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During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.
Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion—which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany—reveals Grass at his most intimate.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 20, 2007 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781400125067
- File size: 445981 KB
- Duration: 15:29:07
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Günter Grass, the German writer best known for The Tin Drum, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. Given his stature, readers have awaited his memoir eagerly. But no matter how interesting the memoir or the life behind it, fifteen-and-a-half hours is a long time to listen to a mostly monotone and rather slow reading. The plus side, of course, is that listeners aren't likely to miss a word of Grass's book, which became a controversial and hurried publication when it became known that he was about to be outed as a Nazi sympathizer, something he'd vociferously attacked in others. Still, the links between autobiography and fiction are fascinating as he continually inserts references to how the person in his real life was transformed into a character in one of his many novels. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine -
May 7, 2007
T
he German edition of this memoir by Nobel Prize–winning novelist Grass caused a stir with its revelations about the author's youthful service in the Waffen SS combat unit during the last months of WWII. According to his deliberately disjointed, impressionistic account of the war, Grass never fired a shot and spent his time fleeing both the Russians and German military police hunting for deserters, but he dutifully shoulders a “joint responsibility” for Nazi war crimes and a guilt and shame that “gnaw, gnaw, ceaselessly.” With less to repudiate in his postwar life as a budding sculptor and poet up to his 1959 breakthrough with The Tin Drum,
he grows more engaged in his story as he recounts love affairs, bohemian idylls (he once played in an impromptu jazz quartet with Louis Armstrong) and his attempts to sift emotional wreckage from the past. Along the way, Grass notes people and events that he reworked into fictional characters and plots, and does quirky profiles of influential figures, including his penis and typewriter. In this otherwise very novelistic memoir, there's not much of a narrative arc, beyond the satisfaction of the author's perpetual “hungers” for food, sex and art, but Grass's powerfully evocative memories are spellbinding. -
August 20, 2007
Grass\x92s memoir of his wartime activity, including the scandalous revelation that he had served in the notorious Waffen SS as a teenager, is shocking enough. Given the heated division between Grass partisans who passionately defend the Nobel Prize\x96winning novelist and Grass-haters who see him as the embodiment of moral hypocrisy, any reading of his latest work needs little in the way of amplification or hoopla. Good news for Grass, then, that Norman Dietz has been hired to read his memoir. As per usual, Dietz reads with smooth efficiency and understated authority. His voice untouched by masculine bluster, Dietz has a pleasingly idiosyncratic tone, more favorite uncle than television announcer\x97to his credit. A legend (at least to audiobook listeners), Dietz is a name that offers the assurance of skill without grandstanding. On passionately fraught ground, inflamed by the still unhealed wounds of WWII, Dietz delivers once more. He may not be able to put out the fires Grass\x92s memoir has set, but his work allows readers to appreciate it or castigate it on its own merits. Simultaneous release with the Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, May 7). -
October 29, 2007
Grass’s memoir of his wartime activity, including the scandalous revelation that he had served in the notorious Waffen SS as a teenager, is shocking enough. Given the heated division between Grass partisans who passionately defend the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and Grass-haters who see him as the embodiment of moral hypocrisy, any reading of his latest work needs little in the way of amplification or hoopla. Good news for Grass, then, that Norman Dietz has been hired to read his memoir. As per usual, Dietz reads with smooth efficiency and understated authority. His voice untouched by masculine bluster, Dietz has a pleasingly idiosyncratic tone, more favorite uncle than television announcer—to his credit. A legend (at least to audiobook listeners), Dietz is a name that offers the assurance of skill without grandstanding. On passionately fraught ground, inflamed by the still unhealed wounds of WWII, Dietz delivers once more. He may not be able to put out the fires Grass’s memoir has set, but his work allows readers to appreciate it or castigate it on its own merits. Simultaneous release with the Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, May 7).
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