He even has one very special power that allows him to control many of his own wishes. Not only does he control his own growth, not allowing himself to exceed 3 foot tall for much of his life, but he is also born with full faculties of thought, memory, speech and powers to act in the world not normally a part of any infant or young child’s world. In the main this is sort of a story of World War II from the standpoint of one telling a story in the model of magical realism, and Oscar is the person who has several unearthly abilities. When he is born his family is living in Dansk in Poland (today’s Danzig, Germany) 1924, during the years between the two world wars. Oscar does get his drum on his third birthday, and he quickly learns to play it and does so with such vehemence and constancy that he goes through drum after drum after drum for most of his life. And, according to the text, is pretty much what happens. One of his earliest claims which lets the reader know this will be a very different sort of story is that Oscar decided at birth, that he would not grow to be over three foot tall!įurther, he claims to have been aware that he would be given a tin drum for his third birthday and that would be a central event in his life. In Oscar’s narrations he just treats many situations of impossibility as though they were ordinary everyday events. The novel has much of the form of the South American novels of magical realism. Nor does author Gunter Grass want there to be. However, there is virtually nothing that we could call “normal” about Oscar. He was born 1924, thus is just 30 years old. It is sort of the story of Oscar Matzerath, narrated by him while in a mental institution in Germany in 1954. I find this to be a very difficult novel to describe or to write about. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim Book review - By Gunter Grass – THE TIN DRUM Reviews of Nobel Prize winner
0 kommentar(er)
