6 Books by Günter Grass
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Overview: Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany’s most famous living writer.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
The Rat
In this superbly inventive, beautifully crafted novel, Gunter Grass relates, in dreamlike sequences, the end of this world and the beginning of an age of rats.
Grass received her as a gift one Christmas. She was sitting under the tree in her gift-wrapped cage, amid fleece-lined slippers, and hand-colored map, a handsome engraving. That’s how the rat came into Grass’s life and imagination. Dream alternates with reality in this story within a story within a story. Of Grass and his Christmas rat. Of a group of liberated women on a research ship in the Baltic Sea, complaining, lamenting, to the clatter of their knitting needles. Of our old friend the tin drummer, Oscar Matzerath, now sixty, balding, plagued by prostate troubles, and head of a major video corporation whose motto is: "We are creating the future." At his Grandmother Anna Koljaiczek’s 107th birthday party, he shows a video of the re-greening of Germany carried out by characters from the pages of the Brothers Grimm – Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog King – and the Brothers Grimm themselves, now ministers of the environment in the Bonn government.
But the rat intrudes in all these stories with stories of her own, challenging our narrator in his dreams and in his realities, arguing with him, interrupting, threatening. He in turn fights to preserve the human present by elaborating on his memories of the past, as he conjures up visions of a terrifying future in apocalyptic images that make inspired reading.
Here Grass baroque, Grass sensuous, Grass the witty observer and interpreter of both the human and animal condition.
Translated by Ralph Manheim.
Too Far Afield
Two old men roam through Berlin observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Theo Wuttke, a former East German functionary, is a keen observer and a gifted speaker. Ludwig Hoftaller is a mid-level spy whose loyalties shift with each new regime. Together, both men see what the future is bringing as they try to save what they can from the past and understand the meaning of being German.
A complex and challenging exploration of what Germany’s reunification will mean-for Germans, for Europe, and for the world-Too Far Afield is a masterwork from one of Europe’s greatest writers. Written with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition, and political acerbity for which Grass is celebrated, it is a deeply human story laced with pain and humor in equal measure.
Translated by Krishna Winston.
Crabwalk
Winner of the Nobel Prize…. Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany’s past for decades now, but no book since The Tin Drum has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.
Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany’s wartime suffering.
Scuttling backward to move forward, Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.
Translated Krishna Winston.
Meeting at Telgte
In 1647, as the Thirty Years’ War is drawing to its close, a group of poets from all parts of Germany gather at the pilgrimage town of Telgte for the purpose of strengthening the last remaining bond within a divided nation: its language and literature.
Gunter Grass infuses his cast of historic characters with tremendous vitality and authentic detail, displaying his genius for bringing horrendous or comic incident alive. The most flamboyant, ribald, and generous character is a transparent counterpart of Grass Himself: Grimmelshausen, here callled Gelnhausen, subsequently the author of Germany’s great baroque novel Simplicissimus, a postwar narrative as representative of its times and as outrageous as Grass’s The Tin Drum.
Translated by Ralph Manheim.
From the Diary of a Snail
Probably the most autobiographical of his novels, From the Diary of a Snail balances the agonising history of the persecuted Danzig Jews with an account of Grass’s political campaigning with Willie Brandt. Underlying all is the snail, the central symbol that is both model and a parody of social progress, and a mysterious metaphor for political reform.
Translated by Ralph Manheim.
Local Anaesthetic
Starusch, a 40-year-old teacher of German and history, undergoes protracted dental treatment in an office where TV is used to distract the patients. Under local anesthesia, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. A satirical portrait of social confusions.
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