Books : Fiction : By Period : 20th Century : Authors, A-Z : G : Grass, Gunter

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The Tin Drum (Vintage Classics)

Gunter Grass
Peeling the Onion

Gunter Grass
Crabwalk

Gunter Grass

With Crabwalk, a book that has enjoyed tremendous success in Germany, Günter Grass proves yet again that he is one of the most formidable figures in modern European literature, and anyone who believes that the glory days of The Tin Drum are behind him will find this remarkable novel quite as ambitious and penetrating as its great predecessor (even if, at 234 pages, it's considerably more concise than his earlier masterpiece). Political engagement has always been the force that motivates Grass's books, and the legacy of the past as it affects the present remains the fulcrum of all his work. Needless to say, like all great writers, his work is universal; you do not need to be German to appreciate such books as The Flounder and this new novel.
Here Grass tackles a subject that still causes unease among his countrymen: the problems of the German nation during World War Two. The central incident of the book is the sinking in 1945 (by a Soviet submarine) of the Willem Gustloff, a ship that had been converted into a refugee carrier. The loss of life in this sinking was immense, and this incident in the Baltic Sea remains the worst of all maritime disasters. The narrative is carried by Paul, a survivor of the sinking, who is now a journalist living in Berlin; his mother, Tulla, gave birth to him in a lifeboat on the doomed ship. As Paul attempts to place the disaster in the context of life in Germany today, his mother finds herself unable to shake off the crushing resonance of the incident. The generational theme is carried further by Paul's young son Konrad, who has been seduced by far-right elements in Germany which are attempting to rewrite history.
This is Grass at his considerable best: a powerful, significant theme is handled trenchantly, while the multi-generational problems of his characters are balanced against a lucid picture of the society in which they live. And despite the seriousness of his subject, Grass remains immensely readable. His books may be shorter these days, but their impact is no less forceful for that. --Barry Forshaw
Cat and Mouse

Gunter Grass
My Century

Gunter Grass

Perhaps it's fitting that the 1999 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Günter Grass, should be the one to see the old millennium out in style. His My Century is comprised of 100 short chapters, one for each year of the 20th century, each told by a different narrator. And of course, since Grass is German, the century he refers to is German, as well--a fact that could prove a little daunting to readers not familiar with the intricacies of that country's history. "1900", for example, throws us smack in the middle of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion from a German soldier's point of view. "1903" jumps us into the head of a young student who, clad in a new straw boater, admires the first Zeppelin, buys a copy of Thomas Mann's latest book, Buddenbrooks and attends the launching of the world's largest ship, Imperator, among other historical events. "1904" is concerned with a miners' strike and "1906" is all about German/Moroccan foreign relations.
Yet as year succumbs to year and one narrative voice piles on top of the next, My Century becomes more than the sum of its parts. And Grass always manages to surprise. The chapters "1914" through "1918," for example, rather than being narrated by the usual suspects--young soldiers in the trenches, worried mothers at home, embittered war widows or shell-shocked veterans--are relayed by a 60s-era young woman who brings two great German chroniclers of the war together. As the now-elderly Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Ernst Jünger (On the Marble Cliffs) meet and spar over the course of several meals, their reminiscences of the Great War present two radically different views. Jünger, for example, says: "I can state without compunction: As the years went by, the flame of the prolonged battle produced an increasingly pure and valiant warrior caste." Remarque's response is to laugh in Jünger's face:
Come on, Jünger! You sound like a country squire. Cannon fodder quaking in oversized boots--that's what they were. Animals. All right, maybe they were beyond fear, but death never left their minds. So what could they do? Play cards, curse, fantasise about spread-eagled women, and wage war--murder on command, that is. Which took some expertise. They discussed the advantages of the shovel over the bayonet: the shovel not only let you thrust below the chin; it gave you a good solid blow, on the diagonal, say, between neck and shoulder, which then cut right down to the chest, while the bayonet tended to get caught between the ribs and you had to go all the way up to the stomach to pull it loose.
It may be Remarque and Jünger talking but the prose is pure Grass. The years leading up to and including World War II are narrated by a variety of voices: A communist in a forced-labour camp in 1936; a schoolboy playing "Spanish Civil War" with his classmates in 1937. The events of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, become inextricably linked with the November 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall, as a German schoolteacher gets in trouble with the Parent-Teacher Association for his "obsession with the past." Indeed, it is the way Grass mixes past and present, the voices of the famous and the ordinary, that lends such power to My Century; and by the time he brings the reader up to the last weird and wonderful chapter, his century has become ours as well. --Alix Wilber
Cat and Mouse

Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum

Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum

Gunter Grass
Headbirths: Or the Germans Are Dying Out

Gunter Grass
Unkenrufe

Gunter Grass
Im Krebsgang

Gunter Grass
Peeling the Onion

Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum (Everyman's Library Classics)

Gunter Grass
Beim Hauten Der Zwiebel

Gunter Grass
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy (Harvest Book)

Gunter Grass
Katz Und Maus

Gunter Grass
Dog Years

Gunter Grass
Die Blechtrommel

Gunter Grass
Selected Poems: 1956-93 (Faber Poetry)

Gunter Grass
Peeling the Onion

Gunter Grass