Clown

"[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."Böll, Heinrich is the author of 'Clown', published 1994 under ISBN 9780140187267 and ISBN 014018726X.