There are a few novels I make of point of re-reading every ten years or so: Buddenbrooks, One Hundred Years of Solitude, All the King's Men (the greatest American political novel) and Die Blechtrommel. I am re-reading Die Blechtrommel now, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of its publication in Germany. I have to say that the novel holds up well- perhaps better even than the other novels I mentioned. Grass's prose is as fresh and muscular now as it was in 1959. One could make the case that Die Blechtrommel is the greatest postwar novel of the last century.
Grass also achieved unprecedented popularity in the US when The Tin Drum appeared in 1963. The book sold 400,000 copies in the first year and Grass was a celebrity. By 1970 he was so popular in the US that he receieved the ultimate honor: Grass was on the cover of Time Magazine. This was back when Americans were still interested in international art and literature.
The Time writers were effusive in their praise back in 1970:
MANN and Camus: dead. Sartre: silent. Malraux: Minister of Culture. The old mullers and brooders, the old definers of crisis, are heard no more in the European novel. For a long time it seemed that there might be no successors. A surprise candidate has now emerged from the wings, an odd figure with a loser's accent and a bizarre past. His earlier books had astonishing power, using dwarfs and drums and scarecrows to explore the nightmare dominion of Nazi Germany and the guilt that followed. ...At 42, Grass certainly does not look like the world's, or Germany's, greatest living novelist, though he may well be both.
It should be said that the American reading public was not nearly as prudish back in the 1960s, and I am not aware of any efforts to ban the novel in the US, while the book was publicly burned in Duesseldorf by a religious yourth organization. All of that changed just a decade later with the release of Volker Schlöndorff's film The Tin Drum, which as confiscated by authorities in Oklahoma as "child pornography".
Those English-speaking readers who read Ralph Manheim's translation may want to try the new translation by Breon Mitchell, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt commissioned for the half-century anniversary.
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