Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

What is noble in Gunter Grass is that his creation, The Tin Drum, has done more than anything else ever done by anyone else to advance peace and the creation of a freer and progressive Germany. Also, it is hard to imagine magic realism without Grass’s prototype: Oskar Matzerath, the boy who willed himself to stop growing. The influence that Grass had on Rushdie, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Calvino, Vonnegut, and other literary novelists is undeniable. But what makes The Tin Drum a book for all the ages to come is the sheer depiction of the terror that pernicious ideologies can acid-rain on humankind--pernicious ideologies, be they political, economic, social, or religious: to wit: radical Jihadist Islamists, Christian Evangelicals, Neo-Conservatives, Supply-side fundamentalists, or war mongers such as Norman Podhoretz. Take a second and compare just one page--yes one page alone--of the Tin Drum to all the warmongering books written by Podhoretz, and ask yourself: which is more noble? While Garcia Marquez tricks us with transcendental magic (Remedios the Beauty levitating to the heavens), or Borges with the Aleph, or Rushdie with his implausible children, Gunter Grass convinces that the other dimension is within us in full benign splendor as well as in evil darkness. Apart from its contribution as an anti-novel with a quirky anti-hero, Grass managed to make clear that the arts (works of the imagination, but music in particular) will not only counterbalance power but also disrupt it, outweigh it, and ultimately outlast it; a legacy that is soothing to the soul. If critics and warmongers want to shout out Gunter Grass's voice, they should begin by asking themselves: have I lived a noble life? Is my work good or evil? The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's writing manual: www.writerivetingprose.com Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

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