PEARL
K.
BELL
77
Baltic for those who want to wait out their allotted time close to their
eventual resting-place; hotels to accommodate the mourners; and, in the
grandest scheme of all, "Bungagolr' vacation homes by the sea, for rela–
tives and friends of the deceased, with bungalows attached to golf
courses. The elderly lovers who started it all are appalled by the preda–
tory deformation of their modest scheme, and they resign from the
board.
Since the story is a comic fantasy, Grass now summons up a hilarious
prescription for a better world to come, in the form of a Bengali friend
of Alexander's. Mr. Chatterjee had arrived in Gdansk some years before
during a gasoline shortage, and he had come up with the idea of driving
tourists around in rickshaw-bicycles to replace the fuel-less taxis. As the
idea caught on, it spread to polluted, traffic-jammed cities all over the
world, and soon Mr. Chatterjee, with the help of numerous relatives
imported from Calcutta, is manufacturing rickshaw-bikes in the once–
booming shipyards of Gdansk. And at Alexander's suggestion, the bicycle
bens developed in Chatterjee's workshops echo the call of the toad. As
more and more of the world falls into Bengali hands, street names like
Goethegass and Grunwaldzka are rechristened in honor of Rabindranath
Tagore and the Bengali national hero Subhas Chandra Bose - a typical
Grass irony, since Bose, as an Indian nationalist, sought to organize a
pro-German legion in India during the Second World War but died in a
plane crash.
Mr.
Chatterjee's literally fantastic success is the embodiment of
Gunter Grass's sober utopian dream of a European future "free from na–
tionalistic narrowness, no longer hemmed in by language boundaries...
." But of course, as Grass makes despondently clear in this novel, it is a
dream now more distant and unrealizable than ever. Since this is not a
comforting view, his wonderfully endearing book was not greeted in
Germany with much enthusiasm. Yet
The Call oj the Toad
is a wise and
somber comedy, a satirical fable drenched in politics and drained of illu–
sion, and it exuberantly reaffirms, after some years of creative drought,
the inventive vitality of Gunter Grass, the old pro once again at the top
of his form.
