WL Webb
If there is a reading posterity, there is no doubt about the place in it of Gnter Grass’s best work. With Gabriel Garca Mrquez and some of his contemporaries in Eastern Europe, Grass has surely been one of the great shapers of literary consciousness in the latter half of the 20th century.
>From the moment The Tin Drum rapped out its new and disturbing tunes, his prodigious inventiveness and creative energy, his vivid (and very German) sense of the picaresque and parody, and his engagement with history and politics tempered by a very modern scepticism helped to restore to the novel some of the ambition and largeness of the great 19th-century practitioners.
Salman Rushdie enthusiastically acknowledges his debt: “This is what Grass’s great novel said to me in its drumbeats. Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets … Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world.”
That seems as good an account as you could find of the stirring effect of that elegy for his Vistula heartland, which was also a shocking challenge to the Germans of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) years to remember the Nazi past.
The novella Cat and Mouse and the long novel Dog Years continued those Danzig explorations before Grass turned his gaze directly to contemporary Germany in Local Anaesthetic, which begins in a dentist’s chair, and From the Diary of a Snail, his version of docu-fiction. The Flounder, his very particular engagement with feminism and much else, and Meeting at Telgte are two of the best of the rest of his considerable output.
With its games with mythology, anthropology and Grimms’ fairytale parodies, Grass seems to recover in The Flounder the energies that drove the writing ofEThe Tin Drum.
But perhaps he is too demanding, too ambitious for today’s readers, who do not want art to give them a hard time.
Wide Field, the big recent novel in which he expressed his unpopular reservations about German unification, got short shrift from the critics. We shall have to wait for a little more of that uneasy future to unroll before we can be sure whether they are right, or the poet Michael Hamburger, who wrote: “In the wider perspective of his life’s work … this benign, slow-moving narrative is a consummation, not a freak. As a warning, it is much more potent than the expected grotesqueries or polemic could ever have been.”
WL Webb was The Guardian’s literary editor from 1959 to 1989