The Günter Grass Reader
HARCOURT, 320 PAGES, $28
THE SPRAWLING BODY of fiction, essays, poetry and smoke-curled rebukes by the most influential German writer alive today has been sorted, sampled and bound into a tidy compendium. Spanning the 45 years of Günter Grass' literary career, this volume may be confused for a collection of writings. It is not. It is something more evocative, anachronistic and precious. It is The Günter Grass Reader.
Simplicity on the spine, the stamp of "reader" forces a collection to hurdle a high bar even as it flies under a lower radar. For devotees, a Reader should distill but not dilute greatness; should offer everything but not all, should successfully cross thumb-worn manual with the genii's lamp and still fit in the outer pocket of a Barbour jacket.
But a Reader also promises to be gentle: Maybe this is your first time. Here's a taste. This is seminal, you know. We don't want to overwhelm you, but here are some poems and a few exercises you won't even remember when it's over.
A reader is hampered by its contextual cousin: the primer. It should be representative as well as talismanic. The Günter Grass Reader puts the Nobelist's best foot forward, opening with dirigibles and rug-beaters as the vessels of a national frustration. Grass' prowess as a fabulist is showcased early in excerpts from The Tin Drum and the other novels of the Danzig Trilogy. Oskar Matzerath makes his window-shattering debut from the arsenal tower; Tulla Pokriefke is introduced exhorting her pubescent cousins to onanistic greatness; Harras the German Shepherd flickers onscreen in newsreels across the Reich.
Taken down from the Grass iconostasis and placed across the table from the author himself, his dissident peers and his cunning fame, these characters are more real, if less realized, in their excerption. Released from the whipping-post of a volk's guilt and free of the mantle of German national promise, Oskar, Tulla, Harry and Mahlke float in a happy (and immensely readable) symbolic void.
Becoming the recognized voice of a generation takes more than conjuring up a gratuitous screamer, and Grass has been an outspoken circuit rider and controversial political commentator from his earliest literary celebrity. He has an inestimable talent for finding an anniversary in every occasion, a starter's pistol in every banquet and a finisher's line in every toast. In recent years, he has taken to standing at a podium when he writes. He is well-served by the multiple translators who have contributed to The Günter Grass Reader-nearly half of the 50 selections are making their first appearance in English.
Loosely chronological, the pieces in The Günter Grass Reader are well chosen to match the alarms of Grass' essays with the awakening they have helped provoke. Sandwiched between a pair of short tales featuring violent love are reflections on hunger and on Israel's right to exist. The essays are written in the 70s, and the stories of pyromania and broken bones are even earlier, yet none of them feels dated. A short tutorial on loose tobacco, "Roll Your Own," and an even shorter poem, "My Old Olivetti," present Grass at his most charming, a writer who measures his progress in cigarette stubs and typos.
On accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Grass remarked that the task of his generation of writers was to "take the goosestep out of German." At the same time he was beginning to deride his peers and successors for ignoring the sufferings of Germans during World War II as a literary subject. Joining the ranks of W.G. Sebald in a debate on cultural amnesia that ruffled feathers along the leftist European front, Grass came under fire. Critics lambasted him as reactionary, revisionist, histrionic and then, "impotent"!
This brings us to another important role of a reader-glossing over the battle scars of its subjects. A good reader allows an aging leopard to change his spots without discernment. A faithful reader stands melancholy alongside zeal without provoking dismay. The useful reader voices the devil's advocate without the loudmouth response of the chorus of angels.
In the end, there is nothing so significant about the title of this collection. The canon of Western civilization is a colonnade of readers. This single volume, one-eighteenth of the box set available in German bearing the title The Collected Works of Günter Grass, could have easily been titled "Selected Works" or even "The Best of?."
But I have to persist. Because the whimsical nature of even the most poignant of his stories puts Grass in a particularly deserving subcamp of reader-ship. Grass, with his cat and his mouse, his dog, rat, snail and flounder, can stand beside Beatrix Potter, Kipling and Aesop in the library of quintessential bestiaries. Perhaps, if the editor had chosen to include the sketches that frequently framed the writer's original drafts, he would.
ELIZABETH KIEM