A Soldier Once :: JOHN IRVING – New York Times:
At the ages of 14 and 15, I had read “Great Expectations” twice — Dickens made me want to be a writer — but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos — all with an unforgiving conscience.
“The Tin Drum” was the most highly acclaimed novel of postwar Germany; Oskar Matzerath’s refusal to grow was declared symbolic of the country’s guilt. In the page-and-a-half-long penultimate paragraph of the novel, “the onion juice that draws tears” is mentioned in passing — one image in a long list of more memorable images: “the wall that had to be freshly whitewashed” and “the Poles in the exaltation of death” were among the ones I loved best.
“Er ist ein bisschen unhoflich.” (“He is a little impolite.”)
This was my first awareness that Grass, to an Austrian and German audience — especially to those old enough to remember the war — was seen as more than an internationally famous and respected writer. To many Austrians and Germans, Grass is perceived as a merciless judge and unrestrained moral authority.
Grass said he felt ashamed that the United States was an ally of his country. (“How impoverished must a country be before it is not a threat to the U.S. government?”)
Good writers write about the important stuff before they blab about it; good writers don’t tell stories before they’ve written them!
‘Life is not a reference book that you can flip through at will; it is no finished manuscript that you can publish at any time.”
The memoir is as good as the very best of Grass’s novels, and it has an opening sentence that explains what his readers might have mistaken, in the earlier work, for a stylistic device — I know I did. “Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great: He was going on 12, though he still loved sitting in his mother’s lap. …” Grass establishes at the outset that “memory is like an onion.” He also asserts, “The brief inscription meant for me reads: I kept silent” — adding, “the temptation is great to discount one’s own silence.” As a child and young teenager, Grass admits to hero worship. “It was the newsreels: I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white ‘truth’ they served up.” This autobiography is a painful confession. “Over and over, author and book remind me of how little I understood as a youth and how limited an effect literature may have.”
“Anyone who has seen not only individual corpses but corpses in piles looks on every new day as a gift.”
He speaks of his three hungers — the ordinary one, to eat (he was near to starving in the P.O.W. camp), “the desire for carnal love” and his hunger for art (“this desire to conquer all with images”).
Grass bluntly states: “I practiced the art of evasion.” What is breathtaking about this autobiography is Grass’s honesty about his dishonesty. From this, “I was completely and utterly taken up with my own existence and the attendant existential questions and could not have cared less about day-to-day politics” — to this, “I have to admit that I have a problem with time: many things that began or ended precisely didn’t register with me until long after the fact.”
The dedication to “Peeling the Onion” reads: “Allen gewidmet, von denen ich lernte.” (“Dedicated to everyone from whom I have learned.”)
“One never knows what will make a book.”
Grass finds an eloquent way to call it quits — “from then on I lived from page to page and between book and book, my inner world still rich in characters. But to tell of all that, I have neither the onion nor the desire.”
‘Peeling the Onion’ :: First Chapter – New York Times (Translated by Michael Henry Heim)
Günter Grass is a bigmouth, a huckster, and a hypocrite. – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine: “Fighting words: A wartime lexicon :: The pompous, hypocritical hucksterism of Günter Grass.”
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