The Tin Drum
Günter Grass(1959)
Extract
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
A boy decides on his third birthday to stop growing, and from that moment forward he observes the catastrophe of twentieth-century Germany from below, drumming furiously on a tin instrument that shatters glass and adult composure alike. Published in 1959, the novel's wild, carnivalesque energy scandalized a nation that preferred silence about what had happened. Oskar Matzerath narrates from a mental hospital, his voice unreliable and grotesque and somehow more honest than any sober testimony. The prose is extravagant, baroque, sometimes revolting, piling image upon image until history itself seems to writhe. The monstrous required a monstrous form, and this novel gave postwar literature the savage, picaresque mirror it needed.
If you loved this
Rushdie gives another magical child the task of narrating his nation's birth, and the debt to Grass is open and joyful.
García Márquez matches the same fusion of the grotesque and the historical, but trades German guilt for Colombian solitude.
Heller finds the same absurdity in wartime, but uses jokes where Grass uses the drumsticks.