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Title: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass ISBN: 0-679-72575-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 16 January, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.32 (68 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting to say the least
Comment: The Tin Drum is definitely not for everyone, a warning I've already seen repeated several times. It is exhausting, unconventional, and long, but if your willing to put the time into reading it, it is a rewarding experience, 600 pages of humanity in all it's beauty and horror.
Oskar is a strange character, but very intriguing. At times, I felt like I could completely relate to him, only to be completely shocked and disgusted by his actions.There were times when I was physically nauseated by this book: the children's stew, the horse head and eels, the mushroom smell of Maria and his grandmother, the pin and Matzerath. Any book that can have that sort of affect on it's reader is powerful.
You shouldn't read the Tin Drum if you're looking for a captivating plot, though at times the plot is captivating. What is really special about Grass' writing are his characterizations which said more about Eastern Europe before/during/after the Nazi era than any plot could've. Though some call this book too fantastic, I think it beautifully and honestly illustrates that period and those people who have been warped by WWII propaganda, the average people living under Nazi rule: grocers, artists, and families; Grass brings them to life. Oskar on the other hand does not seem average, but then again he's not meant to be. This is fiction afterall. If you want a book to dutifully relate Nazi-ruled Eastern Europe read an encyclopedia. If you want to meet people, read the Tin Drum.
Rating: 2
Summary: Keep off the Grass.
Comment: Overall, The Tin Drum seemed to be a drawn-out laborious journey for me. I've always heard so much about the merits of The Drum, perhaps I was expecting too much from it? The first three or four chapters had me thoroughly absorbed in Oskar's ancestry, and for the rest of the book I kept waiting for someone as interesting and human as his grandmother Anna to show up, but I was to be disappointed. Granted, Oskar's mother Agnes is another consistent and great character, but besides these two... oyvay! Oskar was such an unreal personage that I found him impossible to trust as a narrator... with every beat of his drum he startled the already frightened theme of this book into a corner. I never found that corner. If you enjoy authors who tend to dive in and out of the "fantastic" and the "real" I would recommend you go to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hermann Hesse, or Charles Williams, but for goodness sakes... "keep off the Grass."
Rating: 5
Summary: The Banality of Evil and Its Consequences
Comment: I have been meaning to read this book since it came out in 1959, but only did so now. My reason for delaying was that the reviews I had read of the book made it sound unappealing to me. Why did I want to read the unrealistic ramblings of an insane dwarf?
Having been impressed with Mr. Grass's recent work, Crabwalk, I finally decided to give The Tin Drum a try. I'm glad I did. Let me explain why.
In my studies of the Nazi era, I was always struck by comments that observers from that time made about how banal the evil of it all was. Yet much of the propaganda from that period (such as The Triumph of the Will) that we can see today makes the Nazis seem like mythic figures. What were the observers trying to say? I finally felt like I understood the point through reading The Tin Drum. Reading about distant battles while living in Germany before the bombing became great seems a lot like reading about attacks on coalition troops in Iraq now. Going to party meetings seems a lot like how people here go to lodge meetings now.
In the first 100 pages, I kept wondering why Mr. Grass had chosen to write the novel in the form of an autobiography of an insane dwarf pretending to have a mental age of 3 who had been convicted of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, it hit me. He needed a narrator who could not be considered complicit in what the Nazis did, or we could not trust his voice. In addition, how can you portray banal evils as insane unless you see them through the eyes of an "insane" person who makes all too much sense? Once I accepted the brilliance (perhaps even the inevitability of his choice), I settled back and really began to enjoy the story. Then I began to realize that it is our childish instincts to want to control everything in our lives that leads to our separation from the richness that we can provide one another. So Mr. Grass was also sharing an important psychological point in choosing Oskar as his narrator.
What made the book special for me was Mr. Grass's ability to continually show how our connections to one another are the potential for goodness, while our instincts to take advantage of one another are the evil we must overcome. Oskar Matzareth, the narrator, is a thinker . . . yet ultimately his point is that we must carefully examine what we think about. Otherwise, false ideas will lead to fatal consequences.
I was very impressed by the way that the plot was constructed so that each time society acted in divided ways Oskar himself or someone close to him was harmed.
What will stay with me the longest are the amazing descriptions of fictional people and events: His grandmother's skirts, the horse's head with the eels emerging from it, his "father's" death during the Soviet invasion, Jan Bronski's obsessive search for skat cards during the attack on the Polish post office and Oskar's reaction to the statue of Jesus coming to life will always be with me.
I found myself wishing that I could read German like a native. The satirical humor is usually savage and quick to kill its object. I fully absorbed the lesson before the blood could even begin to emerge from the butt of the satire. As I read the book, I wondered how many times I missed compelling humor because it didn't translate well into English.
At the end of the book, I found myself searching for a novel to compare The Tin Drum to . . . in order to help other readers decide if this book is for them. In the end I could find no one book. Instead, The Tin Drum can best be described as a combination of reverse sort of Gulliver's Travels, Candide and Don Quixote set in the context of German/Polish Danzig through the end of World War II and in West Germany thereafter. So there's a fundamental darkness to the book that is missing from the other three.
I came away wondering how I can stay connected with others now while retaining the ability to see and act on the events around me as a detached, objective observer. Mr. Grass has raised quite a challenge for us all.
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