Cuckoo in the nest

‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches with a late and unexpected reawakening of his creative urge. After peevish old age had brought on such despondency that ‘neither lines of ink nor strings of words flowed from his hand’, he was gripped — out of the blue, and to his evident relish — by the impulse to ‘unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Lose my way on a single-minded quest.’

It makes for an invigorating opening: a three-paragraph paean to the unruly and questioning spirit which drove Grass’s writing throughout his hugely productive career.

He established himself from the first as a darkly comic force, his 1959 masterpiece The Tin Drum exposing the failures of his parents’ generation with a shrewd and deft storytelling energy. While much of Germany was still licking its wounds, Grass preferred to rub salt in them — and laugh while he was at it.