Word: grassed
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...GUNTER GRASS...
...drizzly March day in 1969, Germany's most powerful novelist, Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, Local Anaesthetic), abandoned his beloved stand-up writing desk, his charming dancer-wife Anna and his four children (ages four to eleven)-for what? That least seductive of modern quests: politics. A barely tolerable necessity if one is running for office, electioneering in Grass's case was pure altruism. He was doing it on behalf of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt...
...author campaigned across West Germany (31,000 bouncy kilometers in a Volkswagen bus) and "talktalktalked" for the Social Democrats. "A mobile, regionally dispersed, almost intangible father," Grass scribbled a sort of notebook-diary that considers why a novelist finds himself bothering with politics, and tries to answer his children's ritualistic questions: "Where are you off to again? What do you do when you get there?" Grass's answer is a sort of bedtime story on politics, featuring as hero the snail: "It seldom wins, and then by the skin of its teeth. It crawls, it goes into...
...progress of From the Diary of a Snail is all too consistent with the author's snail principles. On the way to almost any point, the reader is likely to get a favorite recipe from Chef Grass (simmered tripe with caraway seeds) or a growling epithet on Hegel: "Thanks to his subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary." Another snail detour documents the diaspora of the Jews of Grass's native Danzig during World War II. Here the narration seems to match the sinister creeping pace of anti-Semitism...
Game Plan. Is the world made up of nothing but "the violent and the righteous"? Are there no other snail lovers left? Just to make sure, Grass invents one, a "Dr. Doubt," a Danzig schoolteacher, who sits out World War II in a cellar, collecting snails and falling in love, among other activities. He says: "I know more now. Hesitation comes more easily." Grass's middle-aged snail wisdom might easily be mistaken for Doubt's. At 45, Grass is too wise to be possessed by any one credo. Yet Grass cannot stay in his cellar while history...