'The Clown' by Heinreich Böll

The tears of a clown is an old cliche and in Heinreich Böll's novel 'The Clown' we drink it deep.

Hans Schnier is the eponymous clown who befalls a romantic tragedy in his life during his late twenties.  He is in love with Marie, a good Catholic, who wishes to be married traditionally while Hans has spurned such a life and wants nothing of the sort.  One day Marie leaves him for another man, Zupfer, and Hans, being monogamous, is heartbroken.

Of all the novels of the Nobel Prize list this, to me, is one of the greatest, second only to Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti. 

So why do I think this?

I've always liked Böll's short stories and thought that they were works of great moral strength, and this seems true with his longer works.  Secondly I was just leaving my twenties behind when I read this and so I could identify with the main character very well, his depression and disappointments.  Lastly it is a great work of art who through one character we see the workings of a hypocritical society always talking about love and never practising it.

It's story works very well as a novel as it is told in flashbacks while having a positive narrative drive.  Though Schnier is a depressed clown he is never morose, often funny and is particularly poignant as an innocent making his way through the wicked world of deceptions and betrayal.  But I think some of it, especially the middle scene with his father, could be made into a good radio/ stage play.  Reading it I could see it in a very cinematic  way.  Which is often a way of discovering if the writer is imaginatively acute or not.

Schnier's attempts to find out where Marie has gone and his obstruction from her friends and family are rigorous through a constant process of loss.  Not only loss of his love but also a loss of his job as a clown.  As he drinks more and becomes less and less in control of himself he finds that he is taking less money for the jobs he does.  His agent, another source of agitation, is in some sense his only friend and even he cannot help him.

This clown is very much a man who in losing the one thing he does love, loses all other things and he is willing to drop out of society completely and be in the gutter.  The layers of interaction give him no pleasure as he becomes increasingly at odds with those around him. 

What clinches it for me as a great book is the grace of it's ending.  Humble and ennobling it rescues Schnier from the very depths of tragedy and gives him a wholeness that he had lost but in a very different sense.  For me this book is about the act of standing up, of trying to restore order, and failing knowing that one had tried, about living honestly and all the pain it gives you. 

I enjoy German writers very much and this book is one of the finest, definitely one for book-worn humanists who need to be told such stories.
     

'Snow Country' by Yasunari Kawabata

The poetry of coldness and heat are evocatively captured in Yasunari Kawabata's slim novel, serialised in the late '30s, 'Snow Country', with a doomed yet elegant love affair.

Shimamura  is a Japanese man who has come to the hot springs of Yuzawa taking a break from his city affairs.  At the hot spring he falls in love with a Geisha, Komako, which is a short, intense, affair but cannot last as Shimaura has to return to the city.  In the novel the fleetingness of life is explored, how pleasure comes and goes from moment to moment to how best this fleetingness should be enjoyed.

It is a very Japanese style of story that looks for the importance in the smallness of things, actions and words, and is very restraint on not overwhelming the reader with too many details.  The hot springs themselves serve for a unique location where this love story is played out.  The steam rising into the cold air is an apt metaphor for what Kawabata looks to describe in 'Snow Country'.

The descriptions are really what makes this book as it sets the tone for the dialogue between Shimamura and Yuzawa.  This could be adapted into a stage play as it is all set in one place and having the snow fall around them while they sit in the hot spring comes across as a good image for the fragility of life, the fragility of relationships and the security that comes with these things.

'Snow Country' is the perfect story for our snowy times, to be read with hot water bottle and hot chocolate at hand.