The Tin Drum (Die Danziger Trilogie #1)

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
Society dislikes outsiders… Outsiders reciprocate…
Oskar is a little drummer boy staying outside of society and his life is an incessant drumming…

I’ve heard rabbits, foxes, and dormice drum. Frogs can drum up a storm. They say woodpeckers drum worms from their casings. And men beat on timpani, cymbals, kettles, and drums. We have eardrums and brake drums, we drum up excuses, drum into our heads, drum out of the corps. Drummer boys do that, to the beat of a drum. Composers pen concerti for strings and percussion. I might mention Tattoos, both minor and major, and Oskar’s attempts up to now…

And the residents of Danzig find themselves caught in the danse macabre of the epochal saturnine satire and they keep dancing to the sinister drumroll of history… And they are incarcerated in the dungeon of controversial opposites: love and hate, loyalty and treason, religion and blasphemy, mirth and sorrow, the dead calm and the tempest of brown plague… And one day the liberators arrive, innocently raping and killing in the process of liberation…

Things grew almost calm and cozy in our cellar. La Greff lay with increasing composure beneath the three men taking turns, and when one of them had had enough, my talented drummer handed Oskar over to a sweaty, slightly slant-eyed fellow I assume was a Kalmuck. Holding me with his left hand, he buttoned his trousers with his right, and took no offense when his predecessor, my drummer, did the reverse.

At last the epochal plague is over but the historical farce continues…
When the history falls ill, the world becomes infected with madness.

Tia

Rating: really liked it
I had an intense reaction to this book. I friggin hated it. Or, rather, I loved to hate it, while I was reading it. It was an assignment in a Postmodern Lit. class, and everyone in the class liked the protagonist but me. I thought he was awful. I couldn't believe they enjoyed him, much less admitted to enjoying him. But some part of me must have understood.

...That was the point. This is a story I felt in my stomach. It was so full of perversion, of the grotesque, and I was 20 and a "good girl" and wanted so badly to not be drawn to it but there I was, ploughing through. Disgusted with so much along the way, but to my great surprise I found myself touched. I cried for a character I thought I was completely repelled by. I couldn't believe it. And at the end, when I reached the last page, when I finished and shut the book...I was grateful. Not to have finished it; I was grateful that I got to read it in the first place.

There are awful images and episodes that stick with me. It is not pleasant to revisit them. But you know what? With every bit of my smiley, idealistic being I say...Thank God. (Or, rather, Thank Grass.) There isn't always easy beauty, or recognizable beauty around us. Oftentimes the beauty is buried in dirt and hard-earned, and doesn't even look like anything lovely at all once you get to it. But you hold it in your hands and it will move you. And if you're lucky, it will change you.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
(Book 462 From 1001 Books) - ‎Die Blechtrommel ‭= The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

The Tin Drum, is a 1959 novel, by Günter Grass. The novel is the first book of Grass's Danziger Trilogies (Danzig Trilogy), and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.

It was adapted into a 1979 film, which won both the Palme d'Or, in the same year, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year.

The story revolves around the life of Oskar Matzerath, as narrated by himself, when confined in a mental hospital, during the years 1952–1954.

Born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), with an adult's capacity for thought and perception, he decides never to grow up when he hears his father declare that he would become a grocer.

Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "clairaudient infants", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself".

He retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, several love affairs, and the world of postwar Europe.

Through all this, a toy tin drum, the first of which he received as a present on his third birthday, followed by many replacement drums each time he wears one out from over-vigorous drumming, remains his treasured possession; he is willing to commit violence to retain it.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی ام ماه آگوست سال 2001میلادی

عنوان: طبل حلبی؛ اثر: گونتر گراس؛ برگردان: عبدارحمن صدریه؛ تهران، نشر نوقلم، چاپ دوم 1379، در 733ص، شابک 9649113029؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان آلمان - سده 20م

عنوان: طبل حلبی؛ اثر: گونتر گراس؛ برگردان: سروش حبیبی؛ تهران، نیلوفر، 1380، در793ص، شابک 9644481666؛ چاپ ششم 1393؛ شابک 9789644481666؛ چاپ دهم 1399؛

طَبلِ حَلَبی، رمانی به قلم «گونتر گراس»؛ و شاهکار ایشان است، کتاب نخستین بار، در سال 1959میلادی، در جهان منتشر شد؛ «طبل حلبی» اثری گیج کننده است، خوانشگر را در چنگال واژه های دهشتزای خود میگیرد؛ و آنگاه در زندگی رهایش میکند؛ این رمان در کنار دو رمان دیگر ایشان، با عنوانهای «موش و گربه»؛ و «سال‌های سگی»؛ سه‌ گانه‌ ای را شکل می‌دهند؛ شخصیت اصلی رمان، پسری به نام «اسکار ماتزراث» است، که تصمیم می‌گیرد، از سن سه سالگی، بزرگ‌تر نشود؛ بنابراین در همان قد و قواره ی کودکی، می‌ماند؛ اما از نظر فکری رشد می‌کند؛ افراد دور و بر این پسر، او را کودک می‌انگارند؛ در حالیکه او، همه چیز را می‌بیند، و درک می‌کند، و هر جا که بتواند، از توانایی‌های ویژه ی خویش، برای تفریح، یا تغییر شرایط، سود می‌برد؛ در این رمان رخدادهایی نیز از دوران «هیتلر» آمده، که کودک داستان شاهد آنها بوده، و نقشی نیز در آنها ایفا کرده است؛ شرایط جسمی کودک، که به صورتی ناقص‌ الخلقه است، باعث آزار دیگران شده، و او، از احساسات دیگران، سوء استفاده می‌کند؛ روایت به نوعی نشانگر شرایط زمانی جامعه ی آن دوران «آلمان» است؛ «اسکار» برای ارتباط برقرار کردن با اطرافیان، از «طبلی حلبی» سود می‌جوید که آن را در روز تولد سه‌ سالگی هدیه گرفته، با آغاز جنگ جهانی دوم، توانایی ذهنی قهرمان داستان افزایش می‌یابد؛ اما با شکست «آلمان» در جنگ جهانی، رشد ذهنی‌اش کند شده و برای نخستین بار رشد جسم او آغاز می‌شود

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 09/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 06/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
When you hear an inner Oskar Matzerath hitting his tin drum in protest against the utter absurdity of life, you know it is time to make a choice for or against sanity.

Oskar himself chose the "easy" way out, deliberately refusing to grow up and accept "moral" guidelines, and in the end, he chose the asylum as the best place to write his unreliable, yet truthful account on the brutal times he called his own.

What do you do if you missed that point at age three to stop growing, but you have been gifted the curse of hearing the noise of the world? Sanity is a scary mindset, and hard to carry for long stretches. You tend to lose parts of it when the world heats up, and you never can be entirely sure you still have it, even when you check it every so often.

"One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public." That is Oscar Wilde's conclusion, and Oskar Matzerath may well have come to the same conclusion about his own environment, in reverse: if this Germany is sane, I better be on the other team!

The Tin Drum to me is one of the most oppressively true novels ever written, on equal terms with Midnight's Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude for its exploration of human irrationality and excess. In some respects it is more difficult to digest because it hits closer to home. But at the same time, it enhanced the powerful effect of the Asian and South American versions of human failure to live properly as I know from The Tin Drum that the deeper truth of chaos is a more sane description of reality than the insane project of writing "objective" accounts.

Oskar is drumming at full force, and some of his naughty brothers who refused to grow up a long time ago don't have the required wisdom and sanity to get themselves locked away before causing more harm than the planet can take.

Do you hear the noise?

Kenny

Rating: really liked it
When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?
The Tin Drum ~~ Günter Grass



GRRRRRR The Tin Drum ~~ this damn exasperating book. It’s one of the best written, most difficult, utterly amazing, truly frustrating books I’ve ever read. I don’t even know where to begin with this review.

For starters, The Tin Drum is brilliant. Wait, no, it’s maddening …



A nearly 600 page novel may badly wear you out, but the marks it leaves in your mind, as well as your soul, are profound enough to take all the pains of reading it. The Tin Drum is a very difficult novel to read; but it is also a fascinating one ~~ one of the most fascinating novels I've ever read. Producing great literature in a time of massive turbulence is a challenging task. Most of the time the writings during a war or massive political change appeal to the current age; eventually they decay with the passage of time ~~ Parade's End comes to mind ~~ but not so with The Tin Drum.

The Tin Drum is a strange, big novel, an epic satire and farce; it is also a provincial, magical realist, picaresque tale. This is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who tells his life story from a German mental hospital in 1954. Having deliberately stunted his growth at the age of 3 and capable of shattering glass with his voice, Oskar is a force of chaos, torn between the teachings of the mad faith healer Rasputin and the poet-prince Goethe, and between Satan and Jesus, both of whom Oskar impersonates.

He’s certainly a bit mad, even monstrous, which is why his unique vision of a monstrous era ~~ 1930s & 1940s Germany ~~ is an essential one.



Armed with the titular drum, Oskar, an incorrigible aesthete understood by no one but loved, at various times, by many, uses his instrument to drum up memories of his perfectly remembered life, beginning with his birth in 1924. It is through this compulsive devotion to rhythm that Oskar is able to produce his personal image of German history. And through his telling, we learn about the first days of WWII, when Oskar’s presumptive father reluctantly joined in the defense of the Danzig post office and became equal parts martyr and coward.

There are tales of Kashubian potato farmers ~~ Kashubians being one of the many quasi-stateless European cultures trampled in the WWII maelstrom ~~ and Nazis who blithely value animal rights more than human ones. There is a postwar, German jazz club where patrons cut onions so as to force themselves to cry and reckon with the past. We travel, with Oskar, to Paris, Normandy, Dusseldorf, on refugee trains besieged by partisans, and to a mental hospital that proves to be a kind of sanctuary.

Oskar is a fine chronicler of his era because he simply does not belong; his very rejection of it is embodied in his refusal to grow and in his decision to lead a gang of youths who fight against parents and all grownups, regardless of what they may be for or against.



The Tin Drum is filled with German folk tales ~~ one of the triumphs of Mitchell’s translation ~~ one of the best translations I’ve ever read ~~ is his attention to local culture and history.

Half a century after its debut, The Tin Drum remains a unique, irreverent exploration of a deranged and crumbling society ~~ Oskar compares Germans’ loyalty to Hitler to believing in Santa Claus ~~ a Santa Claus armed with poison gas. Shocking in its time, the book established the author as one of Germany’s preeminent moral authorities, warning, in the voice of Oskar, against the ignorance that was just then coming into fashion.

Through its verbal complexity, its use of fabulist images, and its daring choice to invest an absurd, amoral character with equal parts monstrosity and artistry ~~ Oskar’s expert ability to singshatter glass is juxtaposed against Kristallnacht ~~ Grass’s novel earns its stature.



Ultimately, The Tin Drum is a whirlpool of persons, events and emotions. Often, it's difficult to figure out where reality ends and Oskar’s fantasy/insanity begins. Memories, plans, dreams, thoughts ~~ all intertwine into one entity. There are more than a few complicated relationships here, a little bit about the war, a little bit about a theater, a little bit about love. But in all of these bits the main character is Oscar, he is always at the center of everything, even when he’s not.

So, who is Oskar? Or better yet, what is Oskar? He is a reflection of the society, of the time, of the people who surrounded him. Oscar is a terrible reflection of war and those vices that people hide so carefully in themselves. Oskar is a man who has absorbed all the evil of the world around him.



The Tin Drum is a challenging read ~~ one the most challenging reads I've ever taken up ~~ but it is well worth reading. In order to make the most of The Tin Drum you must willing to let Günter Grass lead and just accept that world as a world of the horrors of living in and through World War II in Germany.

Dan

Rating: really liked it
My reaction to finishing this book was 'thank god that's over'. I thought it was interesting in the abstract, but at times I couldn't stand reading it. The unreliable main character Oskar, decides to stop growing at the age of three . He refuses to speak, and communicates by banging on his titular drum. I gather this is supposed to reflect German societies refusal to accept the realities of the rise of Nazism and their complicity in it. But I don't really care. My problem with the book wasn't the confusing structure, the occasional nasty scene (don't read this book if you're planning on eating eels anytime soon) but that I just couldn't stand the writing. I'm guessing that much of the humor was lost in translation, but what irritated me the most were the lame lyrical sections. Sentences like "long after I had lain down I was still standing on coconut fibres, and that is why I was unable to sleep; for nothing is more stimulating, more sleep-dispelling, more thought provoking than standing barefoot on a coconut fiber map" are pretty much bullshit (and it doesn't help that I heard Werner Herzog in my head when I read them). And there are a lot of them in this book. There's not enough realism to make the magic interesting. The crazy characters are intersting and funny at first, but there's no connection between them, and after a while their strangeness gets boring and repetitive. I really wanted to like this book, and I know a lot of people love it, but I'm never reading this one again. Maybe I'll try the movie.

Beata

Rating: really liked it
One of those books you read and remember them after years of reading masses of other books. A masterpiece...

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
One crazy ride. Oskar is unlike any other character you will ever read about besides maybe Tyrion Lannister. The book is a comic masterpiece, a fanciful rendering of Germany during the war and after. It is part vaudeville, part absurd, part insane, and like nearly all great literature, impossible to classify. The movie was also unbelievably great. If you want to read one book by this Nobel laureate, I would suggest starting here - you will have a hard time putting in down. I think that it would be a good companion read to Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon. This was the first of his Danzig trilogy along with the similarly excellent Cat and Mouse and the harrowing Dog Years.

Jr Bacdayan

Rating: really liked it
Heil, Oskar Koljaiczek Matzerath-Bronski! The drummer! The magical three-year-old! The hunchback! The Jesus! The Satan! The Goethe! The Rasputin! The arsonist reincarnate! The student! The destroyer of glass! The tempter! The Skat ace! The bane of propaganda assemblies! The war veteran! The Catholic! The disciple maker! The choir boy! The fizz blower! The father! The prodigal son! The entertainer! The tombstone engraver! The art model! The devotee of nurses! The jazz musician! The star! The lover! The dog-walker extraordinaire! The friend! The accused! The insane! The man!

He comes to us as a baby, yet he stays in our hearts a legend. This little boy-man that breaks every rule of humanity yet is the epitome of humanity itself. How does he do it? A tin drum in his arms, he echoes a steady beat that moves one to lose track of the pretenses we mask ourselves with. He reduces this farce we call sanity to rubble. Bladder control shattered, heart rate rising, laughter spouting, everyone surrenders. We all are born again drenched in sweats and stink.

Who is he again, you ask?

He is you and me.

You see, all of us, like Herr Oskar, start fresh thinking ourselves timelessly young, forever denying adulthood, jesters forever being three-year-olds. We not-so-young keep adulthood at bay, a bunch of Peter Pans frolicking around the world, being silly happy, irresponsible, doing what we want, persons stuck in an age where we are merely infants, barely kids. No regard for what others think, no imparity in our straightforward vision, we arm ourselves with nothing but a tin-drum, the distilled pureness of life, a weapon against the mockery and scorn of adulthood, this sickness called youth. But then life forces us to grow up. It might be like Oskar, the death of his last remaining parent. It might be something else, something really painful. But we all bury our tin-drums and we change. We become hunchbacks, disfigured, compared to our youthful selves. Our vision, our passions they dry up and we go through life doing odd jobs, supporting our family, raising children, eating, drinking, watching movies instead of traveling, not that there’s anything wrong with this kind of life. It’s just what happens. We compromise, make the most out of the situation. That’s life for you. Given enough time, often too much time, we rediscover our youthful passions and we learn to drum again, to enjoy, to travel. But by that time the black cook called death is looming just around the corner. Singing: Ha! Ha! Ha!

But considering this, even if Oskar’s life turned out this way, look up at what all he accomplished.
It ain’t too bad, huh?

This story of a magical little man is the embodiment of the human experience. His disparate experiences which will make you laugh, feel pain, confusion, anger and a whole motley crew of other emotions is the ultimate story of man in a backdrop of extremes yet is the story of a person who chose to live life in his own terms. He illustrates that survival is not a circumstantial matter but rather a mindset you choose to adapt.

The human life with its virulent jumps through time is ever unfathomable, ever mystifying. We will never know what will happen to us nor understand why these things happen. The journey we take is wreathed with puzzling events and painful moments, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its beams of joy. The odd assortment of sentiments life makes us experience is ultimately what being human is. You smile and laugh when you feel happy and cry when you are pierced by pain. It’s choosing which moments to memorialize in our minds, which thoughts to make magical that will make the difference. Let’s hope that these moments find us. Let’s pray that we, like Oskar, find our own tin drums that will give a steady beat of purpose to our hearts. Drum away all the unnecessary baggage and crosses. Let go of your circumscribed thoughts and enjoy the thrilling, pounding moments life has to offer. Let’s laugh. Let’s dance. Let’s make magic. And magic is all about believing.

*drumrolls please*

Gunter Grass’ 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him: "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history". Good ole Oskar was living in a period of war, but Grass tells us that the fable of life no matter how dark can always be fun. It’s just a matter of rolling with it.

Life’s a hoot ain’t it?

Sidharth Vardhan

Rating: really liked it
Onions and Potatos

In the very first chapter, I was reminded of Midnight Children because of Oscar's conversational tone of narrative - same as that of Saleem Shinai. Once MC was in my mind couldn't help locating similarities - both narrators start their stories with the first meeting of their maternal grandparents, both like talking about sex, both of them feel need to hide from the world (Oskar in grandmother's skirts, Shinai in laundry box) etc. Still there are enough differences, MC is more magical realism, Tin Drum is more about unreliable narrator

Unreliable Narrator

Why would you consider a narrator unreliable ? He is out of mind or delusional, he is a habitual liar, he is full of inferiority or superiority complexes, he had lied to you before, he is full of guilt. Oscar fulfills all these conditions. The book begins with lines:

"GRANTED: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight."

He has lied to his family half his life. He himself corrects lies he has told you half a book before - putting an asterisk on everything he says. He tells you he deliberately stopped growing - and faked an accident to provide the world reason for that. The fact that a lot of information comes from his drum is not too much satisfying either. He is using both first-person pronouns and his name to talk about himself - at times in the same sentence.

Hence you must take everything he says with a pinch, correction a bowl full of salt. It is funny to see how whenever you find a reason to doubt a declaration he wants to maintain, he would run to explanations - as if he was telling you his story face-to-face and had seen you rise your eye-brow in doubt.

His schizophrenia, self-obsession, and complexes though won't stop him from being witty - every page of the book has some really witty play of words on it. At times, it gets a bit trying but Oscar is too busy showing off to care about your time.


War and War guilt

I look for the land of the Poles that is lost to the Germans, for the moment at least. Nowadays the Germans have started searching for Poland with credits, Leicas, and compasses, with radar, divining rods, delegations, and moth-eaten provincial students' associations in costume. Some carry Chopin in their hearts, others thoughts of revenge. Condemning the first four partitions of Poland, they are busily planning a fifth; in the meantime flying to Warsaw via Air France in order to deposit, with appropriate remorse, a wreath on the spot that was once the ghetto. One of these days they will go searching for Poland with rockets. I meanwhile, conjure up Poland on my drum. And this is what I drum : Poland's lost, but not forever, all are lost, but not forever, Poland's not lost forever.

War as such doesn't show up much in the book except a few chapters it contains no soldiers and guns. I don't think concentration camps were mentioned even once.

There are some allegorical elements - Oscar's mother (the source of harmony in his world) dies at onset of war, Oscar polish uncle (whom he calls his biological father) dies when Poland falls to Russians and his German father dies with fall of Germany trying to swallow Nazi party pin. Wartime madness mostly shows up in sexual madness.

Oscar's is attracted alternatively to Rasputin and Goethe in R-G-R-G sequence which seems to show Germany's WWI-peace-WWII-peace sequence.

During the war, Oscar gain popularity as an artist who could break glasses through his voice (showing how much Germans loved being shouted at) while after war it is his drumming (the creative art) that gets prominence.

An entire credulous nation believed, there's faith for you, in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the gas man.

However this book uses war references in a different context just as some fiction books refers to classics. Oskar is a dwarf with a glass-breaking voice - and in one scene is seen shouting at enchanted people (can you imagine some dwarf with a loud, destructive and seductive voice?).

His favorite toy is Tin Drum - a common sight in war times, for armies marched on sound of drums. His mother was a nurse and he too has a fetish for nurses, red cross nurses; another common sight in WWII. He may as well have served as war Mascot. Like Oscar's drumming, It could have been a more enchanting book for people who have lived through the war - unlike me who has to google out everything.

Oscar doesn't much like Hitler, but he has a love-hate relationship with Jesus (Hitler's title 'Fuhrer' literally means guardian; so does the word 'Christ') - depending upon his mood he doesn't believe in Jesus, believes in Jesus, is a messenger of Jesus, is Jesus himself, is father of Jesus etc. In another scene, our dwarf hero is seen leading his street gangs to invade church (Hitler brought down synagogues).

The later half of the book is full of symbols of war guilt. Besides German father's death in trying to swallow Nazi pin, we have Oscar's fall in an open grave (mirroring German fall at end of war) and working as gravestone architect (too many dead in war) but no symbol is as prominent as hunchback he develops when he chose to grow-up (just a little) at the end of war. He models for painters often portrayed entirely in black with an increasingly larger hunchback while painters completely ignored his blue eyes ( comment on the complete negative portrayal of Germany after the war?). Onion cellar club showed how having lived through war, people were so full of remorse, they were out of tears and needed to peel onions to be able to weep.


An aggressive indifference

The clash between art and war is a constant theme:

They are coming," he whispered. "They will take over the meadows where we pitch our tents. They will organize torchlight parades. They will build rostrums and fill them, and down from the rostrums, they will preach our destruction. Take care, young man. Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it."

Beethoven's big painting in Oscar's house has to give up its supreme position when Oscar's parents had to put in Hitler's painting. Beethoven was an artist and was deaf, deaf to the Hitler shouting in front of him. That somewhat sums Oscar's attitude towards war. He is indifferent to what happens around him, somewhat like Albert Campus and his Stranger - but in Oscar, this indifference is too aggressive, almost insane. He refused to grow up because he thought grownups were evil and he is constantly running away from the world, looking for solitude - in grandma's skirts, under the table his three parents are playing cards on or inside some almirah. When there is firing going outside, Oskar spends his time playing cards inside. He risks his claimed biological father's life for a new drum - repeatedly. He betrays both his fathers and his street-gang-followers to save himself. When his whole family is facing a life threat, he is too busy watching the trail of ants on ground.

This indifference attracts an equal indifference from us. It is really difficult to sympathize with this guy. At times he seems to be trying to make it difficult for us to relate to him - this book can be a thousand things, but it is definitively not a melodrama.

On the size of the book

You may think that with over 550 pages or this long review, it is a long book - do not be deluded by that; through its witty pose, it becomes a much, much, much longer book, almost Dickens long. Like Dickens, Grass seemed to have perfected each chapter separately with too much detail and wit, rather than trying to keep a natural flow which makes you go to next chapter as soon as you finish one.

Antonomasia

Rating: really liked it
This, excitingly, felt like an ur-text not only of magic realism, but of a lot of later 20th-century litfic. Its postmodern self-awareness of its references, the grotesquerie and sleaze, and vagabond escapades in mundane settings, were all characteristic of the 1980s and 90s novels that were my first acquaintance with serious contemporary fiction. (And by no means only Midnight's Children, which is basically The Tin Drum plus X-Men in a different culture.) The Tin Drum's influence may have been renewed with the 1979 film (probably why there are references in early 80s music, like Japan's Tin Drum album and arguably the name Bronski Beat). Several of these key traits in fiction had already become visible in earlier 1950s writings like Lolita (1955) and early Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954) and Philip Larkin, and would soon be carried forward by Pynchon. Yes, this did sometimes pop up earlier in the twentieth century (notably Joyce, though I feel there was often something more refined and less scuzzy and claustrophobic there, regardless of subject matter, like the interwar Paris scene was, and of course its own compatriot Berlin Alexanderplatz which isn't as ludic and effervescent). The mood of The Tin Drum ultimately harks back to, at least from the English-language perspective, the 18th century picaresque romp and the early modern (Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes) and late medieval (Chaucer). But, when linked with the works and trends it prefigured or inspired, The Tin Drum feels like a landmark in a general, notable break from the witty pinched primness of the interwar decades, the memory of WWI trauma and then the nervousness of the 1930s hanging over it, either hinting at or avoiding sex. (Thinking here about e.g. Woolf, and because I've read them this year, Chandler and early Hemingway as well as golden age detectives, Wodehouse etc.) There's something rather late-1960s about The Tin Drum - most especially in the scenes in The Onion Cellar jazz club in post-war Dusseldorf, which read to me like "what if people had tried to deal with WWII trauma through a 1960s happening?" - it seems to be trying to regain the liberal, experimental mood popularly associated with Weimar Berlin, which was so rudely interrupted, and bring it back into the flow of culture in whatever modified way is possible. It shows strands of continuity between that and the jazz hipsters of the 1950s and in turn the hippies.

The novel is of course deliberately un-beautiful and un-refined. The infamous scene of the eels and the horsehead, one can imagine was concocted for its especial disgustingness; readers are even treated to a detailed recap near the end. The whole project represents and celebrates what the Nazis called 'degenerate art', and the voice of a person whom they wanted to exterminate once he was no longer useful to them as entertainment. A character who, as part of further artistic reaction from the author, fails to be pure and nice in order to most neatly and piously refute them. The only character whose good looks are frequently remarked on - the beautiful blue eyed blond Jan Bronski, the embodiment of 'a lover not a fighter' - is supposed to be comically cowardly in contrast to the Nazi Aryan ideal of such a man as a brave and selfless soldier. (Though I confess I failed to notice this until analysing the book after reading, as he simply seemed like a type very recognisable to me, a man who is attractive but a bit gormless - and given that it takes actual fighting to make him recoil, not half as gormless as some 21st century men.)

That deliberate failure of Oskar to be nice is complicated: he is creepy, lascivious and at least a minor criminal - all negative stereotypes long associated with dwarves. Criticism of this is not merely a part of the 21st-century social justice movement: when Charles Dickens was writing David Copperfield in serial form (1849-50), an acquaintance of his confronted him about the character of Miss Mowcher, a dwarf like she was; Dickens began a process of modifying the character to make her more positive and less of a caricature. Oskar on one level reinforces these stereotypes, which have been seen in many films made since WWII - but the novel is also implicitly about asserting his right to choose to be alive and to be heard at length as a person, regardless of his being unpleasant and an offender, and fitting negative stereotypes. For this reason too, the reliability of his narrative is genuinely ambiguous, in unusual contrast to, say, Lolita, and many other literary unreliable narrators of the following decades.

I'd felt like I ought to read The Tin Drum since my teens, Günter Grass being one of the authors listed in The Divine Comedy track 'The Booklovers', whom I've been trying to make my way through, twenty-odd years after I would like to have finished them. At some point I also figured I should read it because it's about an important part of Polish history, albeit the very opposite end of the country from where my family came from and therefore almost a different country. (It literally was one when my grandparents were born). But the book always sounded either boring, horrible or both. One particular GR friend review a few years ago intensified my assumption that it would be horrible. But by the start of this year, I'd read at least one book by enough of the listed authors that The Tin Drum was one of only two post-war (and therefore likely easier-to-read) titles left on my list and so it was time to have a go at it when I could.

Many of the adventures Oskar relates, first of his grandparents and parents, and then his own, are more fun and expansive than I ever expected this book to be, and it isn't until a third of the way into the novel that Nazism definitively intrudes, when Kristellnacht is reported. But a background grimness always hangs over the story because the narrator mentions from the very first that he is, at the time of telling his tale, locked up in an institution - and as he is a dwarf in mid-century Germany, who also has moderate (as distinct from mild) autism-like traits and behaviours, that does not seem to bode well at all. (A GR friend who has autistic sons also saw these traits in the character.) Knowledge of Oskar's unfreedom casts shadow on the most picaresque episodes, or any times he or his allies appear to be on the up; even the grotesque episodes would read more lightly otherwise. Also strange and unpleasant was reading about the war from a German perspective without overt apologies and unambiguous resistance in the text: reading the words of news reports about German successes and failures from the official German early-1940s perspective, mentioned much as if they were weather. If I'd ever read anything else like that it was very rarely.

The Tin Drum is unlike the vast majority of WWII books where one relaxes on characters' behalf once the war is over. The constant foreshadowing subverts that usual trajectory or wartime fiction, which I'm guessing had already become a cliché by the time Grass was writing this novel. Whilst Oskar turns out to be imprisoned for quite different reasons (and, it emerges, in some ways he likes institutional life and his "keeper") the author has created a continual tension that shows how in some ways the war wasn't over and people were still living amid its wreckage and legacy, even if the literal battles had finished in Europe. Even if the West German state's ideology, and approach to someone like Oskar, is different, there can't help be some hint of his potential fate under Nazism lingering in one's imagined idea of the ending during a first reading. Official discomfort with Oskar's inappropriateness, at one stage near the end, seems to echo that with Meursault's lack of emotion. Also symbolic of the persistent legacy of the Nazi era, of people remaining partly shackled by its ideas, is that Oskar keeps returning to the idea of marrying one female character although he knows that during the war she would have acquiesced to him being killed off in a state programme with other 'defectives'.

Having recently embarked on reading the original John Constantine Hellblazer comics, in the weeks just before I read the second half of The Tin Drum they proved an interesting comparison in this respect. Background and synopses for later volumes indicate that Constantine will at points end up in prison and a psychiatric hospital, but he always gets out again. He's got trials ahead of him, that must include literally - which lends a certain heaviness - but he ultimately ends up a free man.

Drawing parallels between Oskar and comics characters seems appropriate. Maybe I give too much weight to Kavalier and Clay but as with American comics by Jewish refugees, The Tin Drum is also about degenerate art and/or the degenerate artist having superpowers (Oskar singshattering glass, in Breon Mitchell's English coinage, and his later ability to affect others' emotional states through drumming). Though Oskar, as a character of ambiguous morality and very visible flaws, has far more in common with the dark, troubled and/or satirical superheroes of the 1980s and onwards than with the Golden Age. A major difference between comics and litfic is that - as can be seen in many GR reviews of The Tin Drum - in a literary novel, if a narrator is in a mental institution, it's implied the reader should automatically conclude this is an unreliable narrator (a reflex which seems to conflict with the popularity of social-justice driven interpretations of other features of literature); whereas in comics and their recent screen adaptations, quite a lot of heroes and other trustworthy characters seem to have been in one at some point, or at least been regarded as mad by others around them (for example Thor and Erik Selvig in the Marvel Thor films). The Tin Drum, on the cusp between fantasy and literary realism, maintains its balancing act in this respect too: as a fantasy or comics protagonist, Oskar could be believed; if he is read strictly as a literary-realist protagonist, the 'magic realism' could be part of his madness. Whilst that distinction and set of trends wasn't as apparent in 1959 as it is now (though the protagonists of ghost stories often wondered if they were mad, or were suspected of being so) it still reads as if it's intentionally unresolved which Oskar is, and that is another strength of the novel that makes it a classic - it can be read as relevant to a trend which was not so fully developed as it is now.

The writing in The Tin Drum is not as overtly experimental, and more easily readable than I expected from the novel's reputation. It didn't require the level of adjustment and attention that, say, Thomas Mann would (at time of writing I've been looking again at the beginnings of his big books). However, it also has flights of the spectacular: especially in elaborate metaphors, and in the long lists and recaps in the second half of Oskar's life, the events of the novel, and the history of Danzig. Translator Breon Mitchell's afterword draws attention to the way Grass uses sentence length to create tension and momentum. (And notes that this was not replicated in the first English translation by Ralph Mannheim.)

Most of the protracted metaphors are really euphemisms, and reflect the way that many people who lived through WWII couldn't talk, or couldn't talk directly, about the events of those years. Some of them are truly impressive and subtle, such as the one in the final chapter of Part One, 'Faith, Hope, Love' about Santa Claus, almonds and the gasman. But others, especially the roundabout sexual euphemisms, which often simply seem to reflect older generations' discomfort talking directly about sex, became IMO increasingly tedious. (Though I think many GR friends who enjoy Rabelaisian novels full of wordplay would love these regardless.)

These two reasons for euphemism intersect when the story reaches the Russian occupation of Germany and the mass rapes by soldiers. At the time The Tin Drum was published, there remained a national refusal to talk about this - and that was still the case in the late 1950s, as was seen in the reception of the memoir A Woman in Berlin. So it was bold to allude to it at all. The innuendos used about it in The Tin Drum read with a playfulness that's highly inappropriate to the contemporary reader, though do probably reflect male minimisation of harm as well as the collective hushing-up, and therefore suit the era from a certain angle.

And The Tin Drum does reflect its times effectively whilst also seeming very modern in its approach (some of the latter may be because of the new English translation). It is about its times whilst also being more than that, not least because of having a few years' distance from its biggest events, and because events are a backdrop, a catalyst, not the only story even whilst they are integral to the characters' fates. Over the past couple of years, I've had a few conversations online about Brexit novels, and, more recently others with a friend about the inevitable glut of covid litfic that will be showing up over the next two or three years. In general I think it is still too close to these events for really good and interesting works to come out of them, taking account of multiple perspectives - and a lot of what there is currently or will be soon, is thinly disguised polemic and/or early processing in fictional form. (Though one or two things of enduring interest will surely come out of it via sheer weight of numbers.) Whilst reading in Part Three of The Tin Drum about the 1948 West German currency reform and its effects in multiple characters' lives, I thought *this* is how it should be done. The reform is undoubtedly pervasive and difficult in its immediate effects, yet the story is still driven by the characters and not by their opinions on the subject. I've not found out how long Grass took to write The Tin Drum, but the best part of ten years' distance, whether in composition or revisions, went into making that section the way it was. The story's arc is also thirty years or more, and when dealing with relatively recent but deep-rooted events and reactions, I think a canvas that large tends to produce the most interesting result.

There is lots I'd like to say about The Tin Drum which I haven't got space for - especially reading the novel in the context of Grass' revelations about fighting in the war, and as a work of hidden guilt. But many other aspects are covered elsewhere, so I have concentrated on a few topics that weren't in the GR reviews I've read. (A few lines more of this paragraph in comment 3 below.)

Bettie

Rating: really liked it


Re-visit 2015: Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87

Description: Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II. So he refuses the society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighborhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time. However, (almost) nobody listens to him, so the catastrophe goes on...



Did you spot Charles Aznavour in there!?
Powerful film of a powerful novel.

Sherbet fizz







Re-Read details: As Hitler rises to power, three-year-old Oskar decides he doesn't want to grow up. Stars Phil Daniels and Kenneth Cranham. Broadcast on:


blurb - Classic novel of the rise and fall of Hitler as seen through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator, Oskar Matzerath.

Not caring for the world he is growing up in, a small boy determines to remain a child. The epic sweep of Grass' novel satirises German nationalism and the rise and fall of the Nazi movement.

___

Brilliant portrayal of a youngster in denial of real-life. This theme has been loosely followed up in Cabaret and Pan's Labyrinth.

Erwin

Rating: really liked it
"Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution."

This opening line prepared me only a little to what was to come: a challenging, weird, unbelievable and extraordinary story.
Oskar's drums and his drumming may still "haunt" me for some time after finishing his story. I am lost for more words here but one: recommended!

Chrissie

Rating: really liked it
The story here is thoroughly absorbing. The writing is of its own style—creative, unique, one-of-a-kind. Simply marvelous.

The book is perfect as I lie in the hospital with a fractured kneecap. I hope to return home with the leg in a brace at the end of the week. Life was never said to be easy.

During twelve days the book has kept me thoroughly occupied. Now at home, I have finished the book and am writing my review.

The story is an autobiographical memoir written by a dwarf. Writing from an insane asylum in 1954, he is thirty. He recounts the events of his life and in so doing draws a picture of Nazi Germany before, during and after the Second World War. Born in Danzig (today Gdansk, Poland), we view through his peregrinations not only Danzig but also Dusseldorf and France, particularly Normandy. What is delivered is a satire, a bizarre, picturesque and vivid tale seeped in magical realism.

The idiom, “to beat a drum”, is to bring attention to a cause, and that is what the book does /did. It won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1999. Oskar, it is he who is the dwarf, the midget, who through his drumming protests against the era as well as the middle-class mentality of his family. Gunter Grass, a German, delivers a sharp critique of Germany and the mindset that prevailed. When the book first came out in 1959, it was banned. It was dubbed as blasphemous.

Oskar, rebels by two means—his drumming and shrill singing. Windows splinter. Glass shatters. This is merely one example of how magical realism is woven into the tale.

I listened to the version translated into English by Ralph Manheim. In my view the prose is the tale’s strongest point. The choice of words enhances the value of the tale told. Don’t hesitate to read this translation.

The audiobook is narrated by Robert Gladwell. He speaks clearly, although I did reduce the speed. The prose is meant to be savored and thought about. I have given the narration four stars. The pronunciation of some names are a bit off. This is not of much importance. Perhaps I should have given the narration five stars--it was easy to follow all the way through. This is helpful in those parts that are confusing when your mind is whirling, grasping to understand the author’s implied message.

I love this book for its creativity, its vividness and how it delivers its message. The writing is a real treat.




************************


*The Tin Drum 5 stars
*Cat and Mouse TBR
*Dog Years TBR

Yu

Rating: really liked it
Painful because what is presented as entertainment is actually crime. Disturbing because what is responded by laughter should be responded by tears. This is a world unaware of its crime, and in the aftermath of the atrocity unable to mourn.
There are a lot of brilliant use of symbolisms. The one that stuck with me the most is the peep hole Bruno used to observe Oskar which resembles the peep hole equipped in gas chamber to observe the struggle of the dying.
To end with a quote: "Our kind has no place in the audience. We must perform, we must run the show. If we don’t, it’s the others that run us. And they don’t do it with kid gloves...Take care young man. Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it."