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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 an alternate Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews
When the book was first published in the early '60s in Germany it was a controversial matter and fiercely discussed by the media and the church and it hasn't lost matter.
Although Boll says that "The Clown" is only a love story, it's far more between the lines!
Hans (the clown) lost his partenr (wife, they never officially get married because he never accepted to go to the Catholic church. Hans had a mystical peculiarity, as he could detect smells through the telephone, also he suffered from his disposition to monogamy...
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.
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.
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