MY CENTURY

Name: MY CENTURY
Author: Günter Grass
ISBN: 0-15-100496-X

by Günter Grass & translated by Michael Henry Heim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1999

A masterly synthesis of fiction, history, and autobiography. My Century is one of Grass’s most skillfully crafted books and...

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On September 30th, Sweden’s Nobel Committee righted what many have long considered an egregious wrong by awarding its 1999 Prize for Literature to Germany’s greatest living novelist. Grass remains most celebrated for his early masterpieces, The Tin Drum and Dog Years, but forty years’ worth of vigorous fiction, poetry, and sociopolitical commentary testify eloquently to his ongoing creative vitality, as do a highly controversial recent novel (to appear here next year as Too Far Afield) and his ingenious new fiction, My Century: a mosaic history of modern Germany, comprising a hundred brief stories, one for each year of the present century. Thus: a young Bavarian soldier recounts his experiences in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900; a pieceworker at the Krupp munitions factory explains how a (then) ultimate weapon was named “Big Bertha” after her; a “peat cutter” forced to help build a concentration camp comments on Jesse Owens’s domination of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games; and unnamed representative citizens offer their perspectives on such watershed events as the “economic miracle” of the late 1950s, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Grass varies these narrating voices, which, though engagingly differentiated, are uniformly lively and seductive. The war years 1914-18 are discussed, in conversations held nearly a half-century afterward, by prominent German novelists Erich Maria Remarque and (the now centenarian) Ernst Juenger. A nameless war correspondent fills in details of the period 1941-45. And Grass himself chimes in, first in 1927 (the year of his birth), then with increasing frequency from the 1980s forward, as he wryly observes his country’s resurgent militarism, gathers material for the aforementioned Too Far Afield (which was published in1995), and, when in the 1990s geneticists begin cloning sheep, expresses his fear of a coming “fatherless society.” And in the mischievous and dazzling final chapter (“1999”), Grass’s late mother (d. 1954) tartly laments the prospect of her now elderly son, who’s “made quite a name for himself…bringing me to life again for one of his stories.”

A masterly synthesis of fiction, history, and autobiography. My Century is one of Grass’s most skillfully crafted books and proof positive that the Nobel Prize – passing this year from José Saramago to Günter Grass – once again rests in good hands.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-15-100496-X

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
OF ALL THAT ENDS
by Günter Grass ; translated by Breon Mitchell ; illustrated by the author

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM GERMANY TO GERMANY
translated by Günter Grass ; by Krishna Winston

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOX
by Günter Grass

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

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Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY

by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013

Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.

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One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.

Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.

Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.