Volume 25, Number 18 · November 23, 1978
The One That Got Away
By Nigel Dennis
The Flounder
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 547 pp., $12.00
I think that a personal approach to Günter Grass's new novel is right because it is a work about which one is certain to be wrong. Grass read a couple of chapters from it aloud last year to a New York audience that included 'most of New York's German intelligentsia,' and Miss Marilyn Moorcroft, who was among those present, reported in Commonweal that 'oddly enough, even after the reading, the content of the excerpts of the two chapters…were still hazy in the minds of many of the German listeners.' There is a small grammatical error here, but I am sure that 'content' was the word intended because I am sure that nobody could possibly be hazy about The Flounder's contents. I did feel hazy, and even surly, when I got to the end of the contents, but that was only because there seemed to be no end to them. Trying to pin down the content was my chief problem all along the way, and always being unsure about the content was the main reason why I balked at the endlessness of the contents.
Review, 2522 words
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