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Title: The Flounder by Gunter Grass ISBN: 0-15-131486-1 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: May, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Grass' weakest effort, by far
Comment: Gunter Grass, The Flounder (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)
I just couldn't get through it. I can't really put my finger on why, but there it is. The Flounder contains all the things I revere about Grass-- a strong sense of history, scurrlious sense of humor, strong characters put into wonderfully unrealistic situations. But this novel, Grass' weightiest (literally), never seems to come together in all the little ways that made similarly large tomes like The Tin Drum and Dog Years such wonderful reads.
The Flounder is a massive creation myth, seen through the eyes of a continually-reincarnated man, his continually-reincarnated longtime companion (who is always a cook of some sort), and the Flounder himself, who serves as a kind of fairy-godfather figure. In modern times, a group of feminists discover that the Flounder has been the architect of the overthrow of matriarchal society and put him on trial; the narrator and the Flounder use the trial as a method to go back over history and show the development of patriarchy in Poland, and how it relates to the potato. Yes, I'm serious.
The novel feels as if Grass had lost his sense of dynamic while writing it. The earlier long novels each keep the reader's interest with a series of climactic events, each leading up to the larger climax upon which the novel turns; The Flounder, on the other hand, continues on at the same rlatively leisurely pace in its survey of history. And that, ultimately, is its downfall; there's just too much of it without anything really going on, on a larger scale.
Definitely a bad starting place for Grass; turn to the Danzig trilogy instead. (zero)
Rating: 5
Summary: I can't believe it's out of print...
Comment: I read this book when it first came out (1980?), and have read, in English or German, 4 other novels by GG. All were wonderful, but this was my favorite. It's "magic realism" that's both thought-provoking and very entertaining, and so well-written and translated. It's really too bad that it's out of print.
Rating: 5
Summary: check it out
Comment: An outstanding statment by Grass on history, feminism, cooking and Joycean bodily details which encapsulates the obssession by the Germans of systems, machoness and abstractions that have led to disaster. But the book is a balanced look at the effects of excess feminism as well.
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Title: The Rat by Gunter Grass ISBN: 015675830X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 May, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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