The Tin Drum - Softcover

Gunter Grass

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394703006 ISBN 13: 9780394703008

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1964

Synopsis

On his third birthday, at three feet tall, Oskar decides to stop growing. On the same day, he receives his first tin drum. Together with his piercing scream, he wields his drum as an anarchic weapon, drawing forth memories from the past and passing judgement on the horrors, injustices, and eccentricities he observes through the long nightmare of the Nazi era. Oskar participates in the German post-war economic miracle - working variously in the black market, as an artist's model, in a troupe of travelling musicians - yet he remains haunted by the deaths of his parents, and afflicted by his responsibility for past sins.

About this title

Review:

"Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era." (Observer)

"Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations...Mitchell's excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece." (The Times)

"Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game" (Daily Telegraph)

"At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice - Dickens made me want to be a writer - but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens' full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience." (John Irving, New York Times Book Review)

From the Publisher:

ONE OF TWELVE TITLES IN VINTAGE'S A FORMAT WAR PROMOTION. Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game' Daily Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1964
• ISBN 10: 0394703006
• ISBN 13: 9780394703008
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 594