The Clown [Mass Market Paperback]

Heinrich Böll (Author), Leila Vennewitz (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1975

Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schneir collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation”
afterwards.

Heinrich Böll’s gripping consideration of how to overcome guilt and live up to idealism—how to find something to believe in—gives stirring evidence of why he was such an unwelcome presence in post-War German consciousness . . . and why he was such a necessary one.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These mark the fifth and sixth Boll titles reprinted this year-impressive. First published in 1965, The Clown is typical Boll and is ripe with guilt and fear in its Nazi and post-Nazi Germany setting. Vennewitz's translation was dubbed "admirably smooth" (LJ 2/1/65). Katharina Blum (1975) was described by LJ's reviewer as a "powerful image of innocence betrayed, of measureless evil oozing quietly out from regulated, unimpeachable convention" (LJ 4/15/75). Two solid titles.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

THE ESSENTIAL HEINRICH BÖLL

"Melville House has now reissued handsome paperbacks of three of Böll's most important novels, and in each we find the 1972 Nobel Prize winner, with a humanist's skepticism and tenderness, refusing to allow his fellow Germans to forgive themselves and move on.... [In The Clown] the abstractions of existentialism are manifested in vivid flesh-and-blood characters."
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Böll is an expert marksman: the arrows are sharp, the feathers smooth, the targets numerous.”
—The New York Times

“Moving . . . highly charged . . . filled with gentleness, high comic spirits, and human sympathy.”
—Christian Science Monitor

"His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection."
—The Daily Telegraph

"The renewal of German literature, to which Heinrich Böll's achievements witness, and of which they are a significant part, is not an experiment with form. Instead it is a rebirth out of annihilation, a resurrection, a culture which, ravaged by icy nights and condemned to extinction, sends up new shoots, blossoms, and matures to the joy and benefit of us all."
—The Nobel Prize Committee

“A man of deep feeling and intelligence, speaking in a strongly contemporary voice, [Böll] recorded in his early stories the way it felt to come home to a destroyed country. The tone was neither angry, ironic nor surreal. On the contrary, these stories gave us the slow-moving thoughtfulness of a narrator in pain, walking about on a lunar landscape, knowing he must make sense of things more quickly than he is able to do.”
—Vivian Gornick, The New York Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: Bard Books by Avon (October 1, 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380003333
• ISBN-13: 978-0380003334
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Tears of a Clown, December 5, 2000

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Clown (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)

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.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Heinrich Boll and Post-war German Schizophrenia, December 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Clown (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)

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.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Finest Novel Ever., May 20, 2004

By 

Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Clown (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)

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.