Günter Grass (1927–2015)

The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath who is born with fully developed mental capabilities. On his third birthday receives a tin drum and decides that he will stop growing (literally and figuratively). We first meet Oskar as a patient in a mental institution as he drums to remember all the details of his life story. Oskar has two talents: drumming and “singshattering.” Armed with these two skills, Oskar embarks on a number of adventures. We follow him through childhood, as a show more member of a band of traveling performers, and in various endeavors as an “artist.” The Tin Drum is a classic bildungsroman (or perhaps more accurately the anti-bildungsroman since development and maturity of the main character remains questionable) that places the development of it’s main character in the context of pre- post war War II. In doing so, Grass is able to describe the violence and brutality of the World War two era in Danzig.

It was not an enjoyable read (and enjoyment was not the author’s intention), but is one that I appreciated. Grass’s unique writing style, wit, and symbolism throughout make it worth the read. The social commentary underlying the book makes it intentionally uncomfortable for the reader. Oskar is dislikeable (in my opinion) because his denial and detachment prevent him from truly understanding and acknowledging his role in the lives and deaths of people. He is a symbol of the collective guilt and denial of personal responsibility that Grass attributes to ordinary citizens during WWII and Nazi Germany. show less

The Tin Drum is undoubtedly a very important book. It earned its place on the pedestal among the greatest works of literature of the 20th century and it does belong on that pedestal. Its influence runs deep and wide, reaches far beyond Danzig, Germany, Europe, beyond the war and the peace that followed it.
An acclaimed book Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie and his host of quirky characters are mere shadows cast by Oskar - the mighty dwarf, mere echoes of the sound of his tin drum. I show more would not imply that Rushdie copied Grass's greatest work, let's say he transposed it, cast it in a different time and place.
It's all fine for a book to be important and all that but I personally struggled with it quite a bit. The Tin Drum comes sliced up into three parts and I fittingly allocated my reading time spaced over three years roughly along the lines of this partition. Each time I started or restarted reading it was a delight! The irony, the humor, the minute details and the impressive breadth, the turns of the plot and the caprices of fate, the magical and the real fused together- how could one not enjoy this book! Then, after some time the dark side of the book would take over, behind that façade of fun and laughter the horror lurks, "where peace ... can never dwell, hope never comes ..., but torture without end". The absence of hope is probably the toughest part to take: every human endeavor, every ambition, worthy or not, every thought and feeling gets dissected by Grass's scalpel, turned inside out, revealed for what it is, magnified in its ugliness. The satire becomes unbearable eventually, you no longer laugh, you get suspicious of every form of humor and look at people with worry when they tell you a joke.
It was a relief to finish The Tin Drum and switch to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - equally dark and disturbing but fully devoid of humor, a book that is honestly and straightforwardly miserable but one that does not serve the human misery in the rich sauce of laughter.

Update: I should say that a couple of years later I hardly remember Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, while Grass's mighty dwarf is still fresh in my memory. show less

Alexander and Alexandra are strangers who get into conversation after they bump into each other at a flower stall in the Dominican market hall in Gdánsk on All Souls' Day 1989. One thing leads to another, a cemetery visit is followed by a mushroom (Steinpilz/porcini) supper, and the two of them also cook up, first, an interesting business idea, and second, what turns into a serious relationship. They are both widowed and around sixty, and they were both exiled in their teens by the show more border-changes of 1945, he as a German from Danzig/Gdánsk and she as a Pole from Wilno/Vilnius. Their sharing of family memories leads them to the grand scheme: a service to allow exiles like their parents and themselves to profit from the end of the Cold War and seek burial in the places where they came from.

The German-Polish-Lithuanian Funeral Company soon becomes a reality: they are clearly tapping into a serious demand, and the money starts rolling in. And of course it soon starts going wrong, the idealistic notions of reconciliation in death are overtaken by the demands of free-market capitalism, and Alexander and Alexandra find themselves repelled by the monster they have created.

Grass, of course, enjoys nothing more than being the lonely pessimistic toad raining on the West German parade of reunification and the end of the iron curtain. He had great fun in those days, when he was being attacked in editorials and political speeches practically non-stop. And it probably gave him a certain satisfaction to have been largely right about all the things that the free market was going to smash up in the former socialist states. He didn't quite manage to predict the rise of populist nationalism in places like Poland and Hungary, but he did put his finger on a lot of the external causes of that trend. And this is also a lively story, with a lot of detail about Gdánsk and the way its German and Polish sides come together, and some entertaining characters like the octogenarian Erna Brakup with her felt hat and antediluvian Danzig-German dialect, or the British-Bengali Mr Chatterjee, who is developing a pedal-rickshaw empire across Polish cities and takes over part of the Lenin Shipyard to build his own rickshaws. show less

The Grimms' tale of "The fisherman and his wife" counts as a notorious piece of misogyny: in the published version of the tale (there are others, of course), the wife Ilsebill keeps demanding more and more from the magic flounder until her greed has destroyed their happiness altogether. So, naturally, Grass uses it as an ironic central motif for this novel, his definitive analysis of the History of Women. Which is also — incidentally — a history of cooking, and of human settlement in the show more Danzig/Gdansk city and region, from matriarchal clans of neolithic times to the 1970 strike in the Lenin Shipyard.

Grass clearly means well, and his conclusion isn't very favourable to the way men have run the world, but even as far back as 1977, it's still quite an arrogant task for a male writer to set himself. With hindsight, there are probably roles that his proletarian strong women of history could have filled other than as cooks, nurturers and bed-warmers, and he doesn't really do himself any favours by his gently ironic treatment of the modern women in the feminist tribunal that is trying the flounder for his crimes against womanhood. Especially since the narrator, constantly reincarnated in new male characters, seems to have slept with all of the women in the book...

As always, a tour-de-force piece of writing, clever, witty and knowledgeable, but maybe not the Grass novel you should be rushing to re-read 45 years on. Unless you are fascinated by Baltic cuisine, in which case you can just read it for the recipes (not suitable for vegetarians!). show less