Volume 39, Number 19 · November 19, 1992
Graveyard Utopia
By Gabriele Annan
The Call of the Toad
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 486 pp., $19.95
Günter Grass is the grand old man of German literature and its liberal conscience on matters like disarmament, abortion, the third world, and German reunification, which he vehemently opposed on the grounds that two small Germanys were more beautiful and less threatening than one large one. The fiction he published in the Eighties was not, on the whole, well received. This depressing fact was mentioned by many German reviewers of his latest novel, and must have been on his own mind when he wrote it. The Call of the Toad has a wan, valedictory ring. The title is a literal translation of the German Unkenrufe, but Germans use the word metaphorically as well, to mean prophecy of doom.
Review, 1595 words
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