The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass · first published 1962
38% recommend50% neutral13% critical
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I don't know if it really qualifies as magic realism but Gunter Grass is a very good writer that gives this weird fascinating vibe. 'The Tin Drum' and 'The Flounder' are very interesting books, highly recommend.
on “Haruki Murakami Introduces the Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories” ↗…another question entirely. ("No", I'm afraid, is the answer. There are better books along the same lines that are also challenging but less so. I recommend 100 Years of Solitude, Midnight's Children, or Tin Drum). Avoid Ulysses. There's such bad, lame "philosophy of math" in there it really turned me off, made it seem like the whole book is just Joyce showing off how smart he thinks he is.
on “The Most Abandoned Books on GoodReads (2019)” ↗The Tin Drum is an amazing book and it influenced a lot of fiction - from Midnight's Children to A Prayer for Owen Meany. Some of his shorter books are a little more accessible (Cat and Mouse or Crabwalk, for instance).…
on “German author Guenter Grass dies” ↗Still crawling thru "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass. An epic reading. If you ever wanted to know about the nazi and post-nazi germany and get force-fed with entirely different topics in the process.
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗I am very fond of Oblomov. Always considered him a role model, in hypothesis. I'll get around to emulating him one day. I suspect Günter Grass was a fan too. Meyn the trumpeter in "the tin drum" and his lifestyle.
on “A New Oral Culture” ↗…writing. If you're planning to read a modern German novel, avoid this guy at all cost. Read Handke or Jelinek, Glavinic or Kracht, Gernhard or Böll. Or any of a million others. Don't let anyone sell you the Tin Drum, please.
on “Günter Grass: From Enfant Terrible to Grand Old Man” ↗…von Fontanes „Effi Briest“, Thomas Manns „Buddenbrooks“, Kafkas „Prozess“, Döblins „Berlin Alexanderplatz“ oder Musils „Mann ohne Eigenschaften“. Which says, that there was no other book [than The Tin Drum] in German language that had a comparable presence in the last epoch of international belletristic. It then puts Grass alongside Goethe, arguably the greatest honor a German (or really any) writer can…
on “German author Guenter Grass dies” ↗…https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The... (for objections, see [1]) That's nonfiction, and anachronistic. As far as fiction in the correct setting goes, I'm drawing a blank, and I even had to read things like "At the Bridge" and "The Tin Drum" in school (as well as watch dokus like "The White Rose" and "Triumph of the Will"[2]). Most stories I know are of the unrepentant[3]; maybe I can dig some repentant ones up later? [0] dereactionalisation?…
on “Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium” ↗