The Tin Drum

I would think twice before deciding to read this book, especially if you're like I and tend to stubbornly stick to the bitter end, hoping that the author will bring some meaning and order to the train wreck of a book in the last chapter. Alas, no such luck. The absurdities remain through the final page. And I suppose that may be the point--that life is as absurd as this story about Oskar Matzerath, a 37 inch little person who for much of his life has the appearance of a three year old and relates to the world primarily by pounding on his tin drum (or drums as he often has to replace them due to over exuberant drumming.) I will say the author's imagination is remarkable as is his word play which is likely even more clever in his native German. One has no idea what the next bizarre turn will be or when one will encounter disgusting eels or an erotic fizz powder. What I did find somewhat interesting, and thus the two stars, was an occasional glimpse of the German perspective during the years 1924-1954. However, one must be cautious in drawing any conclusions about that perspective, given the story is told through an unreliable narrator, Oskar himself.

The Tin Drum, published in 1959, is set in Poland and Germany during the rise of Nazism and World War II, but it views this history through a lens (or perhaps more accurately, a fun-house mirror) of absurd humor and obscure metaphor. It is also surely one of literature’s strangest coming-of-age novels, since it features a protagonist who literally refuses to come of age. German author Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 largely on the strength of this, his best-known work. The Tin Drum has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece of modern literature, but it is a tedious ordeal to read.The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who is born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Oskar relates his story thirty years later from his bed in a mental hospital. Much like the city in which he was born, Oskar’s heritage is a mixture of Kashubian, Polish, and German. His mother has two lovers, and which of them is Oskar’s biological father is a matter of speculation throughout the book. At the age of three, two momentous events occur in Oskar’s life. First, he is given a tin drum as a birthday present. This drum becomes his lifelong companion and primary means of self-expression. Second, Oskar makes a conscious attempt to stop growing, thus suspending his physical development.The Tin Drum occasionally provides a vivid glimpse of life in Danzig and Düsseldorf during the 1930s and ‘40s, but more often than not Grass opts for deliberately weird, disturbing, and satirical imagery that steers the narrative down a more comical and frivolous path. For example, Oskar discovers that he has the power to shatter glass with his screams. This is pleasantly surprising the first time it happens, but Grass trots out the same image ad nauseam, to the point where Oskar is developing this talent to ridiculous and tedious lengths. Meanwhile, members of the supporting cast begin committing suicide in bizarre ways, further divorcing the story from reality. As he grows up, Oskar becomes precociously horny, and despite his childlike appearance women seem to find him irresistible. This results in a number of sex scenes, all of which have something disgusting about them, such as his partner smells bad or is asleep during the act. Even in its repulsive or tragic moments, the novel is really too whimsical to be offensive, but it seems to constantly invite the reader to laugh at jokes that just aren’t very funny.If The Tin Drum has a saving grace, it is Grass’s inventive use of language. He plays with words and phrases the way an innovative jazz musician experiments with notes and keys. This would be quite admirable were the book not so inordinately long and relentlessly repetitive. The novel feels like a self-indulgent exercise by an author more interested in hearing himself talk than in conveying anything meaningful to the reader. On the bright side, the 2009 translation by Breon Mitchell does an outstanding job of interpreting Grass’s complex verbal gymnastics into readable English prose.Though normally I wouldn’t make such a recommendation, before you spend 20+ hours reading this book you might want to watch the movie to see if this story is really your cup of tea. The film adaptation only covers roughly the first two-thirds of the book, but is otherwise mostly faithful to the text. If you like the film and think you want to tackle the novel, be prepared that Grass’s gratuitous wordplay draws out every scene to five times its necessary length.

As an avid reader of John Irving's novels, I wanted to read this because it had such an influence on his work, especially A Prayer for Owen Meaney, which similarly features a tiny protagonist. The similarities are very easy to see between Grass's book and Irving's novels. More than just the protagonist is the style. The book follows little Oskar from before birth up to his 30th birthday, a technique Irving often uses, though that's also attributable to Charles Dickens. Unlike Dickens, there's a lot more sexually-charged material in Grass's book, which is another thing that Irving also does quite frequently.Beyond that, I found this to be an interesting and engaging novel. Maybe it's because I've read so much of Irving's books and noted all those similarities that I found this to be so engaging. There are probably a lot of subtle things I might have missed, not being Polish or German and not having been alive in the 30s-50s, and as noted in the afterword there are often things that get lost in translation when translating from one language to another. Overall, though, I suppose I got the gist of it.And I have to say I liked this better than Irving's Owen Meaney, in large part because there isn't a boring nonentity as the narrator who spends half the book railing against the Reagan administration. What I disliked the most is that the narrator kept referring to himself alternately in first and third person. I'm sure was an artistic reason for that, but it was sometimes confusing.Otherwise while it might be a complex book, but clearly it's an influential one.That is all.

The Tin Drum is a noted literary novel. I also found it to be a page turner with memorable characters and one of those books that I was disappointed to end. I wanted to continue to follow Oskar as he went through life.I found the novel used a deep religious metaphor. The novel is full of references to both the catholic and Protestant Christian religions in Germany. However, I found the primary religious metaphor in that of Buddhism. The novel is full of descriptions of the cycle of life and death. There are descriptions of births, deaths and the process of each in funerals and giving birth. This is the Buddhist concept of “smasara” used as a metaphor although not explicitly referenced in the text. This is the cycle of life and death to which souls are condemned until they can achieve transcendence. The novel describes the history of Danzig as it goes through cycles of siege and destruction followed by a reconstruction multiple times over history. It is this cycle which Oskar attempts to escape when he decides to stop growing at three years old.For me, it is this cycle of birth-death, - destruction- reconstruction that is the point of the novel. I have read here and elsewhere that this novel is about NAZI Germany. It is situated in that place and time but is not about NAZI Germany except as it is part of this eternal cycle. Oskar lives within the NAZI regime but his contact with it is only marginal to him. It is only one more turn of the cycle. It is this cycle that Oskar wishes to escape. It is this cycle that drives Oskar mad.

A trifle more than half-a-century has marched past since Günter Grass found a publisher for “The Tin Drum,” considered by many to be the greatest novel to emerge out of post-war Germany. Now a new English-language translation has appeared, a version supervised by Grass himself. Here we have a coming-of-age (and then some) story told by a dwarf who grows into a hunchbacked midget. Receiving a tin drum on his third birthday, our Oskar soon wears it out as he does many other drums. We learn from the first sentence that Oskar’s is a tale told by the inmate of a mental institution in what Grass refers to as alternate reality, perhaps a Teutonic version of magical realism. Setting early on is Danzig, where the first battle of the Second World War was fought at the Polish Post Office as the Germans took back a city they lost after the First World War. Our tiny protagonist then takes us across Europe as far as the Atlantic Wall, a futile defense erected against an Allied invasion. We learn how boring it was to wait for the battle that eventually came. The movie version of this very long novel ends when the war ends, but, as the novel demonstrates, the years that follow are equally fascinating. This was my second reading of the novel, much enhanced now that I know all about that Polish Post Office and the German Currency Reform. Our Oskar is incarcerated in his mental institution for a murder he did probably not commit. He expects that he soon will be released and wonders what will happen next. I do, too. Although he was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, Grass wrote no sequel to “The Tine Drum.”

One of the best books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. The story is very detailed and is very raw. disturbing in a good way.

The Tin Drum is a metaphor for the banality of Nazi Germany (and post war it's cultural void), that is expressed through the vision of Oscar Mazareth, a half Polak dwarf, insane artist whom authorities gladly would have exterminated.The buffoonery of the clinical Nazi machine is mocked subtelty throughout the script such as Oscars drum mistiming, to confuse the steps of Nazi marching volunteers. The destruction of war and its sickening evil is glossed over quite alot but remains poignant in scenes such as the Polish office siege.Overall this book is not a page turner nor the storyline rational, the English is hard going, so it's like eating fine cheese on crackers, without water : i.e. it's an enjoyable read but in small doses.The Nazi theme of war isn't all important but maybe the Nazi theme is more used to explain the dichotomy of Oscars own nihilism of living one's own life, albeit his being more adventurous than most.

I found the third part to be heavy-going and some chapters are probably redundant, but the overall quality of the writing is high. An interesting work.