A Whopper of a Tale

...The narrative impulse is a life-giving, life-saving enterprise, for as in the Thousand and One Nights, when we stop talking we must die...

...Digressions to Calcutta and Berlin (the 20th-century as starvation and murder) afford Grass the occasion to reveal and revel in his mastery of the low style, the clangorous prose debauchery that is set off by less successful but welcome poems, a recurrent punctuation...

...The truth is told in a different way each time...

...Between the desperate remedies of his talent (his appetite) and the stoic submissions to the helplessness of his form (his digestion), there is a grotesque opposition—it makes him alive to pain, and an indispensable witness to the truth which Nietzsche said we could not have without art...

...Os-kar Mazerath, the dwarf in The Tin Drum, turns up twice, and Danzig in its specific environs is more than a local habitation and a name—it is an obsessive site, explored fastidiously as in earlier works, though fiercely as never before...

...The book is a feminist tract: "This vicious circle," says the Flounder himself, appealing to the Women's Tribunal examining his millennial culpability, "must forever remain unbroken —unless it is broken by those who have hitherto made no history, who have not been privileged to resolve notorious historical conflicts, whom I have subjected to male history, to whom history has never brought anything but suffering, who have been condemned to feed the war machine and replenish the human material it consumes—I am referring to women in their role as mothers...

...There may be a difficulty here for American readers—not in the translation, which is astonishingly lyric and precise, but in the brooding insistence upon the regional...

...The novelist (or whatever) must constantly remind us he is there, happily flicking over the iridescent tapestry and showing us the seamy side, the knots, the transitions, the broken threads, patching up his lover's quarrel with the world by language and by myth...

...Grass' men and women are hilarious and recognizable recitations, grotesquely carved netsukes, without the development or identification the novel used to afford (from Werther, say, to Anna Karenina...

...The book is an antifeminist tract: The compliant (and fictive) anthropology mined out to elicit the mindless matriarchy of Grass' first months is matched by the ongoing contempt for the kitchen-hearted and chubby wives of the later ones...

...Perhaps, though, the real resistance will come elsewhere...

...There is a dread weight upon the reader (only Proust inspires a like terror in the beginner, and in both cases it is a terror I should like to dispel, not by pretending it is not justified, but by presuming it means something...

...The book is a Menippean satire: A vigorous medley of verse and prose, it parodies the course of German literature from Medieval chronicles—Pomeranian documents invented alongside authentic saints invested with allegorical tempers—to mannerist panels and romantic apostrophes...

...But being uncomfortable is just what we should expect: It is the one posture any 20th-century novel with claims to salience has imposed upon the public of what was once a popular form...

...The world awaits a sign from the Womenal, a sign that will put the future back in business...

...The conflict between forms is resolved in a rather disturbing way...

...And the suggestion throughout (masked by a kind of generalized and rambling hilarity, the tone we submit to when we call it "Rabelaisian") is that we ought to get back to the beginning, but only at the end...

...Astonishingly gifted, as everyone knows or has been told, encyclopedic in his appetites and aspirations, Grass is a novelist—and a draughtsman, and a historian, and an anthropologist, etc.—who takes great pains indeed to incorporate as much of the world as he can manage, by all the glamor of his bizarrerie, to make into one flesh...

...Fairy tales only stop for a time, or they start up again after the end...

...As she —the fisherman's wife in the folk tale, whose inordinate demands lead to an apocalyptic repudiation—advances toward her delivery, the narrator too is delivered of his tales, his account of the relations of men and women since the Upper Neolithic in terms of their relations to cooking...

...Yet they recur, nothing is taken away without the assurance that it will all come round again...

...One wonders what northern Europeans make of Lolita, a novel [?] similarly fixed to its surroundings...

...He is concerned to illustrate what half the world and more than half of time lives by: "At first I was only going to write about my nine or eleven cooks, some kind of a history of human foodstuffs—from manna grass to millet to the potato...

...Only the details receive an epic structure...

...In my own case—perhaps because I have been so rewarded by earlier Grass productions—I had no trouble meeting this demand...

...the whole is nothing save juxtaposition...

...The book is an Arabian Night: Grass himself says he wrote a fairy tale that his publisher insisted he call a novel...

...Or again, all flesh is as the Grass...

...Indeed, most of the dissent I have read about this whopper, a fish story if ever there was one, has been a kind of skepticism—is the thing a novel at all...

...Here, however, are some notes toward future enjoyment of The Flounder—notes toward the definition of genre, if you like...

...Other possibilities of genre, from fresco to freak-show, loom up, and of course the book is, as well, a recapitulation of all Grass' other books...

...As if we knew, any more, what a novel was...

...It is difficult to be comfortable with a novel that has no mortal characters, no plot and no modesty...

...It is perhaps the burden of our incomparable modernity that we cannot, as once was so readily done, unite the evidence and the outline, the design and the detail...

...The book is an epic: It offers a totality of life received complete, whereas insofar as it is a novel it seeks to discover and to construct a secret totality...

...The book is a cookbook: Grass is gratifyingly precise in his succulent account of feasts and famines, even when they are poisonous (death by mushrooms...

...president, PEN-American Center A good deal of the critical resistance to this insistently ambitious work —intelligent resistance, of course: the author's previous international successes have enjoined mere idlers to Keep Off The Grass—has to do with the old pervasions of genre...

...They are all here, in The Flounder, yet at some cost to seemli-ness, even to seeming...

...The male Scheherazade who keeps his sulky Sultaness awake by his cliff-hangers keeps himself alive by his memory of the way he has eaten for 3,000 years...

...The book is a series of dramatic lyrics: Almost never a narrative, and certainly never tragic, The Flounder twitches away its characters before the reader can nestle down with them...

...Or as Grass says, at the very end, "at last it was all confirmed...

...The book is a couvade: The narrator has inside him nine cooks, one for each month of his wife's pregnancy...

...For it is a somatic procedure that Grass intends, a bodily making-over that he envisions—the nine months of its form are a lying-in, an accouchement of form—and I suspect that the difficulties the book presents are not, on the one hand, in the formal exigencies so variously urged upon us, or in the pressure of observed detail, the experienced thing, the known life, but in the terrible tug between them...