My Century by Gunter Grass, translated by Michael Henry Heim. Faber, 276 pp. £16.99 in UK.
Setting out to tell the story of the past 100 years by representing each unit of time with a story allotted to it and titled only by the individual year sounds an ambitious project, a variation perhaps of Thousand and One Nights. Gunter Grass, this year's Nobel Laureate, has no threat lying over his head, except of course his own visions and the fact that he has often been cast in the role of prophet - never an entirely happy one and not always popular. A century of short stories written in sequence, if not exactly narratively connected, but certainly thematically linked, could not have been easy, but the daring, ever inventive fabulist has succeeded by not allowing the apparently severe structure to oppress his voice or his imagination.
This is a thoughtful, varied book, and a candid one; it also possesses a colloquial ease and simplicity. There are few metaphors, the images are mainly blunt snapshots of war, but as ever with Grass, history is the key to understanding, and his polemical, if characteristically free-wheeling, approach to story has always been based on looking to the past, particularly that of his country. This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Tin Drum, the book that made him famous. It remains one of the handful of truly great novels and could well be the finest of the 20th century, beyond Joyce, beyond Marquez. History, horror story, burlesque cartoon and satiric fable merge within one relentless, profound and angrily truthful narrative. Throughout it, he disassembled and reconstructed the German language and his nation's tortured psyche.
As a young man he had to confront the fact that the version of German history he had been taught was false. In order to correct this, he set out tracking the truth. My Century is a book of voices; a collection of narrators, ordinary men and women, of all ages, dealing with memory and experience; pleasures and wrongs. At times, individual stories are not specifically tied to the year. This doesn't matter; in fact, such randomness allows the book to breathe. Grass has filled his stage with people: some have an audience, others don't, some have practical gripes, such as the wife in the 1951 story who writes to Volkswagen, pursuing her husband's right as a former employee, to a free car. "We feel you should be able to fulfill your part of the Volkswagen Savings Agreement even if we do reside permanently in the German Democratic Republic. Or don't we count anymore as Germans?" A reporter admits "describing misery was something I hadn't been trained to do. I lacked the words. So I learned the silence." Other storytellers are milder, less purposeful: memory, regret and even guilt preoccupy them.
Overall it is relaxed, poignant, never chaotic and oddly coherent - from the collapse of the currency in the 1920s which heralded the most bizarre inflation ever to shake an economy, to the fall of the Wall in 1989. Atmosphere is evoked, the sense of time passing, the way that small things create lives. Above all it succeeds through the shifts of tone. There is also a strong physical sense of Germany, its geography, regions, local cultures. The characters are from all over, from the East to the West, to its present united though more-divided-than-ever self: war correspondents, university lecturers, ageing men, women, from a widow exasperated by the enduring love her respective sons-in law bear for their cars, rather than their wives, to the feisty spokesperson of the Berlin Rubble Women in 1946, all 50,000 of them, who cleaned up the bombed city ("Brick dust. Brick dust everywhere. Let me tell you. In the air you breathe, the clothes you wear, between your teeth"). Men relive old wars, a young girl recalls the boy she never got to kiss, an ageing parent mourns the simple pleasure of gathering mushrooms, ruined by pollution.
A moment of national pride ends in tragedy on the fateful final journey of the mighty airship, the Hindenburg, as it bursts into flames. Poets age, bicker and die; marriages end, the present fails to live up to the past, as a character recalls, "My wife is right when she says, `You were another man back then. We had a real life' ". As the years pass, and the stories multiply, Grass's personal experiences begin to enter the text: he simply walks in from time to time, has his say and then another character takes over. The story for 1927, the year of Grass's birth, opens: "Mama didn't deliver me till the middle of golden October, but if you look closely you'll see that the year I was born was the only year with any glitter to it; the rest of the Twenties, before and after, flickered at best, trying to inject some colour into an otherwise drab existence."
The young Grass becomes an artist, leaves home to wander and observe, all the while little Oskar is pounding his drum, and the novel is taking shape. The autobiographical sequences drift in and out; at no time does it become Grass's story and yet it never ceases to be his, because it is Germany's story, and few other writers have been able to give as complete, as harsh and as loving a portrait of their history, culture, language and ever-transforming country - from Nazi Germany to hippie kingdom.
YESTERDAY Gunte r Grass was formally presented in Stockholm with this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. It is long overdue. His concerned politics and his fearful opposition to German reunification have earned him many critics. His achievement as an artist has been his creative, subversive, experimentation. Despite all the politics and polemics, his imagination has never been overshadowed.
My Century is not The Tin Drum, Dog Years, or The Flounder. It is quiet, full of plain speech from the people who have lived that history. There is no dazzle, but nor is it as bleak as his beautiful, romantic, lamentation, The Call of the Toad. My Century has moments of sadness, and also of irony and blunt humour. Ultimately it is a bigger book than it seems. It heaves with life and celebrates not victims but individuals. Throughout his career, Grass's genius, technical virtuosity and originality have never been doubted, but at the heart of his gifts is his conscience and humanity. We are used to him working on a vast scale, but this is a modest, shrewdly disciplined and deceptively subtle performance.
Grass never forces his tales, his narrators are convincing, and emerge as individuals. The final narrator displays a conversational interest in the proceedings. She is his short-lived mother, who, as he recalls, "didn't mind letting her longings out into the open". Brought back from the dead to celebrate her birthday, "my one hundred and third to be exact", she fondly observes her boy who did well: "he's made quite a name for himself. Still can't stop telling his stories, though. . . he gets the craziest ideas. Always exaggerating. You can't believe a word he writes. . . " Except we know that we can.
Grass has never allowed his flair for fantasy to cloud reality and My Century, with its surefooted, diverse array of tightly written, convincing tales deserves its place in an extraordinary ouevre of a compulsive storyteller, one of the century's surest witnesses and one who remains driven by truth.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist and a critic.