JOHN SIMON
to Dusseldorf, where he becomes by turns carver of funeral monuments,
nude model for crazy artists, drummer in a jazz trio, and, finally, a
famous and rich concert-drummer who, in solo recitals throughout
Germany, drums elderly people back into their youth-a kind of faith
healer, in short. Accused, at last, of the one crime he did not commit,
he is found guilty of murder but reprieved to a mental institution.
Though he finds happiness there, it looks as if he will soon be released.
And then what? He is thirty, and he is afraid.
Such an outline does no justice whatever to the plot, let alone to
the work of art. Gunter Grass is also a poet, painter, sculptor, stage
designer, dramatist, literary critic, and genuine eccentric; all these
occupations have helped him fill his long novel with a splendid
melange
adultere de tout.
Grass calls himself a realist, but this is true only to
the extent that he can describe with equal verisimilitude plain things like
the contents of a grocery, more abstruse things such as the work of a
stone-carver or waiter in a ferocious harbor canteen, and fantastic things
like minor miracles. Always, however, the romantic poet is eager to
take over. Thus we read of the child Oskar, in a garret, disturbed in
his drumming by noises from the courtyard: "A hundred carpet-beating
females can storm the very heavens, can blunt the wing tips of young
swallows; with a few strokes, they tumbled the tiny temple that Oskar
had drummed into the April air." The world is too much with
Oskar, but the expression is not that of the worldly realist. Consider
Oskar's words about how his mother, after four days' painful vomiting
and dying, gave up "that bit of breath which everyone must cough up
in order to obtain his death certificate." Whereupon, Oskar goes on,
"we all breathed easy again ...
"1
The novel is distinguished by its blend of dreary reality and spec–
tacular fantasy, of wit and toughness, of lyricism and amorality.
If
Grass's vision is realistic, it is the realism of someone who does not allow
for optical illusions, who does not know or does not care to know the
laws of causality, who has no visual or moral perspective: a sharp
observer, but an observer from Mars. Thus Oskar watches a neighbor
woman carrying a carpet rolled up and slung across her shoulder
1. Ralph Manheim, the translator, renders this as "the bit of breath which
each of us must give up if he is to be honored with a death certificate. We all
sighed with relief ...
n
This loses not only Oskar's tone of almost innocent
callousness, but also the terrible yet pregnant play on "bit of breath" and
"breathed." Since Mr. Manheim's translation is persistently inept, I am
obliged to make up my own versions.
