There is much that is vintage Grass here: an autofictional self; a satire of academia; a gleeful celebration of food, sex and art; an ironic portrait of ageing; anxiety about the political lessons of the past and the ‘accelerated crises of our present’… Grass blends a political allegory about capitalism and nationhood with a reflection on the processes of art.
— Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement
A newly discovered and translated jewel of a story from the Nobel laureate
At the end of the 1980s, a writer who very much resembles Günter Grass passes through East Germany on a book tour and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor’s models to dinner—and they come, not as ghosts, but just as alive as they were in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: she's a living statue.
As he continues touring around Europe, the writer looks for Uta and her donation basket outside every cathedral he passes. At last, in Frankfurt, he sees her in front of a Deutsche Bank and the two have a meeting with staggering consequences. As Grass said, “on paper everything is possible,” and in this tale he gleefully erases the line between life and death, present and past.
There is much that is vintage Grass here: an autofictional self; a satire of academia; a gleeful celebration of food, sex and art; an ironic portrait of ageing; anxiety about the political lessons of the past and the ‘accelerated crises of our present’… Grass blends a political allegory about capitalism and nationhood with a reflection on the processes of art.
— Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement
Delightfully strange… There’s a pleasingly timeless quality to this time capsule from a master.
— Publishers Weekly
I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. Among the immortals.
— Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker
A delightfully slippery go at archetypal subversion.
— Ben Goldman, Asymptote
Exquisite writing.
— Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
The strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in Germany since 1945. Much of what is active in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls lies in this man's ribald keeping.
