Word: starusch
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Morality and metaphysics are marshaled. "Public burnings are no deterrent," Starusch thinks, "they only satisfy base instincts. (I'll tell Scherbaum that.)" To show the absurdity and ineffectuality of any action, Starusch ponders assigning a paper on "What are acts?" Democracy, that most inefficient if most protective form of government, is also invoked. Scherbaum is not impressed. "Freedom of choice and second helpings," he says, summing up the café ladies, "that's what they mean by democracy...
Growing desperate, Starusch even offers to burn another dog with Scherbaum. He hopes to confuse the issue and thinks that, at the very least, he will be able to protect the boy from the angry crowd. Scherbaum refuses sadly. "You're over thirty," he observes. "All you care about is limiting the damage." "Watch yourself, Flip," advises Scherbaum's politicized girl friend Vero, who wants to see her lions eat her Christians, or vice versa. "Mao warns us against the motley intellectuals...
...crucial third party in the tug of war over Scherbaum's soul, however, is an unnamed man in tennis shoes: Starusch's dentist. Starusch has an overshot underjaw. Pain and multiple appointments are involved. Along with other local anaesthetics, the dentist maintains a diversionary TV set on his wall. As a modern opiate it is not far behind Novocain and the ultra-high-speed drill...
Much of what Starusch thinks, feels and seems to dredge up from his memories and fantasies occurs in the form of a surrealist TV show glimpsed past his tormentor's ear. Meanderings into Starusch's early love life, barely suppressed feelings of violence and real or imagined career in reinforced concrete multiply, not always fruitfully for the reader. Grass, who has long admired Herman Melville, sometimes seems bound to do lightly for dentistry what the author of Moby Dick did for whaling. Symbols clang. Tartar on the teeth, one gathers, is Evil?"calcified hate." Parallels are drawn?and stretched?between...
...held the patient's left arm," he complacently lectures Starusch, comparing the painless extractions of today with the dental horrors of a century ago. "The second wedged his knee into the pit of his stomach, the third held the poor devil...
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