Nobels: 1999: Günter Grass

Another short book read slowly, Cat and Mouse by 1999 winner Günter Grass is a fictionalised memoir of adolescent life in Germany early in the second world war.

It wasn't, by any means, a difficult read and I don't really know why it took me so long. The narrative content is quite slight: young men  crossing over into adulthood, a transition that in this case has the consequence of inevitable involvement in killing and risking being killed (along with the usual sexual and social problems). The restraint of the book is in how unspoken that consequence is; although the material effects of being at war are always present - scarcities of many kinds - it's not something the narrator (Pilenz) and his antihero (Mahlke) talk about much. It's a kind of banality: behaviour and destiny that would have seemed absurd in peacetime become rapidly normalised.

I see that this book is part of a "Danzig Trilogy", of which the first part is the much better known Tin Drum, and I suspect that across the three books there's a kind of mythology established, in which the wider significance of the Cat and Mouse references find a place. Clearly Grass is saying something about what Germany was like then, but I'm not sure I can detect what he's saying about what Germany was like at the time he wrote (1961).

If I were not on this self-inflicted quest to trainspot Nobel winners I'd take time to read more by Grass and I can't say that about all the writers I've discovered so far.

Günter Grass, trans Ralph Manheim Cat and Mouse Penguin 1966