The Clown - BookWyrm

Florian reviewed The Clown by Heinrich Böll (Penguin twentieth-century classics)

Review of 'The Clown' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

This is the first book I've read from Böll, and from what I've gathered, it is supposed to be one of his best works. I for one did not like his writing style.

The action takes place over one day, actually over only a few hours, and there are frequent flashbacks in which he remembers a bunch of useless stuff about the people he's about to call to ask for money, his family and his lost "wife".

However there are small passages that are worth reading and that made me keep reading, otherwise I would have just abandon it. There are some debates (actually, just his opinions) about several social issues including religion, specifically Catholicism, which supposedly aroused fierce arguments, although who still consider "outrageous" to attack the Church today?

Do I recommend this book? Not really, but you should know I'm not usually into this type of books. So …

DaveNash3 reviewed The Clown by Heinrich Böll (Penguin twentieth-century classics)

Review of 'The Clown' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Holden Caufield has nothing on Hans Schnier. The narrator has a total meltdown when his girl leaves him. He drinks too much and his promising clown career goes down the drain. He sits in his apartment and dials all the people who have made his life miserable and rants against the hypocrisy of his society. A society that is terribly oppressive and hypocritical.

As a clown he says when an act is 'right' it means you made the right people laugh and the right people angry. I think this book would have done that for the post WWII West Germany it was written for.

There is something about the character the author creates that carries across to a different time and space. However, its focus on social commentary makes it less relatable here and now. Still worth a read and I'm going to look into other Boll works.