William McCann
Johnson, Lucy
Grass' Fireworks Dog Years, by Gunter Grass. Har-court, Brace & World. 570 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson T^he new novel, Dog Years, is a sec-cond examination of Germany from the 1920s to...
...When he brings the two visions together, as he most often does, facades crash in rubble all around him...
...What about the black German shepherd dogs...
...It was an unforgettable tour de force...
...Most of the time, however, the parodies are hilarious and the word play clever...
...The changes of words and names as recorded by Grass are echoes of his central theme more directly expressed in Matern's constant ambivalence toward Amsel and Amsel's series of metamorphoses...
...THE REVIEWERS STANLEY K. SHEINBAUM is an economist at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara...
...The earlier novel told with exuberance of how those years looked through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the grocer's midget son who "wasn't right in the head...
...A brief summary, so full of suggestive oddities, does not even begin to scratch the surface of this rich and obscure novel...
...Grass lets loose at the economic recovery, various government figures, the press and radio, the whole cultural milieu...
...Eddi made scarecrows while Walter protected his fat, freckled friend with his fists and took care of the money side of the scarecrow business...
...WEBB S. FISER is a professor of political science in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the State University of New York...
...Are they man's creations made to help him in his struggle with nature and will they get out of control and take over like Capek's robots in R.U.R.7 Through all of the symbols, all of the levels of meaning, Grass keeps looking out at the world with two slightly unsynchronized eyes—one seeing the pudding-faced, stupid, everyday people on the street and the other seeing the viciousness and bestiality underneath the placid surface...
...LUCY JOHNSON is a free lance reviewer who comments regularly in these pages on new fiction...
...Finally, Matern meets Goldmouth, an entrepreneur and shadowy eminence several identities ago called Amsel, who takes him to a former potash mine now used to manufacture mechanical scarecrows...
...Prinz finally deserts the Fuhrer for the West ("I disengage myself," he says) and, under the name of Pluto, attaches himself to Matern in his travels...
...From 1955-59 he was campus director of the Michigan State University Vietnam Technical Assistance Project...
...The boys were both friends and enemies (as close friends often are) and in anger knew how to hurt each other...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson T^he new novel, Dog Years, is a sec-cond examination of Germany from the 1920s to the 1950s by Gunter Grass, the author of the wonderful and successful The Tin Drum...
...In a travesty of Virgil and Dante, Amsel, in his final role as the mine-owner Braux-el, guides Matern through the thirty-two stages in the hellish production of scarecrows...
...The second section leads up to and covers World War II and is told by Harry Liebenau, a younger boy, who watches Eddi and Walter from a distance as they go through school and become embroiled in one way and another with Nazism...
...Its richness and texture, its brilliantly illuminated depths, and its destructive range may make it take dog years to read the novel, but the time given to the extraordinary world of Gunter Grass is well spent...
...Some of this is frighteningly effective, and some just doesn't come through or seems repetitious...
...Is this line of dogs a part of the German essence, neither good nor evil in itself, but morally inert...
...And what about all those scarecrows...
...He has reviewed for The Nation and other publications...
...His examination of Germany in the '50s goes far beyond this personal vengeance...
...Eddi transformed folk lore, legends, superstitions, and family tales of the region into his art and from used clothes and other jetsam made scarecrows so effective that they frightened animals and children and even adults...
...The first section of the novel tells of their childhood in a small town on the Vistula delta near Danzig...
...But his revenge is not sweet because he meets righteous self-pity everywhere: "Who wants to tear open old wounds if the opening of wounds gives pleasure...
...The third section is postwar Germany and falls into a familiar literary pattern: the wanderer from the past (in this case Matern), traveling about, observing, visiting his former friends, judging and punishing them...
...Dog Years has a shifting perspective and a flaring brilliance which is the very essence of what the novel is about as well as a technique used in its narration...
...From 1958-59 he was the principal planner in the Office of Urban Renewal in Syracuse, New York...
...HARVEY J. BRESLER is an assistant professor in the department of business administration at C. W. Post College...
...Walter first becomes a Communist and then a Nazi and leads eight members of his SA sturm in beating up Amsel...
...There are some marvelously evocative scenes: two small boys and a black dog exploring along the dikes, busy making things among the dunes...
...her pup is the Liebenaus' Harras, who sires Prinz, Hitler's favorite dog...
...There were times when I felt that I didn't have the specialized knowledge needed to catch the full implications of some of the satire and other times when I thought either Grass, or his generally good translator, Ralph Man-heim, too fascinated with the sound of words...
...Eduard Amsel, a half-Jew, introverted and artistic, and Walter Matern, a Catholic Slav, extroverted and athletic, are friends and blood brothers whose careers are followed all through the book...
...The novel shows the duality, the paradoxical nature, of life and in so doing explodes in furious and virtuoso verbal fireworks at every brutality, hypocrisy, stupidity, and vanity within range...
...He is the author of "Mastery of the Metropolis...
...Amsel undergoes his first metamorphosis and travels west to Germany where he becomes an impresario and composes a fantastic scarecrow ballet in which the scarecrows are joined by the birds in an attack on their creator, the farmer...
...Probing the contrasts between the two men and the conflicts within each one is just the most easily described aspect of this book...
...Descended originally from Slavic wolves, Senta is the dog with Walter and Eddi on the dikes...
...Eddi moves on to mechanize his scarecrows, creating them in the form of saluting SA men...
...WILLIAM McCANN is a free lance reviewer and editor of the paperback, "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...It is a stunning—and occasionally numbing—performance...
...Matern is as guilty as his victims and he is punishing them for the same crimes he has committed...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
