Book Review: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.

Book: The Tin Drum/ Author: Gunter Grass (Nobel Laureate)/ Publisher:Vintage (May 5, 2005)/ Pages 576/ ISBN: 0099483505

I have just finished reading Gunter grass' The Tin Drum and I had to wait for it to sink in. A masterpiece of sort, you cannot let yourself to reading anything below this once you have read the book.

The blurb of the book says too little to seize a reader, but the opening lines do it efficiently well. It goes "Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me." It arrested me and i couldn't take the novel off until I was done with it, though at times feeling disgusted at the Freudian libido of the protagonist Oskar Matzareth, the cornucopian family tree, the strange and repulsive anecdotes. In spite of all that you cannot put the book down.

Subtly knit with metaphors, magic realism, and a plethora of narrative techniques the novel is written in form of Bildungsroman, a term from German literature signifying 'novels of education' or 'formation'. The subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist's mind and character, as he passes through varied experiences- and usually through a spiritual crisis- into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world. But unlike Goethe's Wilhem Meister, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, The Tin Drum is a Bildunsroman with a difference.

It is a story of a gnome, Oskar Matzareth who has willingly stopped himself from growing above the age of three. Oskar declares it on his third birthday: "It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer; that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire." Oskar's development into maturity (mentally if not physically) is fretted with strange and macabre moments. The grotesque depiction of the world through his vision becomes both sad and disgusting.

Oskar by no means is an ordinary man, he can astonish you by "singing glasses to pieces", a congenital gift he discovered too early in life; by his continuous and manipulative drumming which he is obsessed with; by his bizarre rationale for committing patricide; by his knack for differentiating smells and by his insightful depiction of other characters.

Though completely personal in narration, the novel has undertones of the atrocities Germans went through during the world war II .The novel has some thrilling episodes in light of which one could identify with Oskar's unwillingness to grow. The novel gives an insight into the rise of Nazis and the havoc that resulted. When such a re telling of history is heard from a man who 'is an inmate of a mental hospital', an insane dwarf, one gets a peep into the horror that sanity and reason fail to provide.

This book is not for everyone, it is a complex and disturbing read. Read it if you are one of the sorts who look for something beyond plot and action. It is the hallucinatory prose where sentences run into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages that will keep you pinned to the book. But you must give this one a try. It is worth the effort. This book is an example of great literature.