Grass Günter's Tin drum. Has anybody read this book ?

Question

If so, please explain what his book is about. He won some litrature prize for this book . I found it so boring sofar. I have read it untill (Rasputin and the alphabets) and i don't know why is it so famous work of him? what is this book about?

Answer 1

you might want to read a bit about German history of the time the book is situated. I did not like it either, but I liked the Flounder a lot !!! Grass is one of the best german post war writers, he is dense and very sarcastic. but of german writers I prefer Thomas Mann, Michael Ende.

Answer 2

Yes, I read the book, and also a few other books by Gunther Grass. No, I did not think the book was boring. The book was also made into a film, which was quite good. The book is about a fictitious character, Oskar, who sees the hypocrisy of the adult world and refuses to grow up and be part of it. But while his body stays the same size as a child's, his mind matures and this causes many of the conflicts in the story. Give Literature a chance - 'tis more interesting than an X-Box.

Answer 3

Grass Who?

Answer 4

THE book is about a man that served God in the full nest

Answer 5

I haven't read the book. I find he's a very tedious writer and an elitist. And yes, boring just as you say.
Also, remember that he lied for decades about the fact that he was a member of a Nazi military group. This just came out last year when he published a biography.
He is a farce.

The book was made into a movie with the same title. Here's a summary copied form the Blockbuster website:
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In Volker Schlondorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass's allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and 1940s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late 1990s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Running Time: 142 mins
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/movieDetails/35384

Here's a summary of the book from wikipedia:
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The story is about the life of Oskar Matzerath, who writes his autobiography from memory while in a sanitarium during the years 1952 to 1954. However, Oskar's memories begin before those of ordinary people. The story starts with his own birth, when Oskar sees the light of "two sixty-watt bulbs" in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". At age three he receives a tin drum for his birthday and decides, after observing the obtuseness and duplicity of the adult world, to will himself not to grow up. As a result, he retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, Hitler's holocaust, several love affairs, and the hypocritical world of postwar Europe. Through all this the tin drum remains his treasured possession, and he is willing to kill to retain it.

Oskar considers himself to have two "presumptive fathers" - his mother's husband Alfred, a member of the Nazi Party, and her secret lover Jan, a Polish citizen of Danzig who is executed for defending the Polish Post Office in Danzig during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Oskar's mother having died, Alfred marries Maria, a woman who is secretly Oskar's first mistress. After marrying Alfred, Maria gives birth to Oskar's son, Kurt. But Oskar is disappointed to find that the baby persists in growing up, and will not join him in ceasing to grow at the age of three.

During the war, Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs who entertain the German troops at the front line. But when his second love, the diminutive Roswitha, is killed by Allied troops in the invasion of Normandy, Oskar returns to his family in Danzig where he becomes the leader of a criminal youth gang. The Russian army soon captures Danzig, and Alfred dies after swallowing his party pin to avoid being revealed as a Nazi.

Oskar moves with his widowed stepmother and their son to Düsseldorf, where he models in the nude with Ulla and works engraving tombstones. He falls in love with the saintly Sister Dorothea, a neighbor, but fails to seduce her. Still devoted to his little tin drum, Oskar becomes a virtuoso jazz drummer and achieves fame and riches. One day while walking through a field he finds a severed finger: the ring finger of Sister Dorothea, who has been murdered. He then meets and befriends Vittlar. Oskar allows himself to be falsely convicted of the murder and is confined to an insane asylum, where he writes his memoirs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Drum