From the archive, 16 January 1964: The nightmare fairy-tales of Günter Grass

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/jan/16/gunter-grass-dog-years-book

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The novels of Günter Grass are colourful, grotesque, chaotic, funny, uncouth, and (I am told) very German. The latest, "Dog Years" ("Hundejahre " in German), is even more so than its predecessor, "The Tin Drum," which seems to have made Grass the representative of recent German literature abroad.

Grass is the undoubted favourite of that generation in Germany which calls itself "Twens," and partly too of that other which might call Itself "Thirs " (and to which Grass himself, at 36, belongs).

The fascination lies in Grass's very typical mixture of clear sight and dim views, of anger and sentimentality, of nightmare and fairy-tale; and in his very peculiar art of courageously appearing to tackle German reality - and soaring off into the realms of grotesque imagination before he has touched it.

Günter Grass tried his hand at several of the arts before he gained his great success as a novelist. He was, among other things, a sculptor and a jazz drummer. His first literary achievement was a third prize in a radio poetry competition. The grand old German poet Gottfried Benn showed interest in Grass's verse - and recommended him to write prose.

Grass did. He wrote dramatic prose. But all of his six plays failed on the stage. It was, as he himself explained, resentment against the apparent stupidity of playgoers and theatre critics which made him begin his first novel, the now world famous "Tin Drum."

As his verse betrays the pattern of the nursery rhyme, as his plays are obviously located in the stylistic neighbourhood of the Christmas pantomime, so the two main pillars of the first novel were fairy-tale themes - Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf, the Tom Thumb, whose size is sufficient to distort the grown-up world; and Matzerath's ability to break glass by singing, foreshadowed in Grimm's tale of the Six Servants, one of whom could break glass (and other material) by looking at it. In "Dog Years" we find long passages beginning, and repeating, "Once upon a time… " Such as: "Once upon a time there lived a girl at Danzig-Langfuhr; she was called Tulla Pokriefke, and she was pregnant, but did not know by whom."

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