Product Description
A critical examination of Grass's work offers overwhelming evidence that Cat and Mouse and Dog Years are part of a unified structure begun by The Tin Drum and that they continue to explore the same key figures, themes, and symbols. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

What a bore
I made it through 90% of the first story and couldn't take the pain any longer!

The Tin Drum
I can't say that it's the kind of book Iread without putting down.It took me four years to read it in German, it was a project from which I learned more German, to like Gunther Grass and to look at midgets or short people in a different way. For me they now stand for Oskar, the main character of the book a boy who shatters windows and glasses of his teacher, makes the Nazis dance to the wrong tune, loves nursesand much more. It's a wonderful book.I recently read a list of the 50 favorite books of Germans.This one was number 48 for them.It's close to number one for me. It's a wonderful book -whether it takes you a week or 4 years.

Well worth reading
I have read the book in the original language (German)and I couldn't put it down until I was done.
I dont know if it is just as good translated, but I love his choice of words and the pictures he is painting with them.
I mainly read the book, because I am interested in the history of that time,place and the people.
If that is what you are looking for, this book is a must.

A great set, great value
If you can't check these out at a library (or can't just have these greatworks for just a few weeks) this trilogy is for you.Tin Drum, in myopinion, is the best of the set, expressing oppression and pain with thebest of Grass's stark realism and sardonic wit. ... Read more

Product Description
This book traces a longstanding concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and himself as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms. ... Read more

Product Description
These fifty-four poems, spanning four decades, depict a landscape at once recognizably mundane and grotesquely surreal.Grass's spirited humor and linguistic creativity transcend the cant of political poetry. The German originals face the translation. Translated by Michael Hamburger. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Survives the Test of Time
Thirty years after first reading this book, I still recall the milk teeth carefully kept in a special box. The imagery and characterization stay with you - they echo down the years.

I found my old copy last month when cleaning out some old boxes; I set it aside, and read it this week. The book surpassed my memory of the book.

Like life, there are unresolved loose ends and this is a good thing.

hey there
what can I tell ya..

one great book..
I read too far afield before this one..
different kind of book..yes..
more complexed..
but this one is a litle tiny book compering to too far afield...

Local is more then anything It will truly crack u up kind of book..

at the same time..hey..Grass makes u think of any other current writer as being a schmuk at leat in his writing history and analyzing branch..

some less then 300 pages..this book is a straight kick in the stomach...

leave u breathless and thinking...

whats was that little lady's number?

Nadine Gordimer...

Who cares...

Long Live Grass !

For Grass completists
Eberhard Starusch has a number of problems. His teeth hurt. His dentist quotes Seneca constantly. One of his students is trying to come up with a dramatic protest of the Vietnam war. He has invented (or has he?) a numberof events surrounding a mythical (or is he?) Field Marshal General whohappens to be the uncle of Starusch's ex-fiancee, whom Starusch-- orsomeone else-- may or may not have murdered with a bicycle chain.

Such is the platform from which Local Anesthetic takes its course.Throughout this novel, I was reminded almost constantly of AlainRobbe-Grillet's style in The Erasers and The Voyeur. Worthy of imitation,certainly, as those are two of Europe's finest contributions totwentieth-century literature. but hard to imitate. And, were Grass not aconsummate novelist, this would have come off even worse than it did.

One gets the feeling that, unlike Robbe-Grillet, Grass actually wanted thereader to be able to figure out what in the world was really happening inthis odd, nightmarish world of late-sixties East Germany. But the onlything that reader can truly be sure of is the way that Scherbaum, theprotesting student, is going to react to things. And Scherbaum'spredictability, which would be a weakness in most novels, instead anchorsthe reader to some semblance of reality as the possibly-mythical SieglindeKrings and her uncle weave in and out of the arguments the schoolteacher(Starusch) has with the dentist (who is never named), the argumentsScherbaum has with his sometime-girlfriend Vero, the debates Starusch haswith his friend Irmgard Siefert, the wargames Sieglinde and the Generalconduct in a huge sandbox... you get the idea.

Grass manages (almost)to carry this novel off with his trademark combination of wit, silliness,and political invective against both sides of the utterly stupid post-WW2and pre-wall-falling German government. But there seem to be too manyplaces where things wander off and are never really picked up again. Toomany loose threads are left undone at the end of this novel, and thereisn't the kind of evidence one would need to wrap it all up oneself.

I'd recommend this particular Grass novel only to completists; for thosewho want to see an excellent example of this style of writing, check outthe aforementioned novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet (the Grove Press editions)and be utterly blown away. ... Read more

Product Description
Günter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have shaped post-War Germany: the difficult legacy of the Nazi past, the Cold War and the arms race, environmentalism, unification and racism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. This Companion offers the widest coverage of Grass's oeuvre across the range of media in which he works, including literature, television and visual arts. Throughout, there is particular emphasis on Grass's literary style, the creative personality which inhabits all his work, and the impact on his reputation of revelations about his early involvement with Nazism. The volume sets out, in a fresh and lively fashion, the fundamentals that students and readers need in order to understand Grass and his individual works. ... Read more