A writer whose drumbeat still resonates

With Gabriel Garcia Marquez and some of his contemporaries in eastern Europe, Gunter Grass has surely been one of the great shapers of li...

With Gabriel Garcia Marquez and some of his contemporaries in eastern Europe, Gunter Grass has surely been one of the great shapers of literary consciousness in the latter half of the 20th century. From the moment The Tin Drum rapped out its new and disturbing tunes, his prodigious inventiveness and creative energy, his vivid and very German sense of picaresque and parody, and his engagement with history and politics tempered by a very modern scepticism helped to restore to the novel some of the ambition and largeness of the great 19th-century practitioners.

Salman Rushdie acknowledges his debt enthusiastically: 8220;This is what Grass8217;s great novel said to me in its drumbeats. Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets8221;.

That seems as good an account as you could find of the stirring effect of that elegy for his Vistula heartland, which was also a shocking challenge to the Germans of the Wirtschaftswunder economic miracle years to remember the Nazi past.

The novellaCat And Mouse and the long novel Dog Years continued those Danzig explorations before Grass turned his gaze directly to contemporary Germany in Local Anaesthetic, which begins in a dentist8217;s chair, and From the Diary of a Snail, his version of docu-fiction.

The Flounder, his very particular engagement with feminism and much else, and Meeting at Telgte are two of the best of the rest of his considerable output. With its games with mythology, anthropology and Grimm fairytale parodies, Grass seems to recover in The Flounder the energies that drove the writing of The Tin Drum. Meeting at Telgte, one of his most genial works, imagines the writers of the German baroque at the desolate end of the Thirty Years War meeting in the same cause of renewal 8212; of language and imagination 8212; that brought together Grass and Heinrich Bill in the Gruppe 47 in the rubble of Hitler8217;s Berlin.

But perhaps he is too demanding, too ambitious for today8217;s readers,notably unambitious in their politics and not wanting art to give them a hard time either.

Wide Field, the big recent novel in which he combined his unpopular reservations about German unification the patronising, colonialist treatment of the easterners with a history of Prussia got short shrift from the critics. We shall have to wait for a little more of that uneasy future to enrol before we can be sure whether they were right.