The Clown

Praise

THE ESSENTIAL HEINRICH BÖLL

“Melville House has now reissued handsome paperbacks of three of Böll’s most important novels, and in each we find the 1972 Nobel Prize winner, with a humanist’s skepticism and tenderness, refusing to allow his fellow Germans to forgive themselves and move on…. [In The Clown] the abstractions of existentialism are manifested in vivid flesh-and-blood characters.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Böll is an expert marksman: the arrows are sharp, the feathers smooth, the targets numerous.”
—The New York Times

“Moving . . . highly charged . . . filled with gentleness, high comic spirits, and human sympathy.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection.”
—The Daily Telegraph

“The renewal of German literature, to which Heinrich Böll’s achievements witness, and of which they are a significant part, is not an experiment with form. Instead it is a rebirth out of annihilation, a resurrection, a culture which, ravaged by icy nights and condemned to extinction, sends up new shoots, blossoms, and matures to the joy and benefit of us all.”
—The Nobel Prize Committee

“A man of deep feeling and intelligence, speaking in a strongly contemporary voice, [Böll] recorded in his early stories the way it felt to come home to a destroyed country. The tone was neither angry, ironic nor surreal. On the contrary, these stories gave us the slow-moving thoughtfulness of a narrator in pain, walking about on a lunar landscape, knowing he must make sense of things more quickly than he is able to do.”
—Vivian Gornick, The New York Times