The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • 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
    Julian Mitchell, Sunday Times

About the author

Günter Grass

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.
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