[Ro]

The Carnies select with their 2nd round pick, in European Lit, the second best book I've ever read:

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass



Like Catch 22, this book blew me away when I first read it, and I immediately went out and bought a copy of own. After reading it a second time some time later, I became convinced it was a "desert island book," and I am happy to add it to the team.

Some prose about the book, written much better than what I can offer! If it seems disjointed, follow the link provided below- I did a 2 minute cut and paste hack job to trim it down some:

The Tin Drum is a stunning read and is the reason why forty years after its release, Grass, praised for his "cheerful destructiveness and creative irreverence," received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A profoundly human tale, The Tin Drum is built from hallucinatory prose and an ability to see the extraordinary that lurks just beneath the surface of the apparently mundane. The story is of a child who decides never to grow past his current height of three feet because the world is such a horrible place, and then experiences many adventures that prove to him that he was simultaneously totally right and totally wrong in his belief. His family believes that his disability was caused by a fall down the cellar stairs, exhibiting "man's understandable desire to find physical justification for all alleged miracles." Never sentimental, Grass shows the child Oskar growing and discovering what it is that makes up life. He is too complex a character to symbolize anyone or anything specific. Sometimes kind, sometimes spoiled, always curious and filled with Freudian sexuality, and sometimes terrible and cruel he may be. But he is always human.

It is immediately apparent that Grass has an enormous capacity to perceive the lightest comedy and the deepest tragedy (both of which are on a thin, often indistinguishable barrier) in the everyday. An undoubted delight in anarchism ("everything is permitted when it is snowing") runs through a book that regards where "there is politics there is violence" so let us have as little of it as possible. By rejecting the good/evil system of thought, Oskar maintains his freedom. Likewise, Grass refuses to demonize the Nazis, to dehumanize them into stock villains as they had the Jews. They were not predestined or predetermined to be evil, it was not the devil or some higher or lower force that possessed them. They were people, ordinary educated people (doctors, university graduates, chicken farmers, greengrocers) who brought evil about consciously through their choices.

http://www.litkicks.com/GunterGrass/