Some say this is “the” novel of the 20th century. I first read The Tin Drum as a teenager (and saw the film too). It certainly made an impression then, and so it was intriguing to have the chance to reread 30 years or so on. I was surprised how much of the plot — that centres around a clairvoyant boy/man now in a mental institution recounting his prior life — I remembered. However, The Tin Drum is not a candidate for any “best novel” award. Sure there is no way Salman Rushdie could have written Midnight's Children without Grass's work, but the latter's novel is hard going for any reader. It is dense, odd, sprawling, often unnerving (particularly the meaningless violence — even if this is somewhat a critique of Nazism), but at the same time rewarding — at least on finishing and then looking back. Oskar is an archetypal unreliable narrator and the text veers between the first and third person. The text is littered with musical references and reads with a certain rhythm, even if the most obvious musical precedent would be jazz. At its heart lies an implicit meditation on the fine boundary between sanity and insanity, and equally how art can be a form of hope amidst ugliness and horror. 7.5/10.
By Günter Grass