This is surely a difficult read. Not sure if it was due to the translation (which emphasized on trying to capture the literal meaning and sense of the prose, rather than the fluidity of the reading experience), or to the nature of Mr. Grass' prose. The pace picks up every now and then but there are times where it dictates a slower speed while going over paragraphs that cover full pages, chopped into adjectives. It seems to me that the Tin Drum is not about a story, but rather about an experience. Few hints here and there about a value or judgement of any sort (all about too easy about a topic such as Nazi Germany right after the war), but it is embedded in deep art and craftsmanship. This makes it sit comfortably in modern era literature that captures a scene from a society without the audacity of judging it. Oskar, his family, and his nation. All ridden with disasters yet he hardly seem to be moved with any of them. The material gain was never a question and he shows some brilliant ability to "move on" except where it comes to nurses and their white dresses. A reason to raise this work above the level of the ground we walk on, to keep you gazing at it's people for a beauty value.
"You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backward and forward to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all references to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you've finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists. I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes." P:5
"Little people and big people, Little Dipper and Big Dipper, little and big ABCs, Little Hans and Karl the great, David and Goliath, Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the Giant; I remained the three-year-old, the gnome, Tom Thumb, stayed the half-pint that's never topped up, all to bypass distinctions like big and little catechisms, to flee the clutches of a man who, while shaving at the mirror, called himself my father, to avoid, as a so-called grownup of five foot eight, being bound to a business, a grocery store that Matzerath hoped would become the grown-up world for Oskar at twenty-one. So as not to have to rattle a cash register, I stuck to my drum and didn't grow a finger's breadth from my third birthday on, remained the three-year-old, who, three times as smart, was towered over by grownups, yet stood head and shoulders above them all, who felt no need to measure his shadow against theirs, who was inwardly and outwardly fully mature while others driveled on about development well into their dotage, who merely confirmed for himself what other learned with difficulty and other painfully, who felt no need to increase his shoe and trouser size from year to year just to prove he was growing.
And yet - and here Oskar too must admit to development - something was growing, and not always to my own advantage, ultimately taking on messianic proportions; but what grownup in my day had eyes and ears for Oskar, the eternally three-year-old drummer?" P:48-49
"Even in the entrance hall that school smell, described often enough, and more intimate than any known perfume in the world. On the flagstones of the hall stood four or five randomly placed granite basins out of whose depths water bubbled up simultaneously. With children, including some of my own age, crowding about them, they reminded me of my uncle Vinzent's sow in Bissau, who sometimes flung herself on her side an endured the similarly brutal and thirsty assault of her piglets.
The boys bent over the steadily collapsing towers of water in the basins, let their hair fall forward, and allowed the streams of water to poke about in their open mouths. I don't know if they were playing or drinking. Sometimes two boys would straighten up almost simultaneously with inflated cheeks and spray each other loudly in the face with mouth-warmed water, mixed you may be sure, with saliva and breadcrumbs. For my own part, upon entering the hall I had thoughtlessly cast a glance into the adjoining open gymnasium on the left, and, having spotted the leather pommel horse, the climbing poles and climbing rope, the terrifying horizontal bar, crying out as always for a giant swing, felt a very real thirst I couldn't suppress, and would gladly have taken a drink of water like all the other boys. But I found it impossible to ask Mama, who was holding me by the hand, to lift Oskar, the toddler, over such a basin. Even if I stood on my drum, the fountain would remain out of reach. When, however, with a little jump I took a quick look over the edge of one of these basins and saw the greasy breadcrumbs nearly blocking the drain, and the nasty swill left standing in the bowl, the thirst I had stored up in my mind, and in my body as well, left me, as I wandered aimlessly past equipment in the desert wastes of the gymnasium." P:65
"FOR A LONG TIME, till November of thirty-eight to be exact, crouching under grandstands with my drum, with greater or lesser success I broke up rallies, reduced speakers to stutters, and turned marches and hymns to waltzes and foxtrots.
Today, as a private patient in a mental institution, when all that's past history, still being eagerly forged but from cold iron, I've achieved a proper distance from my drumming under grandstands. It would never occur to me to see myself as a member of the Resistance on the basis of six or seven disrupted rallies, three or four assemblies and parade marches drummed off stride. The term is quite fashionable these days. You hear of the spirit of Resistance, of Resistance circles. There's even talk of internal resistance, what's now called Inner Emigration. To say nothing of those honorable men so well versed in the scriptures who were fined by a growling air-raid warden for having failed to black out their bedroom windows and now call themselves Resistance fighters, men of the Resistance. " P:111
"My grandmother had Schwerdtfeger hove a hot brick under her four skirts every hour on the dot. Schwerdtfeger did this with an iron slide. He pushed a steaming packet under her scarcely raised skirts, dumped it, lifted the other one, then Schwerdtfeger's iron slid would reappear from beneath my grandmother's skirts with a nearly cold brick.
How I envied those bricks wrapped in newspaper, storing and bestowing their heat. To this day I wish I could lie like a toasty warm brick constantly being exchanged for myself under my grandmother's skirts. And just what, you may ask, is Oskar looking for under his grandmother's skirts? Does he wish to imitate his grandfather Koljiaczek and take liberties with the old woman? Does he seek oblivion, a home, the ultimate Nirvana?
Oskar replies: I was looking for Africa under her skirts, Naples perhaps, which everyone knows you must see before dying. Where all rivers converged, where all waters divided, where special winds blew, yet calm would descend, where the rains pounded down and yet you were dry, where ships made fast or weighed anchor at last, where the good Lord, who always liked warmth, sat by Oskar, where the devil dusted his spyglass, where angels played blind-man's buff; it was always summer under my grandmother's skirts, as the Christmas tree glowed, as I hunted for Easter eggs or marked every All Saint's day. Nowhere could I live more at peace with the calendar than under my grandmother's skirts." P:113
"IMAGINE, IF YOU PLEASE, a swimming pool tiled in azure blue, and in that pool, feeling suntanned and athletic, people swimming. At the edge of the pool men and women recline outside the bathing cabins. Some music from a loudspeaker perhaps, playing softly. Healthy boredom, an easygoing, casual eroticism that tautens the swimsuits. The tiles are smooth, but no one slips. A few signs with rules; but these too are unnecessary, for those who swim have come for just an hour or two and break the rules elsewhere. Now and then someone dives from the three-meter board but does not merit the attention of those swimming or tempt those lying to poolside to look up from their magazines. Suddenly a breeze. No, not a breeze. A young man, slowly, resolutely climbing the ladder of the ten-meter tower, rung by rung. The magazines with commentaries from Europe and abroad droop, eyes rise with him, bodies at rest now stretch, a young woman shades her eyes, someone loses his train of thought, a word remain unspoken, a minor flirtation, barely begun, comes to a sudden end in mid-sentence - for now he stands on the platform, well built, virile, takes a little hop, leans against the gently curving tabular steel railing, gazes down as if bored, casts off from the rail with an elegant thrust of the hips, ventures out upon the diving board towering high above, which dips at each step, looks down, has gaze tapering to an azure, startling small pool below in which red, yellow, green, white, red, yellow green, white, red, yellow bathing caps constantly rearranging themselves. His friends must be setting there, Doris and Erika Schuler, Jutta waves too. Careful not to lose his balance, he waves back. They call out. What do they want? Do it, they call out, dive, cries Jutta. But he wasn't planning on that at all, just wanted to see what it looked from up there and then climb back, slowly, rung by rung. And now they're shouting to him, so that everyone can hear, shouting loudly: Jump! Go on! Jump!
You have to admit that's a hell of a situation, no matter how close the diving board is to heaven. The Dusters and I found ourselves in a similar situation, though it wasn't the season for swimming, in January of forty-five. We had ventured high above, were now jostling about on the diving board, while below us, forming a solemn horseshoe around an empty pool, sat judges, associates, witnesses, and bailiffs." P:364-365
"I still contradict my keeper Bruno, who flatly maintains that only men can be proper nurses, the patient's addiction to female nurses being simply one more symptom of the disease; while the male nurse conscientiously cares for the patient and sometimes cures him, the female nurse follows the feminine path: she seduces the patient toward recovery or toward death, which she imbues with a tinge of eroticism that renders it palatable.
Thus says my keeper Bruno, whose view i am reluctant to support. Whoever needs to have his life reconfirmed by hospital nurses every other year or so, as I do, maintains his gratitude, and is not so quick to allow a grumpy if likable keeper filled with professional envy to alienate him from his Sisters" P:461
"Today I can smile when I recall the thought that then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine and graduate as quickly as possible. I would become a doctor, as St. Mary's Hospital of course. I would drive Dr. Werner out, expose him, reveal his incompetence, even accuse him of manslaughter for botching a larynx operation. It would transpire that Herr Werner never went to medical school. He'd served in a field hospital during the war and picked up a thing or two: away with the charlatan! And Oskar becomes head surgeon, so young and yet such a responsible position. A new Sauerbruch strides through the echoing corridors with Sister Dorothea, his surgical assistant, at his side, surrounded by a retinue clad in white, visiting patients, making a last-minute decision to operate. How fortunate that film was never made." P:464-465
Finally I would like to conclude with what Salman Rushdie wrote about the novel, which I found at the end cover of this 50th anniversary translation by Breon Mitchell:
"This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things - childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves - that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer."
"You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backward and forward to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all references to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you've finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists. I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes." P:5
"Little people and big people, Little Dipper and Big Dipper, little and big ABCs, Little Hans and Karl the great, David and Goliath, Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the Giant; I remained the three-year-old, the gnome, Tom Thumb, stayed the half-pint that's never topped up, all to bypass distinctions like big and little catechisms, to flee the clutches of a man who, while shaving at the mirror, called himself my father, to avoid, as a so-called grownup of five foot eight, being bound to a business, a grocery store that Matzerath hoped would become the grown-up world for Oskar at twenty-one. So as not to have to rattle a cash register, I stuck to my drum and didn't grow a finger's breadth from my third birthday on, remained the three-year-old, who, three times as smart, was towered over by grownups, yet stood head and shoulders above them all, who felt no need to measure his shadow against theirs, who was inwardly and outwardly fully mature while others driveled on about development well into their dotage, who merely confirmed for himself what other learned with difficulty and other painfully, who felt no need to increase his shoe and trouser size from year to year just to prove he was growing.
And yet - and here Oskar too must admit to development - something was growing, and not always to my own advantage, ultimately taking on messianic proportions; but what grownup in my day had eyes and ears for Oskar, the eternally three-year-old drummer?" P:48-49
"Even in the entrance hall that school smell, described often enough, and more intimate than any known perfume in the world. On the flagstones of the hall stood four or five randomly placed granite basins out of whose depths water bubbled up simultaneously. With children, including some of my own age, crowding about them, they reminded me of my uncle Vinzent's sow in Bissau, who sometimes flung herself on her side an endured the similarly brutal and thirsty assault of her piglets.
The boys bent over the steadily collapsing towers of water in the basins, let their hair fall forward, and allowed the streams of water to poke about in their open mouths. I don't know if they were playing or drinking. Sometimes two boys would straighten up almost simultaneously with inflated cheeks and spray each other loudly in the face with mouth-warmed water, mixed you may be sure, with saliva and breadcrumbs. For my own part, upon entering the hall I had thoughtlessly cast a glance into the adjoining open gymnasium on the left, and, having spotted the leather pommel horse, the climbing poles and climbing rope, the terrifying horizontal bar, crying out as always for a giant swing, felt a very real thirst I couldn't suppress, and would gladly have taken a drink of water like all the other boys. But I found it impossible to ask Mama, who was holding me by the hand, to lift Oskar, the toddler, over such a basin. Even if I stood on my drum, the fountain would remain out of reach. When, however, with a little jump I took a quick look over the edge of one of these basins and saw the greasy breadcrumbs nearly blocking the drain, and the nasty swill left standing in the bowl, the thirst I had stored up in my mind, and in my body as well, left me, as I wandered aimlessly past equipment in the desert wastes of the gymnasium." P:65
"FOR A LONG TIME, till November of thirty-eight to be exact, crouching under grandstands with my drum, with greater or lesser success I broke up rallies, reduced speakers to stutters, and turned marches and hymns to waltzes and foxtrots.
Today, as a private patient in a mental institution, when all that's past history, still being eagerly forged but from cold iron, I've achieved a proper distance from my drumming under grandstands. It would never occur to me to see myself as a member of the Resistance on the basis of six or seven disrupted rallies, three or four assemblies and parade marches drummed off stride. The term is quite fashionable these days. You hear of the spirit of Resistance, of Resistance circles. There's even talk of internal resistance, what's now called Inner Emigration. To say nothing of those honorable men so well versed in the scriptures who were fined by a growling air-raid warden for having failed to black out their bedroom windows and now call themselves Resistance fighters, men of the Resistance. " P:111
"My grandmother had Schwerdtfeger hove a hot brick under her four skirts every hour on the dot. Schwerdtfeger did this with an iron slide. He pushed a steaming packet under her scarcely raised skirts, dumped it, lifted the other one, then Schwerdtfeger's iron slid would reappear from beneath my grandmother's skirts with a nearly cold brick.
How I envied those bricks wrapped in newspaper, storing and bestowing their heat. To this day I wish I could lie like a toasty warm brick constantly being exchanged for myself under my grandmother's skirts. And just what, you may ask, is Oskar looking for under his grandmother's skirts? Does he wish to imitate his grandfather Koljiaczek and take liberties with the old woman? Does he seek oblivion, a home, the ultimate Nirvana?
Oskar replies: I was looking for Africa under her skirts, Naples perhaps, which everyone knows you must see before dying. Where all rivers converged, where all waters divided, where special winds blew, yet calm would descend, where the rains pounded down and yet you were dry, where ships made fast or weighed anchor at last, where the good Lord, who always liked warmth, sat by Oskar, where the devil dusted his spyglass, where angels played blind-man's buff; it was always summer under my grandmother's skirts, as the Christmas tree glowed, as I hunted for Easter eggs or marked every All Saint's day. Nowhere could I live more at peace with the calendar than under my grandmother's skirts." P:113
"IMAGINE, IF YOU PLEASE, a swimming pool tiled in azure blue, and in that pool, feeling suntanned and athletic, people swimming. At the edge of the pool men and women recline outside the bathing cabins. Some music from a loudspeaker perhaps, playing softly. Healthy boredom, an easygoing, casual eroticism that tautens the swimsuits. The tiles are smooth, but no one slips. A few signs with rules; but these too are unnecessary, for those who swim have come for just an hour or two and break the rules elsewhere. Now and then someone dives from the three-meter board but does not merit the attention of those swimming or tempt those lying to poolside to look up from their magazines. Suddenly a breeze. No, not a breeze. A young man, slowly, resolutely climbing the ladder of the ten-meter tower, rung by rung. The magazines with commentaries from Europe and abroad droop, eyes rise with him, bodies at rest now stretch, a young woman shades her eyes, someone loses his train of thought, a word remain unspoken, a minor flirtation, barely begun, comes to a sudden end in mid-sentence - for now he stands on the platform, well built, virile, takes a little hop, leans against the gently curving tabular steel railing, gazes down as if bored, casts off from the rail with an elegant thrust of the hips, ventures out upon the diving board towering high above, which dips at each step, looks down, has gaze tapering to an azure, startling small pool below in which red, yellow, green, white, red, yellow green, white, red, yellow bathing caps constantly rearranging themselves. His friends must be setting there, Doris and Erika Schuler, Jutta waves too. Careful not to lose his balance, he waves back. They call out. What do they want? Do it, they call out, dive, cries Jutta. But he wasn't planning on that at all, just wanted to see what it looked from up there and then climb back, slowly, rung by rung. And now they're shouting to him, so that everyone can hear, shouting loudly: Jump! Go on! Jump!
You have to admit that's a hell of a situation, no matter how close the diving board is to heaven. The Dusters and I found ourselves in a similar situation, though it wasn't the season for swimming, in January of forty-five. We had ventured high above, were now jostling about on the diving board, while below us, forming a solemn horseshoe around an empty pool, sat judges, associates, witnesses, and bailiffs." P:364-365
"I still contradict my keeper Bruno, who flatly maintains that only men can be proper nurses, the patient's addiction to female nurses being simply one more symptom of the disease; while the male nurse conscientiously cares for the patient and sometimes cures him, the female nurse follows the feminine path: she seduces the patient toward recovery or toward death, which she imbues with a tinge of eroticism that renders it palatable.
Thus says my keeper Bruno, whose view i am reluctant to support. Whoever needs to have his life reconfirmed by hospital nurses every other year or so, as I do, maintains his gratitude, and is not so quick to allow a grumpy if likable keeper filled with professional envy to alienate him from his Sisters" P:461
"Today I can smile when I recall the thought that then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine and graduate as quickly as possible. I would become a doctor, as St. Mary's Hospital of course. I would drive Dr. Werner out, expose him, reveal his incompetence, even accuse him of manslaughter for botching a larynx operation. It would transpire that Herr Werner never went to medical school. He'd served in a field hospital during the war and picked up a thing or two: away with the charlatan! And Oskar becomes head surgeon, so young and yet such a responsible position. A new Sauerbruch strides through the echoing corridors with Sister Dorothea, his surgical assistant, at his side, surrounded by a retinue clad in white, visiting patients, making a last-minute decision to operate. How fortunate that film was never made." P:464-465
Finally I would like to conclude with what Salman Rushdie wrote about the novel, which I found at the end cover of this 50th anniversary translation by Breon Mitchell:
"This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things - childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves - that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer."
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