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The Nobel Prize for literature has often gone to writers whose books are as unapproachable as their names: Sien- kiewicz, Eucken, Gjellerup, Sillanpaa. Last week the last prize of the century belatedly went to a familiar face, 71-year-old Gunter Grass, who worked as a farm laborer, miner, black marketeer, stonecutter, and washboard player before becoming the greatest German writer of the post-Hitler era. Grass brought German literature down to earth (the antihero of his most famous novel, The Tin Drum, is a midget, and other books inhabit the perspectives of a dog, snail, flounder, and rat). The result is an evocation of life in stubborn, pungent detail, combined with a sweeping historical vision. No one would call his novels easy reads, but there are plenty of inducements for picking them up. Among his best:
The Tin Drum (1959) The Hitler years and the era of postwar forgetfulness are satirically filtered through a childlike drummer, Oskar Matzerath. Cat and Mouse (1961) It conjures up 1930s adolescence in Danzig, where Grass grew up, and shows how German ordinariness both survived Hitler and was deformed by him. The Rat (1986) Grass intimates disaster in the dying forests, polluted streams, and expanding corporations and waistlines of complacent West Germany.
