9780140187267

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Through the eyes of a despairing artist, Hans Schneir, who recreates in his pantomimes incidents in people's lives with honesty and compassion, Boll draws a revealing portrait of German society under Hitler and in the postwar years.

"[Boll] commands [this novel] beautifully. In structure 'The Clown' is simple to the point of starkness....This is not a symbolic tract. The book is dense with realized and felt experience, rich with emotional detailing. Schnier's loss of central meaning in his life is sharp and moving to the reader; all the more because of the hard-surfaced prose in which it is presented...What Schier (and the author) seem to be asking is: How can an honest man profess Christanity when Christian culture in the West failed to stop the rise of Nazism...and when the Church thrives in a society that worships nothing but the values of the market-place? Hard questions, but embodied in a bitter and brilliant book. And posed by an artist who has the right to ask them."

Daniel Stern, New York Times Book Review, 1/24/65

"Lacking action in the usual sense of the word, 'The Clown' yet moves with a remarkable purposiveness, its constituents working singlemindedly together. Possibly for this reason it may not prove altogether acceptable. The sensitive contemporary reader prefers to be knocked flat by a velvet glove and there is perhaps too much iron in evidence here. I think it is the case that the irony is rather too insistent....A common weakness of writers with something to say is their inability to understand that saying it four times is not four times as effective as saying it once. But to have something to say--how rare this is! ...Boll doesn't erect reading-difficulty into a law; although retaining the flashback technique of 'Billiards at Half-past Nine', this new novel is less gratuitously involuted, with a positive stylishness of clarity and competency, and free from fussiness....There are few novels coming out these days which aren't either a kind of syrup or a kind of emetic. 'The Clown'...besides being one of these few, is at times very funny, as well as sad, as well as salutatory."

D. J. Enright, New York Review of Books, 2/11/65

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