My Century

From Barnes & Noble

A Century Ends

Newly christened Nobel Laureate Günter Grass grabbed the world's attention in 1958 with a debut novel, The Tin Drum, that examined Germany's recent past from the viewpoint of a boy who stopped growing at the age of three. This enabled little Oskar to witness history from a unique and unnoticed perspective. The Nobel Committee surely chose Grass in part for his astonishing capacity to render the larger scope of humanity and history through the smaller lens of the individual. In his latest offering, My Century, Grass confirms his virtuosity as he chronicles his, and Germany's, century through the eyes of nearly a hundred different observers—some very ordinary, others extraordinary. In doing so, Grass simultaneously meditates on a tumultuous century and guides his readers from everyday reality to a higher realm of symbolism and allegory.

The form of the book allows Grass to exploit his considerable talents to their utmost. The book's first chapter, entitled "1900," begins with this sentence: "Me, trading places with myself, I was in the thick of things, year in and year out." Although we soon learn that this is a soldier speaking, it may as well be Grass himself, because he goes on to live up to the soldier's promise, offering a different chapter and narrator for every year of the century. We pass from year to year through the eyes of, among others, an antique collector, an incontinent child ("And so it happened that in the year 1907 I pissed not only my pants but also my father's neck"), a senator, a radio broadcaster, a schoolteacher, a painter's assistant, and a sports fanatic. The two world wars are each told by a single narrator, providing Grass the opportunity to delve somewhat deeper into these crucial periods.

Grass's conceit is, suffice to say, somewhat disjointed: Each narrator is only with us for a couple of pages. But it is not long before the choppiness of his fractured narrative recedes, and a larger and more fluid structure begins to assert itself; Günter Grass is one of the rare authors who can address the forces of history explicitly without getting lost in cliché and abstraction. By the chapters of the century's teens, as we see the seeds of the Third Reich, small events and details begin to assume a subtle but forceful symbolic weight. By World War II, as a war correspondent who "rarely has anything sensational to report" stares out into the ocean, first singing "Hurrah for the storm and the thundering waves" and then, finally, "just star[ing] mutely out at the sea," the everyday has become allegorical. The reader can sense an overarching, intelligent creative entity—"Me, trading places with myself"—that seemingly could turn its attention toward any given person and tell us something important about history and humanity through his or her eyes.

Tolstoy argued that wars are won and history is made by the foot soldiers, Hegel that certain crucial individuals shape it to their ends. Grass boldly picks both sides of the argument, sometimes giving us a privileged glance at the actions of the century's leaders and artists through the eyes of their attendants, other times zeroing in on an anonymous participant in a watershed event. In a few cases, such as a narrative of a large woman named Bertha who had a certain gun named after her, Grass suggests that the line between the somebodies and the nobodies—using any of the limitless definitions of these terms—is blurrier than we might think.

Many of the themes of My Century mirror those of Germany's tortured 20th century. But beyond war and peace, love and hate, remembrance, forgiveness, and forgetting, Grass's narrators focus on topics that might be ignored by a more traditional historical survey. New technologies and fashions come up again and again. Radios, motor cars, and even straw hats play their part: "There was much that was new at the time," says a civil servant who, in 1902, has succumbed to the latest fad and bought a "flat-topped, buttercup-yellow, vainglorious straw hat." He goes on to enumerate a theme that Grass revisits through many different voices: "And since progress was the keynote of the day, many straw hatters were curious about times to come." Grass doesn't let us forget that history is at its most exciting not after the fact, but in the moment of its inception. Sometimes, as in a gripping description of a Nazi mob seen from the rooftop of a Jewish artist, we see an event through the wise eyes of an observer who understands what must follow; other times, such as a chapter by a Nazi who is being transferred from a camp after botching the murder of a Jew that was meant to look like suicide, we vicariously experience the blinding power of propaganda and distortion.

Another recurring theme in My Century is that of play, and specifically sports. Is the history of the 20th century best told through the history of its sporting events? Probably not, but in choosing to focus on so many different sports narratives, Grass tells us something about his own project. One hundred brief chapters surely cannot "do justice" to the complexity of Germany's 20th century. But by calling forth images of boxing rings, racing tracks, and soccer fields, Grass suggests that with a certain arbitrary setting of limits—the lines of the soccer pitch or the sampling of individual voices for his narrative—we can make a leap that helps us grasp something that is otherwise too grand and elusive to comprehend. This is the power of symbol and parable, and, as Grass's supporters on the Nobel Committee no doubt understood, he is perhaps our greatest living mythmaker.

—Jake Kreilkamp

About the Author

Recently named the recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass is Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer. His most recent book in English is a collection of poetry, Novemberland.

Michael Pakenham

,,,a fast-paced, genuinely interesting fictional appreciation of the last 100 years.
— Baltimore Sun

Michael Scott Moore

Gunter Grass' new novel, My Century, is a pastiche of 100 little stories rooted in the political surges of Germany's violent and fascinating past 100 years. Grass has been a Nobel candidate for long enough to know that the prize for literature typically goes to writers with political stances (preferably left of center), so it's possible to see the novel as a shameless bid for laurels: In this double-anniversary year of 1999 (40 years after the publication of The Tin Drum, 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), in the wake of a book as millennium-gimmicky and politically minded as this one, how could the Swedish Academy not have awarded the prize to Grass?

He deserves it, of course. He should have gotten it years ago, after The Danzig Trilogy. But the new book has a shrill and personal tone that conjures up Oskar Mazerath raising his glass-shattering voice before the committee: "Hey! Guys! Remember me? Come on!"

My Century tells the saga of German history since 1900 in a noisy fugue of voices, with each brief chapter assigned a single year. The "my" in the title is both personal and paternal. Grass turns up as a character 13 times, but the other voices are his as well, in the sense that Grass regards himself as the voice of Germany. It's an immodest conceit, but it holds the book together. Soldiers, housewives, cops, journalists, grandparents, activists, a professor, a dirigible pilot, a businesswoman and ravers in the Berlin Love Parade all contribute their little share to a mosaic of the German nation in war and peace. The result is not a novel so much as a scrapbook of commentary, because what drives you through isn't story or theme -- it's rank curiosity about what Günter Grass will have to say about some juicy year. This tactic assumes, of course, that you care about Grass or about German politics; if you don't, My Century may read like an elaborate inside joke.

He puts both friends and enemies into the book. Willy Brandt, friend and former chancellor, becomes a moral lightning rod for German and Polish racism. One narrator is irritated by "that writer with the walrus mustache" -- that is, Grass; another refers to "the man who's putting me down on paper here and thinks he can give me a grade (social behavior: unsatisfactory)." These bits are funny but shallow. Grass also has a sublime talent for common voices, especially women's, and the best chapters are narrated by salty grandmothers. "1946" is a reminiscence by one of the so-called rubble women who cleaned up Berlin after World War II, brick by brick. "Rubble women," she says. "Not a man in the bunch. Wasn't enough of them. And them that was, they just stood around and did nothing or else ran the black market. No dirty work for them!"

Unfortunately, regional voices never survive translation, and this chapter is a prime example of how much weaker the book is in English. Translator Michael Henry Heym's version of "1946" ends with a simple reunion in a cafe -- "coffee and cake at Schilling's. I always get a kick out of it" -- instead of the original's noisy Kaffeeklatsch of ex-rubble women, with its echoes of personal triumph. "Is immer lustig da," the final line goes in German (literally, "It's always cheerful there"), and that "lustig" stands out after pages of vividly rendered suffering and destruction. The original has not just untranslatable voices but also very translatable overtones that Heym doesn't or can't render. His English tastes like thin beer next to Grass' schnapps.

The chapters that work well in English include accounts of a fictional meeting between war novelists Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque, who spend a wine-soaked meal (and five chapters) arguing and reminiscing about the First World War ("1914-1918"); escapes from East Berlin through hand-dug tunnels and sewers ("1961"); an elderly banker and onetime collaborator with the Nazis who becomes a punk ("1978"); a retiree who hunts mushrooms in Germany after the Chernobyl meltdown ("1986"); and the Berlin Wall's retirement ("1989"). My Century remains a beguiling people's history of Germany as long as Grass resists his urge to go on record with moral and political stances. But Grass, like the Swedish Academy, knows he has a bully pulpit, and when he fails to resist that urge, his novel becomes a book for the moment instead of the ages -- mortalized, you might say, by the master's public squabbles.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Nobel laureate Grass's deft new collection of stories thoroughly and intimately marks the passing of the 20th century. Comprising 100 monologues, each named after a year of the century and spoken by characters who represent a broad spectrum of German society, the work becomes the literary equivalent of a choral symphony. The stories include the reminiscences of ex-Nazis about their activities in 1934; a dead woman's perspective on Germany after the crumble of the Berlin Wall (1999); a delirious letter by the turn-of-the-century poet Else Lasker-Sch ler (found by the story's narrator in a used book), in which she imagines herself to be 20 years younger than she is (1901); and the author's descriptions of his beleaguered personal life (1987). Several entries establish some continuity from year to year, while other segments clash brilliantly with each other. The volume progresses less like a narrative than like an argument, each year's oral history advancing the thesis that history and personal identity are inextricably linked. Unlike Grass's earlier politically tinged and more willfully surreal work, this novel is consistently realistic, with only a few exceptions. Although the units are always engaging, some of them are drier than others, based upon abstruse but suggestive information, such as the details of munitions manufacture or obscure battle maneuvers. The effect of the episodic narration is a sort of cacophony, but one that is finally resolved into a complex, multipart harmony. Much like the voices echoing in a train station or airport, this cumulative sound reminds the reader of the rich fabric of humankind's collective existence. Grass (The Tin Drum) concludes with the memories of a 103-year-old woman who has been brought back to life by her novelist son for the purposes of his fiction. As she says: "I'm also looking forward to the year 2000. We'll see what comes of it... " (Dec.) FYI: This volume will be published simultaneously around the world. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The most recent recipient of the Nobel prize, Grass here offers a collection of stories, which, though not exactly linked, coalesce to form a unified vision of the 20th century. The title's simultaneous aspirations to both sweeping grandeur and a highly individual story are artfully maintained in the text. Each year is represented by a two- or three-page vignette, each told by a different anonymous narrator. The plots of the pieces are small to nonexistent, the sorts of musings and memories one turns over while riding a subway or rummaging through an attic. And, truth be told, they are not always completely engaging when read scattershot or with pauses between chapters. By book's end, however, they amount to a kinetic vision of a city square--unknown people filled with personal preoccupations come together to form a shifting pattern recognized only by the reader endowed with a bird's-eye view. A fine addition to literary fiction collections in both public and academic libraries.--Eric Bryant, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Diane Rubin

Gunter Grass has combined imaginative vision, political commitment, humane wisdom, and an unfailing sense of humor to keep his equilibrium.

Christian Science Monitor

Hugh Macpherson

As millennium books go, My Century is a superior choice. One hundred stories by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a novelist who..."has created some of the most evocative prose in German."
—TheTimes Literary Supplement