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G nter Grass (1927-2015) was Germany's most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility- novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass's first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.
An aging German art-historian, Alexander Reschke, meets a Polish woman, Alexandra Piatkowska, a fine-arts re-gilder, at an outdoor flower-stall in Gdansk, Poland (once Danzig). Widower and widow finds themselves talking, then together visiting a local cemetery - where the tragedy of the displaced German Danzigers (like Reschke) and the battered Poles who bore Hitler's fury seems crystallized. Over a home-cooked meal of sauteed mushrooms and wine, the old pair come up with an idea - a cemetery of reconciliation where native Danzigers, Polish and German, could find final rest. The idea also leads to a romantic affiliation of these two oldsters - but it's downhill from there, as the idea becomes one under which third-party German commercial imperialism recapitulates Nazi land-grabbing, a greed that post-Soviet, impoverished Poles are helpless to counteract. What a pain in the butt Grass must be to the Germans! Though the sour little fantasy here goes on too long - losing sight of the charmingly seedy lovers (and of a delicious Bengali entrepreneur who sweeps through the continent selling rickshaws to Europa's traffic-paralyzed cities) in favor of bureaucratic complication - Grass's naysaying verve is infectious. His metaphors - the cemetery, the gold leaf, the rickshaw - are as light as air but trenchant. Spun like a jazz solo, the book seems a lot more casual than you later realize it is - which is one of its choicest pleasures. (Kirkus Reviews)
