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Extracts

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Of All That Ends

The final work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Günter Grass – a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, and the world.

As subtle and as delicate as the many feathers depicted through its pages, Of All That Ends is a glorious gift, a final salute true to the singular creativity of the most human, and humane, of artists.

There is a lovely diversity to these pieces… His intelligence and intellectual engagement remain fiercely undimmed.

This beautiful, ironic and often funny final collage of asides and meditations sums up the fabulist’s genius.

Autumnal, elegiac and tinged with a twilight charm

Of All That Ends radiates a burst of his primitive energy and his subtle shrewdness, using words and pencil lines as a remedy, an antidote to the factual world that we objectify and iconise… Laced with black humour.

Grass’ writing…is uncluttered and haunting… Tiny snapshots of morality more insightful than most novels could dream of, forming a work of real emotional substance. A fitting requiem for a true great.

A melancholic anthology of musings, poems, and sketches, delicate in both form and content as they trace the edges of ageing, death and the world we live in.

Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

The final work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Günter Grass – a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, and the world. 
 
Suddenly, in spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness. 
 
Only an ageing artist who had once more cheated death could get to work with such wisdom, defiance and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose and drawings, Grass creates his final, major work of art. 
 
A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.

The Tin Drum

On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. While beating his tin drum he recounts his extraordinary life in this classic and essential German novel.

This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again

Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience

Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age

The novel is as monstrous as its hero, pullalating with a kind of anti-life... Gunter Grass may have written the nearest thing to a literary masterpiece his generation is capable of producing

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game

The publication of The Tin Drum in 1959 launched Günter Grass as an author of international repute. Bitter and impassioned, it delivers a scathing dissection of the years from 1925 to 1955 through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf whose manic beating on the toy of his retarded childhood fantastically counterpoints the accumulating horrors of Germany and Poland under the Nazis.

Local Anaesthetic

Juggling mockingly with lost and found illusions, with the tensions between reformists and revolutionaries, middle age and youth, Grass has created a satirical portrait of social confusions that adds to his customary exuberance a new mastery of subtle control.

Starusch, a bachelor aged forty teaching 'German and history (two inseparable subjects), undergoes protracted treatment by a dentist who uses TV to distract his patients. Gagged in his chair, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. Reality and fantasy, the actual and the repressed, overrun the screen in a mirror image of German history. Thus among other episodes we see Krings, one of Hitler's most ferocious 'fight-to-the-finish' generals, return from Russian captivity and engage in sandbox reconstructions of Germany's battles, determined to win them this time. In a casual throwaway, the author reveals his true identity -- Field Marshal Schoerner. 
 
Under the influence of local anesthesia, Starusch's imagination releases h erotic fantasies and the very violence he tries to combat in his pupils, one of them a militant Maoist. The dentist, dispensing humdrum wisdom and painkillers with godlike aloofness, objects to violence, real or imagined, advocating universal Sickcare and a diet preventive of caries as a cure-all. Meanwhile, Scherbaum, Starusch's favorite pupil, grimly prepares to burn his dachshund Max to stir u the conscience of dog- and cat-loving Berliners. 
 
Juggling mockingly with lost and found illusions, with the tensions between reformists and revolutionaries, middle age and youth, Grass has created a satirical portrait of social confusions that adds to his customary exuberance a new mastery of subtle control.

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

In his first full-length play, Günter Grass takes Bertolt Brecht, the foremost modern German dramatist, as his key figure. On 17 June, 1953, the workers in East Germany rise in rebellion against oppressive measures, but their revolt lacks a voice and a leader. In the East German theatre of which he is the director, the famed Communist poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht (named 'the boss' in the play), is shown rehearsing his adaption of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. The revolution spills over into the stage happenings as a workers' delegation requests that 'the Boss' lend the authority of his voice and fame to their demands for justice and freedom. The intellectual is shown in a tragic dilemma: reasoning keeps him from active commitment until it is too late. He becomes guilty of betraying the workers and his own self.

Diary 1990

From Germany to Germany

A fascinating account of one of the defining moments of modern European history by Europe's greatest living writer.

From Germany to Germany contains delightful insights into the process of crafting a novel…the most compelling and enduring evaluation of the complexities of reunification is likely to have come from the pen of Günter Grass the novelist

Though Grass spent much of the year engaged in political argument – with others and with himself – there is much else in the book. It is first the record of a man possessed of extraordinary energy, both physical and mental…One cannot but admire his zest for life

From Germany to Germany is as earthy and real as The Tin Drum

This diary does capture a great moment in time

In 1990, Günter Grass - a reluctant diarist - felt compelled to make a record of the interesting times through which he was living. 
 
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of Communism, Germany and Europe were enduring a period of immense upheaval. Grass resolved to immerse himself in these political debates: he travelled widely throughout both Germanys, the former East and the former West, conducting a lively exchange with political enemies, friends and his own children about all the questions posed by reunification. 
 
His account gives the reader an unparalleled insight into a key moment in the life of modern Europe, seen through the eyes of one of its most acclaimed writers. It also provides a startling insight into the creative process as the reader witnesses ideas for novels occurring and then taking shape. 
 
From Germany to Germany is both a personal journal by a great creative artist and a penetrating commentary on recent European history by someone who was simultaneously an acute observer and a highly engaged participant.

Tales from the Darkroom

The Box

The sequel to Grass's controversial and successful book Peeling the Onion.

With his magical story of Marie's all-seeing camera, he transforms the facts of his headlong but loving life into something far more potent than reportage

A short, often charming book...richly comic

Short and beautifully written sequel to Peeling the Onion

In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory - they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. 
 
To say nothing of Marie, Grass's assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Peeling the Onion

The memoir of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer.

An exquisitely constructed narrative... Peeling the Onion is a genuine masterpiece

As a writer, his influence still looms large, and Peeling the Onion is a reminder why. It has that same imaginative accuracy that made The Tin Drum a bestseller

An ingenious but treacherous text that glides constantly between past and present, first and third person, memory and imagination

This subtle and expertly written book is really a memoir about forgetting

Grass's profound and moving memoir [has] an unforgettable power, and it is not just the significance of his experiences, but the virtuosity of his writing which elevates Peeling the Onion over any memoir published in recent years

As a demonstration of a literary will, the novelist's last testament, it is in many ways a masterpiece

A compelling memoir. The emotions unleashed are raw... It is with extreme eloquence that he can finally excavate the silences at the heart of his life

He peels his particular onion with the candour and irony that have shaped his fabulist fiction for close on 50 years and this beautifully gruff, no-nonsense account of his early life is direct and conversational, though not without jolts of profoundly human remorse

A wonderful book, full of life, full of love, vibrant and uncompromising and as picaresque and varied as all his finest works... As a portrait of a young boy and young man alive in Germany through its most devastating decades, it will stand as a factual masterpiece... an astonishing tour de force

Much of this memoir is painfully honest, and the confessions in it are clearly written from the heart

Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest account of Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians, and the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris. 
 
It is a remarkable autobiography and, without question, one of Günter Grass' finest works. 
 
By the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum.

Dog Years

The final part of the magisterial Danzig Trilogy by Nobel Prize-winning Günter Grass.

Grass is one of the few great writers in Europe today

Günter Grass releases, against the grain of history, a troop of obsessional characters, armed often with magical or at least disconcerting powers, who gnaw through the madness of the Third Reich and the chaos of the collapse, into the complacent fabric of modern West Germany

Forty years of twentieth-century German history observed through a massive fable about men and dogs. Mad, Gothic, repetitive and bitterly funny

In an explosive fusion of myth and reality, magic and romance, Dog Years charts forty years of German history, starting with 1917, to expose the madness of a society that bred and nurtured the horrors of the Third Reich before anaesthetising itself with the chaos of disintegration.

The Flounder

Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass takes as his theme the relationships between food, women and war as he re-imagines the fairy tale of The Fisherman and His Wife.

A masterpiece by one of the most gifted and original of contemporary writers. It is a book that will repay study and rereading. Only a churlish, insular reader could fail to respond to its bold and exhilarating historical sweep, its poetic celebration of food and the arts of cooking

Grass spices his potent brew with a juicy concoction of tales and anecdotes, and a rich, Rabelaisian humour

I know of no one else capable of writing anything like it

Günter Grass, says The Times, 'is on his own as an artist', and indeed this extraordinary, provoking and joyously Rabelaisian celebration of life, food and sex is unique. 
 
Lifted from their ancient fairytale, the fisherman and his wife are still living today. During the months of Ilsebill's pregnancy, the fisherman tells her of his adventures through time with the Flounder, constituting a complete reworking of social, political and gastronomic history.

Cat and Mouse

A powerful story set in war-torn Danzig about a teenager’s rise from clown to hero by Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass.

Grass is probably the nearest thing we have to a certain genius in living novelists

To compensate for his unusually large Adam's apple - source of both discomfort and distress - fourteen year old Joachim Mahlke turns himself into athlete and ace diver. Soon he is known to his peers and his nation as 'The Great Mahlke'. But to his enemies, he remains a target. He is different and doomed in a country scarred by the war. 
 
Cat and Mouse was first published in 1961, two years after Gunter Grass' controversial and applauded masterpiece, The Tin Drum. Once again Grass turns his attention on Danzig. With a subtle blend of humour and power, Cat and Mouse ostensibly relates the rise of Mahlke from clown to hero. But Mahlke's outlandish antics hide the darkness at the heart of a nation torn by Nazi violence, the war and its aftermath.

From the Diary of a Snail

'Actual factual elements are fused with imagined, created things, curt yet marvellously explosive observations: the result is a difficult, dynamic book, like no other... certainly an event in the reader's life and possibly in literature's history' - Sunday Times

A pungent stew of a book using every ingredient to hand: nourishing but full of strange, grisly lumps and bitter flavours

Grass is one of the master fabulists or our age and perhaps its supreme dramatist of metaphor

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. 
 
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of The Tin Drum.

The Call of the Toad

'This book is a genuine tour de force' - New York Times Book Review

At once a satire of post-1989 politics and a love story, it shows two sides of the author: firebrand and mellowed, humane observer... The Call of The Toad shows Grass as one of our greatest living storytellers

Mr Grass has a more lyrical, a more glorious sense of locality than any other novelist today

With The Call of the Toad, Grass brings the fable landscape of the Europe of his lifetime up to date

'Gdansk 1989. A polish woman, a guilding specialist, meets a German man, a professor in art history. A walk together in a graveyard gives rise to an ambition to establish a Cemetery of Reconciliation as a mark of the times and their spirit of unity... The satire is sharp, the analysis precise, and Grass is still expert in drawing out the painful comedy of human behaviour and the pitfalls that await good intentions' - The New Yorker 
 
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum comes a satire of european politics and a love story.

THE TIN DRUM presents Hitler's rise and fall through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator whose magic powers become symbolic of the dark forces dominating the German nation in the period. Like Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Grass's novel explores the dark roots of power and creativity. An early advocate of 'magic realism'. Gunter Grass is the most powerful and celebrated novelist to appear in post-war Germany. His home city of Danzig is a powerful presence in this novel.

Günter Grass

Breon Mitchell

Bitter and impassioned, The Tin Drum delivers a scathing dissection of Germany and Poland under the Nazis. 
 
On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany. 
 
'Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age' The Times 
 
TRANSLATED BY BREON MITCHELL 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Günter Grass

Books by Günter Grass

Series by Günter Grass

Against War

Articles featuring Günter Grass

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

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