Word: dogged
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jerk, Dog, Swim & Frug
Like his other books, The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse, and like the rest of the new generation of German fiction, it deals with the Nazi era. Dog Years is powerful, jumbled, symbol-cluttered, too long, exhausting. It drifts in and out of fantasy, scratches at memories as if they were swords too dangerous to grasp, and says nothing directly. The narrative follows, circles about, sniffs at, is diverted from, and returns to the careers of two friends, boys who were born in 1917 in a fishing village on the Baltic...
...fanatically vengeful de-Nazifier, whose method is to spread his own gonorrhea among the wives of men on his private list of war criminals. But two diseases cannot beget health, and this does not ease his soul. Can he himself be guilty of something? He is harassed by a dog who has begun to follow him like a conscience-a magnificent black German shepherd who once belonged to Hitler and who is, by significant chance, the grandson of a bitch Matern owned...
...They are much in demand among guilt-ridden Germans, and Amsel employs a large force of workers to build their elaborate machinery and package them in an abandoned potash mine. In a grotesque parody of that old literary device, the descent into hell, Amsel leads Matern and his black dog through his guilt factory. The black dog, who appears to embody both the bestial and the sturdily virtuous elements of the German nature, remains in Amsel's underworld as a Cerberus. But Matern is allowed to return to the surface and soap himself clean in what could...
...romped with the kiddies, celebrated his hunting prowess in ecstatic bursts of epic poetry. But Mrs. Ur wanted a better way of life, moved the family into a nice new house down near the well, got everybody started on farming, free enterprise, philosophy, house building, domestication of the wild dog, sickle manufacturing, and the long agony of getting along with God. All in the space of three years...