The Tin Drum

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 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 show more 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

A lyrical and captivating, humorous, beautiful and grotesque German classic with a new English translation (2010 see below) that makes the original shine.

Oskar, our unreliable narrator, recounts his life from his bed in the mental hospital. And oh what a life. A life where he decided to stop growing at 3 and only ever to drum. A life where he could singshatter glass. A life of love, death, blasphemy and sex. Where he was a stone cutter, a jazz musician, a nude model, the head of a deviant gang.

It is a book that encompasses life, a book that gently takes you by the hand and wraps its beautiful language, its musical beat around you and never lets go. It could be seen to be shocking but it is never dull. Political and allegorical it show more maybe, a social commentary on Germany during and after the war (WWII) but it's also a superb story and I enjoyed it as such. Theme's hover gently, connections draw together the text, long sentences flow and crash into short ones. The characters dance in Oskar's story too, fully alive. There is never a dull moment, even for the tiny degenerations into insanity.

I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peep hole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.

One of the better books I have read and if your are in the mood for long immersement in deep waters may I highly recommend this but please go for the new English translation.

Comment on the new translation
The translators afterword is fascinating on the trade of a translator but also sheds to light the difference they can make, on the aims of a translator: "Do we owe our allegiance to the reader or to the author?" I.e. do they make it more accessible in language or culture to target audience. I know my preference but it's an interesting point.

Here he has worked very closely with the author to bring the text in line with the original. Long sentences, originally were broken up for easy digestion and these were restored, as was the rhythm and certain themes (i.e. left handiness). I really can't imagine this book being as good with an earlier translation so I urge you to seek it out. show less

A thematically rich and syntactically complex dark comedy, the novel uses these traits to simultaneously heighten and obscure the mundane, the fantastical and the grotesque in the everyday life of its German, Polish and Kashubian characters before, during and after the second world war. It is unreliably, albeit imaginatively, wordplayfully and lyrically, narrated by the willfully stunted protagonist, rendering it as a rewarding novel-long exercise for the reader to read between his florid lines to get through to the patheticness or horrificness of what he is witnessing or perpetrating. The writing itself is a masterpiece in deception.

Part family saga and part historical fiction a la Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and Salman Rushdie's show more Midnight's Children respectively, this is not a straightforward or even connected plot. It meanders, elaborates on minor details for the sake of rhythmic sentence structure, pauses, glosses over violence and successes with an almost disinterested hand, backtracks, excuses itself, fastforwards, provokes, skips, self-references, but by no means is it boring. It is particularly enjoyable if you like playing with words and educational if you have not read about the war from a German perspective before.

Some questions and remarks:
- sometimes for births, Oskar rattles off the position of planets etc, are the planets positions accurate to the time described?,
- on page 233, the railway line from Karthaus to Langfuhr had not yet been cleared of what?,
- there should be an accompanying guide to the book of Bruno's knots and how to make them yourself,
- Oskar is the worst yet still likeable, how did Grass do it?,
- it is disconcerting to realise that the interestingly and innovatively constructed paragraph you just read actually described a rape, murder, execution, violence, suicide, etc and doubly disconcerting when this doubles your appreciation of the author/translator's skills as well as the horrendousness of the act,
- are those nuns dead or not?
- the women are mostly depicted as independent and capable, Anna, Agnes, Maria, Roswitha, they'll marry if they think they need to but maintain sexual autonomy which is refreshing. On that note, what a great cast of characters,
- this is a book which will definitely benefit from a re-read or a read of a different translation. I have no way of knowing, unless I learn German, but Breon Mitchell's translation appears to have captured as well as English can the essence of Grass' prose. show less

Funny I missed rating and reviewing this jewel. This is the lodestar, the mandrake root, the intrepid ooze making friends in the lukewarm pools of primeval poetry. This was the point of departure. A hallowed book I finished in a laundromat. I almost can't remember my reading life before wee Oskar. Eels, fizz, post offices, onions and Dusters have littered my imagination seemingly forever. I wanted to read the new translation and likely will someday. My memories of my own grandmother now smell like butter.

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 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) show more 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

It's hard to know where to begin. I just finished The Tin Drum, and I'm blown away by Grass's skill. His playful prose, use of allegory and metaphor, and ever-present humor (often through the grotesque) is both impressive and entertaining. I relished the inventive twists and turns of the plot itself. However, despite some grounding in twentieth-century European history, I am left with the distinct impression that I missed a great deal. This book is like an iceberg--you can enjoy what's above the surface well enough, but if you look deeper there's plenty more to be discovered. I hope some day to return to the The Tin Drum, knowing its narrative arc, and lose myself in the artful prose and linguistic complexities of the novel.

As an aside, show more another reviewer wrote of how involved we are in Oskar's story, yet always mistrust him. This precisely sums up my feelings about our odd narrator.

I'd give The Tin Drum 4.5, but I don't give half stars! show less

I've avoided this book for almost sixty years. In some sense it's a little too close to home. I'm short, just under five feet and lived in Germany in 1954 for almost a year. I decided to read it when I learned that it's on John Irving's top ten list. I read Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany which is an homage to The Tim Drum. Owen Meany shared initials with The Tin Drum's central character, Oskar Matzerath. Owen is also small, speaks loudly, has visions, identifies with a Savior, works as a stone mason, all traits he shares with Oskar. Irving's book is easier to read.

The Tin Drum is more demanding. It is more like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. In Gravity's Rainbow psychedelic drug induced hallucinations are interspersed with show more events in the narrative arc to the point where we often have to stop and decide are we reading something the character is going through or something that he's just imagining. Often this occurred with no way to resolve the issue. I had to give up trying to determine what exactly was happening. Going with the flow was my only way to get through. In The Tin Drum we don't have to deal with drug induced hallucinations. Oskar is capable of hallucinating without drugs. The tension here is to determine what he's imagining and what he's actually going through. Often Oskar's thoughts are to take us back through a whole series of previous events. Some we recall as happening in Oskar's past so we recognize those. Why Oskar brings them up at this point is often unclear. Going with the flow is a little easier here than in Gravity's Rainbow.

The historical setting is central to this story. Most events take place in Danzig or, as the Poles call it, Gdansk. The German takeover of the city in the 1930's is the backdrop for everything that happens. The Poles believe the city should be there's. The Germans believe it's their territory. Things escalate. Even Oskar's family is divided. Uniforms for all sorts start appearing. Rarely do we see a story describe how this impacted ordinary people. Even they get dragged into the events leading to World War II. We see a Jewish man's futile attempt to assimilate by converting. He's a toy store owner who both supplies Oskar with new drums as he wears out the old ones and also tries to pull Oskar's mother away from her weekly trysts with her Polish lover. Oskar believe that lover, Jan Bronski, his "uncle" is actually is father. Oskar's mother's husband, his "father", even seems to appreciate the lover's ability to calm down his wife. The openness of the lovers is striking. Oskar is not the only one who is acting strangely.

AS WW II begins the Germans attack the most visible Polish symbol, the Post Office, killing Jan. Oskar's mother dies and a young woman, Maria is brought in to work in his father's grocery. She's actually the same age as the diminutive Oskar and both initiates Oskar sexually and eventually marries his widowed father. Oskar joins a troupe of dwarf's performing for German soldiers. After showing off his unique ability to shatter glass in Paris they move on to Normandy where they watch as Nuns frolicking on the beach are brutally slaughtered just because no one was allowed there, they violated the rules.

Oskar returns home as the city is bombed and the Russians overrun it, raping and murdering anyone resisting them. Oskar's strange adventures bring calls to have him institutionalized. These are resisted until there is no one to save Oskar from this fate. Which brings the book full circle for it was in the mental institution where we first meet Oskar and he begins this strange tale.

After reading the book I found the movie, a Blue-Ray version, in German with English subtitles. It's much easier to follow than then book. While the rise of the Nazis is the background for the entire book, the movie brings that aspect front and center. While swastikas are mentioned several times in the book, armbands are more often what we read about. In the movie swastikas, armbands and uniforms are everywhere. The movie also includes newsreels showing both the rise of the Nazis and also bombing and the resultant destruction of the once beautiful city. I recommend seeing the movie after reading the book. They are both brilliant. show less