Finished reading on: October 11, 2005
Opinions of a Clown
Title of the original version reviewed: «Opinioni di un clown»
AI Translation Notice: This review was translated from the original Italian using artificial intelligence. Book quotes and excerpts are translated interpretations and will not match the author's original English phrasing or official published translations.
Hans is a young man from a wealthy and influential family who works as a clown and has been left by his girlfriend, Maria.
A devout Catholic, the young woman could no longer live with Hans, who is fiercely critical of religion and, more broadly, of bourgeois respectability, and who cannot stand the Catholic circle Maria frequents.
Hans turns to drink and finds himself jobless, alone in his flat, attempting to reach out to his friends, his father, and his brother.
Met only with rejection, he decides to take to the streets to beg, strumming a guitar and singing liturgical hymns.
The novel is heavily rooted in post-war Germany and, from this perspective, distinctly dated.
Yet one theme remains universal: the rejection of a hypocritical and disingenuous society that refuses to accept the truth or tolerate any challenge to prevailing social codes.
How can one react: with nothingness.
You tried to comfort yourself with Fredebeul’s stale left-wing cynicism: in vain.
In vain will you have tried to get angry at Blothert’s stale right-wing cynicism.
There is a fine word: nothing.
Think of nothing.
Not of the Kanzler or the katholon; think of the clown weeping in the bathtub, of the coffee dripping onto his slippers
.
The theme of nothingness is the novel's central thread, finding its origin in the figure of Henriette—the sister sent to the front to die, the young man’s profound wound, a bereavement never reconciled.
Henriette would often detach herself, thinking of nothing, and remark that it was wonderful.
Thus, the clown performances become a way of detaching oneself, of viewing the world from the vantage point of nothingness.
The time spent in the bathtub, the waiting for the telephone to ring, the mask, and the vagrancy are all avenues through which the author pursues nothingness, thereby separating himself from a world—politico-social, but also personal—that he refuses to accept and that strikes him as monstrous in its vacuity.
The narrative pace is swift, interweaving intimate introspections with conversations that are invariably broken off and disappointing.
In some ways it recalls that of Javier Marías, with the difference that the caustic vein is far sharper, leaving no room for a gentle, reassuring irony.
The narrative arc would seem to lead toward the protagonist's suicide; instead, he finds solace and survival in the clown’s mask, for only behind a mask can one live in a society ruled by opportunism and bourgeois respectability.