<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and Very Relevant
Review: I took this book thinking I would find a mad clown criticizing everything around him. I don't know why this idea. But I found a story of a person whose life is breaking in pieces. He has been abandoned by his girlfriend to marry another guy, this is his current pain in the story, but you can see also the wound left by his dead sister, the hate for his stupid stupid mother and the hole he is falling in, searching for someone to borrow money from. From the beginning I had the sensation Hans was an middle age man, when he really is 27 years old.I don't know if is just how I perceived the character, or the writer tried to give Hans that characteristic, or he failed to give us a correct 27 year old young man. the fact is that the world he lives in looks in decadence, as if everything is collapsing, the whole city, the whole world; it looks he's about to suicide for the lack of reasons to stay here. He has nothing and he does not know how to get up, nor even seems to want to get up. It's a sad story of a person who at the end, has virtually no one to cry with, or to be supported by.
Rating:
Summary: Myoptic
Review: If your looking for a sad book...well you've found it. The book falshes from past to present with a hint of our furture. Boll takes the reader on an emotionle suicide. The character(the clown) faces problems with the world, his parents and himself. I say this book is a must read for any reader.
Rating:
Summary: The Finest Novel Ever.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Finest Novel Ever.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Tears of a Clown
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: If you feel depress and lonely, run away from it.
Review: This book exudes sadness and pain from the first line until the last. The most strong portrayal of what occurs when society takes form over substance, and how choosing the latter to live your life will not make you immune to having your heart broken and being misunderstood. Actually the most probable outcome is that you will end up being beaten since most humans hate to have a mirror place in from of them if it can show them how they really are. Heinrich Schier has been abandoned by his "wife" actually she was your living with him, but the fact that during some time he did not want to marry through a catholic ceremony, plus his deeply ingrained rejection of double standards, sends his life spinning down, to a place were he does not know upon which values he can reconstruct his life.
Rating: 
Summary: An Exploration of the Rhineland Catholic elite in the 1960s
Review: This book purports to be about West Germany after Hitler. I had expected to see a detailed and devastating critique of the hypocrisy, hollow reconciliation, and reconstructed memories of the past that were common in Germany after 1945. While these themes do appear in "The Clown," this novel is really about Catholicism.
The main character spends most of his time recalling his life with his Catholic ex-lover, Marie, and/or harping upon her sanctimonious circle of Catholic intellectual friends. One could easily gain the impression that this book is steeped in anti-Catholic invective. However, it is important to know that the invective, such as it is, is directed against a very specific stratum of postwar German society: the politically conservative and politically active, wealthy, pro-industrial, Catholic, moralist elite of the Rhineland in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result of its highly specific milieu, it is even hard to make generalizations about the state of society in all of West Germany after World War II.
Not all of West Germany was Bonn. Not all of West Germany's elites were Catholic. And the extreme emphasis on Catholicism obscures what could have been a damning critique of Germany's failure to face its past honestly and to engage in sincere reconciliation with Hitler's victims. Instead, "The Clown" seems to be a strident critique of Boll's own religious and social environment.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Very Relevant
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Impossible not to love The Clown.
Review: When I was a kid I was doing a renovation job with my dad at a distant location. The family was on vacation so they said it was okay if we stayed at their house rather than a motel. At night I had nothing to do but I found this book and started reading it. The cover was about to fall off but it was the only book that looked interesting. A little more than halfway through the book we completed the job and had to leave. So, what did my 14 year old logic instruct me to do?
I stole it! That's right, I took it without permission and never returned it. It's mine. My own! My precious!
<< 1 >>
|
