Posts

Showing posts from December, 2012

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

An absolute gem by Grass. The book unfolds through most of before, during and after Second World War. The main character is Oskar. A character so hard to imagine but so vividly portrayed that you actually read the book through his eyes. Slowly my childhood - the childhood that means so much to me - slipped away. The pain in my gums, foreshadowing my first teeth, died down; tired, I leaned back: an adult hunchback, carefully though rather too warmly dressed, with a wristwatch, identification papers, a bundle of banknotes in his billfold. I put a cigarette between my lips, set a match to it, and trusted the tobacco to expel that obsessive taste of childhood from my oral cavity. Childhood is the best time of your life - so they say. But for so many, the memory of childhood is merely a burden. You carry so many "symbols of progress" that you wish to imagine all of it never happened. How can you purge it? If only it were as easy as blowing cigarette smoke out. Condemning the first