Volume 20, Number 17 · November 1, 1973
Slug of Redemption
By Neal Ascherson
From the Diary of a Snail
by Günter Grass
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 310 pp., $7.95
Among the things which Günter Grass is good at—as he might put it, in one of his less engaging habits of phrase: writingsculptingdrawingtalktalkingbarbilliardstombstonemaking—there is cooking. He comes back to cooking several times in From the Diary of a Snail, not to a classic cuisine or to Utopian rinds and grains, but to great thick cauldrons full of Central Europe's fancy: tripe with caraway seeds and tomatoes and garlic, mutton with lentils, 'green eel' from the dirty old Havel lakes, beef heart stuffed with prunes, pheasant with weinkraut, hashed lung. Novels are a sort of soup, drawn out of every kind of bone, stray vegetable, and stock from past meals. In the present case, however, Grass has chosen to serve up the ingredients with their end product. We get a novel, a central narrative, and interleaved with it an assorted mass of diary, fantasy, and reflection.
Review, 1993 words
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