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Michael Hulse
THE CALL OF THE TOAD
Secker & Warburg £14.99, pp. 248 tinter Grass and the new Germany have been conspicuously at odds. Apalled by the triumphalism -that-fellow-ad- the--- -onenine Cirass_y_arneri of In return of steamroller Teutonicism in a too- hastily unified nation. He put the case for a gradual rapprochement of the two Germanies via confederation. Now, almost three years after that heady night in circumspection might have averted the pan-German unpleasantness that is currently 1---o-c-vding otiCarrifiettiOry Of 11W initial euphoria.
I believe Grass is right. Most of his - - infect-e-34ew-c.:ap$.
very far from his best. where, are being reinterred in their Pon German death is once again exported to Poland (though this time the aggression is economie'rnther than military) and Polish soil becomes German by the burial of German bodies there.
'I'm drinking to forget my wife and kids. That's them at the other end of the bar ' Kampf as well as Gunter Grass. The plot presents this new invasion via the dull love story of an unprepossessing Darby and Joan. Alexander Reschke, .a German born, like Grass himself, in Danzig in 1927 and now a professor of fine art in the Ruhr, meets Alexandra Piatkowska, a Polish expert in restoring artwork gilding, now nitshin. • I • 1 D . 1989.
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people'. Well met, indeed. In a Gdansk cemetery, the two hit on a plan to enable Germans displaced from Poland in this 'century of expulsions' to be buried in 'home soil'. This idea, which a CiatiOttit. 'ukSilup dbJCI LS IS IdSIi% iv the rottsn-tiefffah--L-Ithar-- Cemetery Association. The first temeterY of reconciliation' is consecrated on the very day that Poland's western border is official- ly recognised by Germany. Many are those countrymen disagree, though. The coffee- Germans who now want to be buried in house view on Grass now is that he is a Poland when their time comes — crotchety Jeremiah out of touch with the German soil', as one undiplomatic b.c.h.-s.k, anti-they— of-the near their last resting right to be, The_call_of lAe Yawl: is Soon those alicativ dead; aid briel see Naples, and die. There are other characters and sub-plots, including the promising but undevelocie4 tale of a Bengali who succeeds in the neW Poland with a bicycle rickshaw business -- a quirky Grass conceit that might have offered a greater purchase on shifting con- ditions in the new Europe. But the crux of the novel lies in its rather plodding attack on German necrophiliI6- tinailow - 'aggression. On that, it has nothing new r° gist of Grass's misgivings, but equallY tn1r. mlush_ nleacnre in the fiction he's made out of them. The novel- - is unfocussed, long-winded and de" _ - New Yor-ker who worked for Ralph Manheim, the translator, who died a With this publication we must saluw - th. nf RS Manheirn,!
r intelligence during the war, had a I° 4 translations of Brecht, Heidegger and
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