| View Larger Image | The Flounder (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) | Paperbackby Gunter Grass (Author)
| List Price: | $22.00 | | Price: | $19.80 | | You Save: | $2.20 (10%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Mariner Books | | Page Count: | 560 Pages | | Publication Date: | May 05, 1989 | | Sales Rank: | 366,902th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is caught by a fisherman at the very spot where millennia later Grass's home town, Danzig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. As Grass blends his ingredients into a powerful brew, he shows himself at the peak of his linguistic inventiveness. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 6 reviews)
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Not worth the effort by Gregory Baird (Morristown, NJ)  2 Stars
June 01, 2009
You say: a profound examination of gender politics deftly woven into a farce of German society, with interesting use of food politics as a metaphor.
I say: an unnecessarily abstruse novel about one man's obsession with potatoes.
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a wonderful work by roan (oregon)  4 Stars
August 24, 2007
Truly an epic journey. The story combines many themes and just as many characters. One must read about half to get a grasp on the reins and after that, it's fun. Cooking and copulation play large roles. All the talk about soup and the endless mushrooms are fantastic. Throughout the text are poems and songs. At first, they don't seem to relate. But one comes to expect them after a time. This is a big change from the style of the Danzig trilogy, much more modern. Grass makes some interesting points about guilt and shame (defecation circles, sleeping with the abbess.) The last few scenes are tremendous. Supposedly, this was Grass' present to himself. The terrific ending must reveal an optimist side to him.
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Not Exactly Sashimi Quality by S. Singer (Pittsburgh, PA, USA)  3 Stars
July 07, 2007
Gunter Grass, I love you, but "The Flounder" just isn't a sashimi quality piece of fish. It's really more something out of the frozen food section.
"The Tin Drum", the author's first book, remains one of the most white hot brilliant novels written in the last 100 years. It's the kind of book that in every sentence shows the desperate need the author had to tell his tale.
By contrast, "The Flounder" is a tepid excercise that expresses no such fiery need. Sure, there are good ideas and interesting sections. However, the whole doesn't amount to much - in fact the book is more like a Mrs. Paul's fish stick than a gourmet pan of white fish - in effect, there seems to be far too much breading and not nearly enough good solid sea food in every bite.
Perhaps it's unfair to compare everything Gunter writes to his first meteoric success. Still, when you have the power to write something like "The Tin Drum", you can't expect to get off with writing less.
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Grass' weakest effort, by far by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)  1 Stars
April 05, 2001
Gunter Grass, The Flounder (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)I just couldn't get through it. I can't really put my finger on why, but there it is. The Flounder contains all the things I revere about Grass-- a strong sense of history, scurrlious sense of humor, strong characters put into wonderfully unrealistic situations. But this novel, Grass' weightiest (literally), never seems to come together in all the little ways that made similarly large tomes like The Tin Drum and Dog Years such wonderful reads.The Flounder is a massive creation myth, seen through the eyes of a continually-reincarnated man, his continually-reincarnated longtime companion (who is always a cook of some sort), and the Flounder himself, who serves as a kind of fairy-godfather figure. In modern times, a group of feminists discover that the Flounder has been the architect of the overthrow of matriarchal society and put him on trial; the narrator and the Flounder use the trial as a method to go back over history and show the development of patriarchy in Poland, and how it relates to the potato. Yes, I'm serious.The novel feels as if Grass had lost his sense of dynamic while writing it. The earlier long novels each keep the reader's interest with a series of climactic events, each leading up to the larger climax upon which the novel turns; The Flounder, on the other hand, continues on at the same rlatively leisurely pace in its survey of history. And that, ultimately, is its downfall; there's just too much of it without anything really going on, on a larger scale.Definitely a bad starting place for Grass; turn to the Danzig trilogy instead. (zero)
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I can't believe it's out of print...  5 Stars
December 30, 1999
I read this book when it first came out (1980?), and have read, in English or German, 4 other novels by GG. All were wonderful, but this was my favorite. It's "magic realism" that's both thought-provoking and very entertaining, and so well-written and translated. It's really too bad that it's out of print.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The Rat
by Gunter Grass (Author)
A female rat engages the narrator in a series of dialogues-convincingly demonstrating to him that the rats will inherit a devastated earth. Dreams alternate with reality in this story within a story within a story. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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| Dog Years
by Gunter Grass (Author)
A novel set in three parts, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 1950s, that follows the lives of two friends from the prewar years in Germany through an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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| Crabwalk
by Gunter Grass (Author), Krishna Winston (Translator)
Hailed by critics and readers alike as Günter Grass's best book since The Tin Drum, Crabwalk is an engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and a critical meditation on Germany's struggle with its wartime memories.
The Gustloff, a German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some nine thousand people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a...
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| The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass (Author)
This postwar classic offers a profound yet humorous perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.
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| Peeling the Onion
by Gunter Grass (Author), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)
In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final...
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