Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1959128 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-20
• Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
Grass's memoir of his wartime activity, including the scandalous revelation that he had served in the notorious Waffen SS as a teenager, is shocking enough. Given the heated division between Grass partisans who passionately defend the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and Grass-haters who see him as the embodiment of moral hypocrisy, any reading of his latest work needs little in the way of amplification or hoopla. Good news for Grass, then, that Norman Dietz has been hired to read his memoir. As per usual, Dietz reads with smooth efficiency and understated authority. His voice untouched by masculine bluster, Dietz has a pleasingly idiosyncratic tone, more favorite uncle than television announcer—to his credit. A legend (at least to audiobook listeners), Dietz is a name that offers the assurance of skill without grandstanding. On passionately fraught ground, inflamed by the still unhealed wounds of WWII, Dietz delivers once more. He may not be able to put out the fires Grass's memoir has set, but his work allows readers to appreciate it or castigate it on its own merits.
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From AudioFile
Gnter Grass, the German writer best known for The Tin Drum, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. Given his stature, readers have awaited his memoir eagerly. But no matter how interesting the memoir or the life behind it, fifteen-and-a-half hours is a long time to listen to a mostly monotone and rather slow reading. The plus side, of course, is that listeners arent likely to miss a word of Grasss book, which became a controversial and hurried publication when it became known that he was about to be outed as a Nazi sympathizer, something hed vociferously attacked in others. Still, the links between autobiography and fiction are fascinating as he continually inserts references to how the person in his real life was transformed into a character in one of his many novels. R.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Illustrious German writer Grass' memoir was first published in his native country in 2006, amid an international storm of controversy. The problem wasn't so much his admission of being a member of the Waffen-SS—he was drafted as a teenager toward the end of the war, never fired a shot, and never saw a camp—but rather the 60 years of semi-hypocritical silence that followed. Grass suggests that as a young man his biggest failure was a relentless lack of firm beliefs: Egomaniac that he was, he saw and felt only himself. I would not have wanted to meet him, but had I met him, we would have fought. It is interesting nonetheless that even here Grass shies away from chronicling his political progression from an unquestioning Hitler Youth to the fervently moralistic novelist and outspoken social democrat that he would become. Rather, he simply plots his early life's turning points—most of which revolved around his three overriding hungers for food, sex, and art—while recollecting the accompanying details and imagery that would eventually be folded into his fantastical and Nobel-winning fiction. The memoir ends quietly with the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959 and perhaps functions best as a companion to be read alongside his oeuvre rather than as a portrait of the mind of a master at work, siphoning tumultuous times into modern masterpieces. Chipman, Ian
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