I just received the TLS from Sept. 29 in the mail. The feeling of synchronicity of reading the opening review, Ian Brunskill's eminently clear-headed discussion of Guenter Grass's new memoir, "Beim Haeuten der Zwiebel," given the topic of my post on Kertesz from earlier today, was inescapable.
For example, Brunskill writes:
Grass treats – has always treated – the conventions of literary reminiscence and historical recollection as suspect and flawed. Autobiographical truth, he has said before, all too easily gives way to “the old literary lies”. The past is elusive, memory play tricks, the self of narrative is a stranger to the self who writes.
Or consider Mario Vargas Llosa's reaction to the public outcry surrounding the revelations of Grass's teenage service in the Waffen SS in the last months of the second world war, quoted at length by Brunskill. According to Llosa, the true subject of the strong public reaction to Grass previously unknown past was
people’s image of the author that Grass has desperately tried to be for his whole life: one who expresses his opinions on every issue, and for whom life – as literature – adapts to one’s dreams and ideas. A man for whom the writer is the absolute number one, simultaneously entertaining, teaching, giving orientation and guidance. Dear Günter Grass, we have blissfully carried this fiction around with us long enough. It’s over now.
It remains, perhaps, an open question the extent to which Grass's life as a public figure will continue to adapt to his dreams and ideas. But if Brunskill's review makes anything clear, it is the extent to which the image of Grass as a "man for whom the writer is the absolute number one, simultaneously entertaining, teaching, giving orientation and guidance" was hardly a mere fiction.
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