The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass

Having been sort of into German language authors for a couple of years, I figured I really had oughtta get into the Günter Grass sooner or later. This summer I was contemplating this fall, all the great autumnal authors I would read. Sinclair Lewis, Tim O'Brien, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and maybe track down some Günter Grass.

In August I think it was, I went to Half Price Books to find a new copy of The Rake, and as long as I was in the store I figured I might as well see what they had for Günter Grass. They had The Tin Drum but I think the cheapest copy was six dollars or so. I didn't figure that was worth it for a book I could borrow for free at the Maplewood library across the street. So I didn't get it.

A few days later my wife and I were in the Macalaster-Groveland neighborhood of Saint Paul which was having a Garage Sale Day. A hundred or so garage sales in only a couple of square miles of the city. We only went to a half-dozen or so of them, and at the first one we stopped at, on somebody's porch, books were fifty cents. Books at garage sales are usually quite uninteresting. Mostly trendy thrillers, romances, self-help, popular stuff. Not my cup of tea. But at this sale there was some good eclectic, intelligent stuff. I found The Tin Drum and Moliere's "Le Misanthrope," untranslated French.

So I read The Tin Drum and it was amazing. It's kind of like something by Thomas Pynchon, except not nearly as overwhelmingly obscure and difficult. To read Pynchon and understand it, you have to know almost everything about almost everything. Like Pynchon is deliberately trying to baffle you. The Tin Drum is similar to Pynchon in that there is an incredible amount of data, very densely packed, but Grass only puts forth a few themes, which is manageable, whereas Pynchon throws out such an incredible number of themes at you that you will be lucky if you catch one or two. Grass demands that you know something about Poland and Germany, specifically Danzig/Gdansk, and some twentieth-century history and geography, but that's about it, and some of it you can pick up on as you go along. Pynchon, like I said before, demands too much of you.

I don't mean to say that Grass is Pynchon for dumb people though. Grass won a Nobel Prize. It's just that Pynchon was too demanding for me, and Grass was just about right. And very entertaining. I think the only other books this long that kept my interest and attention through the whole thing were Infinite Jest and Giants In The Earth. Oskar Matzerath was a very memorable character. His exploits will stay with me for a long time.

Reading this I kept being reminded of A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving, and not without reason. John Irving evidently studied under Günter Grass in Vienna for a while. Many similar symbolic literary tools. Churches, gravestones, diminutive heroes, angelic mothers. It's kind of obvious actually, which does not reflect well on the writing of John Irving. I liked A Prayer For Owen Meany a lot when I read it, but I'm not so sure I would like it quite as much anymore, knowing that The Tin Drum came first.

I have read online that Grass' other novels aren't nearly so good as this one is, not even the other two novels in the Danzig trilogy. That's a shame. I think I'll seek him out again anyway.

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