Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
Turncoats
By Gabriele Annan
Too Far Afield
by Günter Grass, Translated from the Germanby Krishna Winston
Harcourt, 658 pp., $30.00
Too Far Afield was published in Germany five years ago, and stirred up a huge literary rumpus. Reviewers for and against the novel tore into it and each other with a savagery rarely experienced in English-language criticism, and enough indignant articles and letters were produced to fill at least two sizable collections in book form. They were published, one in Göttingen by Grass's publisher, Steidl Verlag, the other by the Zeitungsarchiv (Newspaper Archive) in Innsbruck.[*] The man who fired the first shot was the famous and famously fierce literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, writing in the not particularly literary magazine Der Spiegel. His photograph made it onto the cover: he looks beside himself with rage and is shown literally tearing the book in half. He claimed—he hardly needed to—that the photo was a montage. Still, the extra protest added to the decibels, and the photo caption became the title for the continuing debate in the press: Zerreissprobe—a neat pun. Zerreissprobe is a term for 'uncorrected proof'; but the literal meaning is 'proof to be torn up.'
Review, 3993 words
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