down either the first or the second time that I read it. Yes, it is depressing, but there is much joy in it and it gives a reader a tremendous opportunity to reflect on the realities of his or her own life. I could not recommend a book more highly.

The Clown is a very fast-moving story told in the first person by Hans Schneir, who is a clown. Hans is a delighful character, incisively cynical about the "new" Germany and its transparently selfish citizens in a way that leaves you more amused than depressed. Boll's attention to the fine details of life make the book specially fascinating, because they make Hans (and the other characters) so believable it's as though you are right there, watching them. The book is a fantastic voyage into another person's despair, where humor, shameless honesty and hopelessness rub elbows as they do in reality. I have just finished The Clown, but I am not ready to shelve it. There's too much that I love about it.

This is one of those rare books I come back to again and again: beautifully and unpretentiously written, and honest to the core. It is a biting critique not only of postwar German society, but of hypocrisy in general (religious, romantic, and otherwise). It made me cry and it made me laugh; I can offer a book no higher praise.

I am not normally a big believer in fate. But as it happens, I first read this book after finding it on top of an abandoned car during a rainstorm. I'd just been dumped by a longtime girlfriend under circumstances not too dissimilar to those of Hans Schnier. I won't say the book saved my life, but it made me feel a lot less alone in the world.

As "Billards at Half-Past Nine" is a brilliant social commentary in a personal setting, "The Clown" is a brilliant personal commentary and heart-wrenching lament in the context of a critical new German society. Hans Schnier is a pathetic, hearbroken clown, whose poverty consists of a bankrupt heart. By the end of the novel, his only choice is to sit on the curb and strum his guitar for change. Boell crafts an image of a man willing to do anything for love, and is suspicious and afraid of the world around him after his personal world collapses. In lines such as "Think of the clown who weeps in the bath, and whose coffee drips onto his slippers," Boell reveals his mastery of capturing the human spirit through poignant narrative, aided greatly by Leila Vennewitz' brilliant translation. This is a must-read for anyone who knows Boell or has any concept of love and the human spirit.

A grim post-war novel abounding in fatalism, doubt, sarcasm, loss and survival, Heinrich Boll's exploration is a true literary masterpiece that could make one almost wince in its no-holds-bar truth offering. The life of Hans Schneir, a down-on-his-luck, melancholy, incisive clown could represent any human life after surviving and living the day-to-day economic and emotional traumas hatched by war and the idiocy of policy that brings it about. What is normalcy after war? In most cases it is the love of a future wife and the co-creation of a family, for when one is in a war-and for survival sake-must sometimes end a human life, it is natural that the desire afterwards would be to help bring about life, as well as the beauty surrounding it. But for Hans Schneir, that is not the case, for he is encased in a cocoon of soulful hardness, an all encompassing iciness of mistrust, cynicism and destroyed ideals. Whereever he looks, he sees people manipulated by guilt, best exemplified by his mother, a former Nazi sympathizer who ultimately evolves into a kind of champagne activist while serving as president of the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences. He sees people who can not deal or cope or who are wounded with life, as is the case with his brother, Leo, who converts to Catholicism and then enters and is ultimately stashed in a seminary. All the time while German citizens flounder in their varied emotional states, Hans has two things which keep him stable, his unbending emotional hardness and his lover, Maria, who, as well, drifts away from him while gradually embracing the ideals of a Catholic neophyte named Zupfner. Hans Schneir's resolute closeness versus Maria's relentless openness casus the two to clash in many ways. Where he sees hypocracy and weakness, she sees Truth and possibility. Yet, to Hans, that is exactly what she is supposed to see and fall into, another trapping created by man to make a big power machine (the Church) even bigger. Thus he loses her, and she becomes the "first lady" of German Catholicism-Pg. 176. As all that Hans holds near and dear to him slowly drift away, the one thing that he clasps onto is his art, the talent of pantomime, whereby he immitates those in his environment: politicians, religious leaders, people who use other people and institutions merely in order to feel a sense of worth. But as he acts out the truths that he sees yet things that people do not wish to see, he even fails at his art, for who wants to see a sad clown? In the end, he struggles along, fighting to incorporate snippets of hard truth into his life, truth that nobody wants. Heinrich Boll is indeed the grand master of exploring the harsh truth of human behavior and how humanity uses a veneer of politics and God in order to not confront itself.

Boell unmasks the empty form of class society. The figure of the clown who stands desperately alone with his true feelings and ideas against a Catholic society which takes him away his love, Marie, is the greatest story I have ever read. The original German title was "Opinions of a clown". You will read this more than once.

I read this book years ago (on a plane ride) and it has stayed with me as few other books have. It cuts to the heart of something that is wrong with our culture, maybe with all of our civilization; specifically, I mean the habitual hypocrisy and the over-riding need to self-rationalize. Of course, this theme has been treated before, but I have never seen it done with the simplicity and eloquence with which it is done here.

The story is perfect somehow: a woman leaves her husband, a decent man (the narrator), for someone who is more powerful within the Catholic Church, the same Church that ostensibly preaches "blessed are those who are meek for they shall inherit the earth." By focusing on these smaller acts of injustice and hypocrisy (rather than on the overwhelming horrors of Nazi Germany), Boll brings what happened in Germany into a focus that I had never seen before.

When I hear George Bush talk about "spreading freedom" while suppressing democracy at home or condemn "evil doers" while condoning torture, I think of this book. It captures the emptiness at the heart of the mealy-mouthed pieties that afflict our civilization with a economy and grace that is unique.

One of the finest books of the superb Boll, the Clown is a demonstration work. Superbly mixing pathos and humor, the bittersweet life of Boll's narrator - this is a work told in the 1st person - shows off a master writer's craftsmanship as his tragic character attempts to hold his life together. The narrator's omnipresent self-doubt dominates his every thought and act: human vulnerability is probably as well captured here as anywhere in fiction - the hero attempts to survive through dogged determination to hold on to his skills and pits his fading artistic persona against the edginess of ever present failure and ultimate collapse. Following the narrator as he runs through his routines over and over again the reader comes as close as possible to the alternate universe of the clown.
A memorable book!