The Tin Drum

Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era. - Observer

Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations...Mitchell's excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece. - The Times

At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice - Dickens made me want to be a writer - but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens' full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience. - New York Times Book Review

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game - Daily Telegraph

Encountering The Tin Drum in the early sixties was like discovering a new planet, a reinvention of literature. It brings the exhilaration of discovery, linked with an enormous gratitude for the way in which Günter Grass makes the world a worthwhile place to be in, and living a worthwhile thing to do. He has forever pushed back - and opened up - our concept and awareness of what is real, and what is possible, and what we dare to dream about. - André Brink