On Reading "The Tin Drum".

In his novel, The Tin Drum , Günter Grass notes that attending funerals often reminds one of other funerals attended in the past. I suppose a similar principle might hold up when thinking about, or writing about books one has encountered.

In an earlier post, I wrote of how I came to read His Monkey Wife . While window shopping in a bookstore frequented by a friend and myself, I came upon a collection of short stories by John Collier. The selling point for me were the words on the book's cover - "By the author of His Monkey Wife ". Although I had never heard of Collier or his earlier book, these words intrigued me enough to purchase and read the short story collection. A similar thing happened in the same bookstore around the same time, regarding Grass' novel Cat and Mouse . Again, I was unfamiliar with Grass or his earlier novel, but the words, "By the author of The Tin Drum " was enough to convince me to read Cat and Mouse .

Back in the day (when we didn't even use the phrase "back in the day") it was difficult to get ones hands on every book one might want to read and I had been unable to find a copy of The Tin Drum . It was the blog post on His Monkey Wife that led me to search for The Tin Drum online. It was then that I learned that those two novels by Günter Grass are considered books one and two of his Danzig Trilogy - the third being Dog Years . I downloaded the three books with the intention of reading the three before year's end. I began reading the first book in the trilogy on December 12; certainly enough time left in the year to read all three.

Typhoon Odette had other ideas.

While we were lucky that in our area the typhoon caused few serious problems, we were without electricity for several days and when my Kindle's battery went down, I wasn't able to recharge it until the power returned. During those days, I was forced to read the 20th Century way......books printed on paper - Buddha by Karen Armstrong and The Bhagavad Gita translated by Eknath Easwaran.

The Tin Drum is not an easy read by any means, as a number of reviewers at goodreads.com have pointed out. The protagonist, Oskar Matzerath writes his memoirs while confined in a German mental institution and is viewed by most readers as an unreliable narrator. It is difficult to understand how much of Oskar's account is "real" and how much is delusional. In the end, I had to wonder if Oskar Matzerath was indeed a dwarf (or midget) or if this idea was part of his mental illness.

The novel is bizarre and disturbing, although it finally pulls together (more or less) at the end.That said, I'd like the novel much more if it were shorter.

I'm reading Cat and Mouse now. It's considerably shorter than The Tin Drum so I should be finished soon, though perhaps not soon enough to read Dog Years before the year is out.