Peeling the Onion - Hardcover

Grass, Gunter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014779 ISBN 13: 9780151014774

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007

Synopsis

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published.

During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion—which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany—reveals Grass at his most intimate.

About this title

Review:

"An exquisitely constructed narrative... Peeling the Onion is a genuine masterpiece" (Independent on Sunday)

"A memoir of rare literary beauty" (New Yorker)

"As a writer, his influence still looms large, and Peeling the Onion is a reminder why. It has that same imaginative accuracy that made The Tin Drum a bestseller" (The Times)

"An ingenious but treacherous text that glides constantly between past and present, first and third person, memory and imagination" (Evening Standard)

"This subtle and expertly written book is really a memoir about forgetting" (Sebastian Faulks Sunday Times)

Book Description:

The memoir of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0151014779
• ISBN 13: 9780151014774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 425