The Call of the Toad

Gunter Grass

Rounding the far turn and into the stretch of the grass marathon, with only one extremely dauting book (The Flounder) left in my present collection. My first response to this book is to say "ignore everything on the dust jacket." There's a lot of spewing about satire on capitalism gone swry in post-unification Germany, and maybe I'm just not politically savvy enough to catch it, but I didn't think that's what this book was about, despite Grass' constant left-leaning and tendency to poke fun at all things Western. The real center of this book is the relationship between Alexander and Alexandra, a couple described on the jacket (again, somewhat in error) as being "in late middle age" when they meet-- during the book, Alexandra celebrates her sixtieth birthday, and it is implied in more than one place that Alexander is approaching seventy. The two start their relationship with an idea-- that expatriates who were kicked out of Poland, or fled, during WW2 want to be buried in their homeland. Simple enough, right? So the two cook up a plan for a "cemetery of reconciliation," a place where expatriates' bodies can be shipped after death for burial in their homeland. All in all a noble idea, I think. But, of course, business being what it is, others have to get involved, a board of directors is formed, and the usual silliness begins. Sure, fun is poked at capitalism, but no more so than fun is poked at communism. And while it's a subtext, it's no more central to the relationship between the two main characters than is the subplot of Alexander's growing friendship with Chatterjee, a Bangladeshi national who's come to Poland to start a rickshaw service in order to combat pollution in major cities.

What's interesting about this book is that it, written in the early 1990s and set at the close of the century, presages many of the events that have since taken place in the world. Grass predicted the re-rise of Hussein and a second Gulf conflict in 1999, many of the difficulties that have come from the reunification of Germany, etc. While he was off on the rickshaw thing (he was convinced that by 2000 rickshaws would be the main form of transportation in cities the world over), many of the other events have an eerie similarity to what's actually happened in the eight or nine years since the book was written.

As to Grass' style... it's Grass. It's pointed, funny at times, unapologetically poignant. It's as worth reading as everything else of his I've read. Not as rewarding as some of the longer works, but doesn't have the scope of those, either. It's an interesting little book, and it's fun. ***