THE RAT. Translated By Ralph Manheim

Grass, Gunter

ISBN 10: 0151759200 / ISBN 13: 9780151759200

Published by San Diego, NY & London. 1987. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich / A Helen & Kurt Wolff Book, 1987

About this Item

black 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. remainder copy in fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. top edg has black ink mark, other edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining. book is as new but has a remainder mark. first edition so stated. first printing (#1 in # line). 371p. novels. fiction. german literature ~ In this superbly inventive, beautifully crafted novel, Gunter Grass relates, in dreamlike sequences, the end of this world and the beginning of an age of rats. Grass received her as a gift one Christmas. She was sitting under the tree in her gift~wrapped cage, amid fleece~lined slippers, a hand~colored map, a handsome engraving. That's how the rat came into Grass's life and imagination. Dream alternates with reality in this story within a story within a story. Of Grass and his Christmas rat. Of a group of liberated women on a research ship in the Baltic Sea, complaining, lamenting, to the clatter of their knitting needles. Of our old friend the tin drummer, Oscar Matzerath, now sixty, balding, plagued by prostate troubles, and head of a major video corporation whose motto is: "We are creating the future." At his Grandmother Anna Koljaiczek's 107th birthday party, he shows a video of the re~greening of Germany carried out by characters from the pages of the Brothers Grimm~Rumpelstiltskin, the Frog King~and the Brothers Grimm themselves, now ministers of the environment in the Bonn government. But the rat intrudes in all these stories with stories of her own, challenging our narrator in his dreams and in his realities, arguing with him, interrupting, threatening. He, in turn, fights to preserve the human present by elaborating on his memories of the past, as he conjures up visions of a terrifying future in apocalyptic images that make inspired reading. Here is Grass baroque, Grass sensuous, Grass the witty observer and interpreter of both the human and animal condition.

Seller Inventory # 10082503

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE RAT. Translated By Ralph Manheim
• Publisher: San Diego, NY & London. 1987. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich / A Helen & Kurt Wolff Book
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151759200
• ISBN 13: 9780151759200
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • german literature
  • fiction
  • novels

About this title

Synopsis

A female rat demonstrates that her species will inherit a devastated earth but will inevitably imitate the grotesque example set by human destructiveness throughout history

Reviews

The marvelous flounder, resurrected from the novel of that name, appears in Grass's new novel, his first large work of fiction since the talking fish swam into view, accompanied here by singing jellyfish. The tin drummer, now a balding man of 60 hampered by a bothersome prostate, also returns. A melange of fable, history, polemic, diatribe and jeremiad, its prose interspersed with verse, The Rat is a teeming sea of story and saga that defies brief description and amply displays Grass's fecund imagination. The She-rat is a Christmas gift requested by the narrator, and she is a mixed blessing, devoting herself mostly to denouncing the human race and its legacy of garbage, radioactive trash, toxic chemicals. Contemptuously ridiculing humankind's pretensions, she informs the narrator that she and her kind are "sick" of the stories by which man seeks to sustain himself, "to put off the end with words," and the quarrel between them takes on the weight and seriousness of moral judgment, just as Grass's gifts of fantasy and his strong, skeptical intelligence vie for dominance in his fiction. Manheim's heroic translation lucidly conveys Grass's linguistic idiosyncrasies, bizzare neologisms and madcap eccentricities. (June
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

And the rats shall inherit the earth, or so Grass concludes in this wonderful work of speculative virtuosity. With no less a subject before him than the ultimate fate of humankind, this superb German writer weaves together stories to produce an imaginative whole. As the oracular She-rat tells of humanity's demise and the rat's ultimate dominion, Grass himself fights back with memories and dreams, seeking to establish a better future through the acts of history and mind. Meanwhile, a barge crewed by women plies the Baltic Sea. And Oscar Matzerath, the drummer of Grass's early novel The Tin Drum, now appears as a 60-year-old film producer with a plan to film the natural world before it dies in chemical offal. Wildly entertaining as well as thought provoking. Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.