Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125358 in Books
• Published on: 1965-01-01
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 247 pages

Synopsis
The face of a clown is the face of innocence, and innocence goes to the wall in German society after the Second World War, when double-dealing and double standards became a way of life. Heinrich Boll's clown is a professional entertainer in his late twenties who has reached the end of his tether: an unhappy drunk abandoned by the woman he loves, too honest and disillusioned to compromise, he sits in his lonely furnished flat and calls for help or consolation of any kind. For this is a study in hypocrisy - emotional, sexual, religious and political - where the majority are smugly blinkered and the rest are caught in a trap they fail to understand, let alone escape.

Customer Reviews

Love in it's purest form!
In Short: Bolls "The Clown" shows love in its purest form as tragic as it can be. Our "hero", a bedraggled clown, has lost everything - his job, his love Marie but not his honour. A moment of time is expanded by Boll to a whole evening of tragic and of memories of his childhood and his one-and-only love Marie.

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!

Think!
That's a great book, make you think which is good for our nowadays life.I rather read it in original language but my German is not as good as my English. I recommend it 100%.
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...