I read about 50 pages and found the book depressing and tedious. I read for enjoyment, not hard work! Whoops! Only made it to page 34. Yes, it received a Nobel Prize. ( )

1042 The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass translated from the German by Ralph Manheim (read 25 Jan 1970) Obviously I am not with it. I've just read this book, also on Time's list of Notable Books of the Sixties, the complete list of which I have set out in my review of The First Circle, by Solzhenitsyn here on LibraryThing. This book tells a story of a dwarf born in Germany about 1923, and of his life to age 30, when he is in a West German mental hospital. His name is Oscar, and he is of course insane. I suppose all is very symbolic, but it symbolized bad taste and crudity to me. The whole theme just strikes me as not worth reading about. It is an ugh book, and I just think it is ridiculous to call it notable. But obviously, the book has, since it appeared in 1959, in Germany, excited much critical comment. It is boorish and ishish and ughey. ( )

Well this was not what I expected. It’s a very meandering story with very little discernable plot. Things just sort of happen but nothing definitely leads from one event to another. Things are pretty random. I think a good editor would be able to clean it up. There’s too much detail. What little there is of a story gets bogged down in it and can barely stand up.

Then there’s the narrator, Oskar. I couldn’t stand him. He was a whiny, insane little brat. I hoped for him to come to a worse end than he did - accused of a murder and sent to a home for the criminally insane. In one sense, it’s the best place for him. In another, I would have liked to have seen him dead. The narration is weird. He drifts from the third person to the first person constantly. Sometimes from one sentence to the next. I think it is some kind of dual personality or something. On one hand, you know he killed the woman but on the other, there is an innocent part of Oskar that really doesn’t know how he got into this mess.

But I still couldn’t stand the little asshole. With that stupid drum and his incessant screaming that would break glass. I wanted someone to cut his throat out and his hands off and just let him sit there powerless. Instead he wanders aimlessly through the story from one weird situation to another. All the while there are people creating and maintaining homes for him along the way. Only when he goes into first show business with a traveling freak show and then when he takes up tomb stone carving, does he ever support himself.

I thought there would be more commentary about the war and about the Nazis and how the country was changed, but there wasn’t. It was all oblique. Things happened like the burning of a synagogue or the trampling of a Polish post office, but that was about all.

The whole business with his oversexed mother was also bizarre. She had Jan Bronski on one side and Albert Matzerath on the other and her in the middle with her freakish kid. Oskar always knew what she was up to but wasn’t judgmental about it. He didn’t notice or remark on the fact that no one else noticed or remarked on his mother’s weird situation. The bit about the eels in the horse’s head was gross and it should have put his mother off them forever but then she goes overboard and starts eating so much fish and fish oil that she dies. Then the brat Oskar goes back and forth between his father and his presumptive father and can’t decide who to be. At one point he’s living with Matzerath and his housemaid Maria. They have some kind of weird relationship that borders on sexual. When Maria ends up pregnant, the horror Oskar is convinced it is his child even in the face of the evidence of catching Maria and Matzerath on the couch going at it like rabbits. Just how on earth his 3-year-old prick was supposed to impregnate anyone is a mystery. His son Kurt my ass.

Then when he’s taken out of Poland on the train he suddenly grows and develops a weird hump on his back. He becomes a freak art model after that and is probably portrayed as accurately as anyone had during the novel, as an evil, twisted, soulless freak. During this time he has ditched his stupid drum. And his voice had changed so he could no longer break glass with it out of spite and malicious intent.

In the end he takes a room at a boarding house and is obsessed with the nurse who lives down the hall. He sneaks into her room and goes through her things. One night he gets out of bed stark naked and tries to break in again. He finds her just coming home and wraps himself up in some kind of weird fiber mat and scares the hell out of her. She realizes who it is and leaves the house. He somehow tracks her down and kills her.

All in all it’s a very imaginative book but with little substance. I had no sympathy or liking for any of the characters. I can see why people try to call it literature because to make it dark and mysterious and symbolic can cleanse it of it’s many faults. ( )

I haven't read it for 15 years. All I can remember is that the Prussian protagonist (meaningfully) is the son of an arsonist and a potato digger.

I give it 5 stars, but tragically the other two parts of the trilogy (Katz und Maus and Hundejahre) I remember as being pretty boring and very boring respectively! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/802243....

This is the story of a boy growing up in Germany between 1927 and 1954 - in the Free City of Danzig until 1945, then in Düsseldorf - with a couple of fantastical wrinkles: he is able to shatter glass at will by yelling at it, and he deliberately decides not to grow and remains the size of a three-year-old until the war (and even then he grows only to four feet tall).

I found it pretty fascinating. The liminal identities of what is now northwestern Poland are vividly brought to life - various members of our hero's family are forced to identify themselves as Polish or German, though their roots are in fact Kashubian; and the growth of Nazism, and the consequences of it, told in a tone which I found descriptive rather than preachy. I don't know Danzig at all, so I found those bits particularly interesting; I do know Düsseldorf a bit, and felt the author's heart was less in it there (though it's still a good description). Also, because great stories are written about unlikely events, he happens to be in Normandy on D-Day, so we get to hear about that too from an angle I wasn't really familiar with.

Not quite sure what to make of Oskar's physical distinctness. Peter Pan never grew up either, but the consequences seemed much more benign. In any case, Oskar is able to beget children despite his physically immature appearance. Perhaps I am looking for something that isn't there. Apart from that, I also enjoyed the intensity of the story of the relationship entanglements of Oskar and his relations and neighbours. It's a long book but worth the effort. ( )