Of All That Ends

October 31, 2016
Grass (The Tin Drum), an acclaimed, controversial German novelist and 1999 Nobel Prize winner for literature, devotes his final work to a thoughtful, uncompromising meditation on death and aging. Grass, who died after a sudden illness in 2015, was clearly already thinking of his own mortality when he wrote this book. The text is a mix of prose and poetry, interspersed with black-and-white sketches that display his less heralded talent for drawing. In reminiscences of his boyhood and musings on the mundane (his smoking pipes, food, letter-writing), he describes loss, change, and memory with a combination of melancholy and wit, and occasionally with defiance. As always in his work, current events and politics are never far. Several of the poems address the growing refugee debate and Grass’s call for compassion and acceptance, and in a clever micro-essay titled “Unteachable” he slyly refers to his left-leaning politics by the metaphor of his left-handedness, suppressed when he was a boy. As he writes in the final poem of the book, from which the entire volume takes its name: “No more trouble now,/and all will soon be well/and nothing remain/and all be at an end”—except, of course, for the art that outlives its creator and helps guide readers along their own journeys.

September 15, 2016
Last words and images from the Nobel Prize-winning writer.In this posthumous collection, Grass (1927-2015) offers brief, gentle, intimate meditations illustrated by his own soft pencil drawings. Some pieces look back with nostalgia and even surprise at the author's past. Discovering more than 200 drawings and watercolors that he made when he was an art student, he feels "amazed" and searches his memory "trying to find the young man in his early twenties" who was passionate about craft. He recalls his start as a writer, "setting down words early on," excited when he received an Olivetti typewriter, "sleek and elegant in form, as if Leonardo da Vinci had invented the typewriter on the side." Even in the age of computers, Grass remained true to his Olivetti, stocking up on ribbons that became increasingly scarce. In many pieces, the author considers the losses that come with old age: his senses of taste and smell, the pleasures of a woman's breasts, and teeth, reduced to only one, "single, who wants to show how stalwart he is." A poem entitled "Self Portrait" begins, "Old codger, chewer of gums / fit for nothing but spooned pap." Lost, too, was the ability to travel, and Grass was reduced to tracing a finger on a map. "It's hard to let go," he writes. "Some things are easier / others give rise to howls of complaint." He complains, for example, about a world in which some favorite foods are considered offensive--e.g., pig's kidneys, breaded brains, beef liver. His children exclaim "Sickening!" when he reprises the flavors of his past. Of the few benefits of old age, the lessened need for sleep is one: "sleep," he remarks, "is a waste of time." He and his wife decided to have their coffins made, discussing shape, wood, and types of handles with a master carpenter. When the finished products arrived, they had "our trial lie-in," and then, he writes, "life went on as usual." Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living.

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October 15, 2016
The final volume by one of Germany's most celebrated and provocative writers, Nobel laureate Grass, collects a hundred or so brief works composed near the end of his life, revisiting familiar themes, and facing mortality. Some pieces are prose, some sway into poetry, some others feel like the contemplative diary entries of a man who knows the end is near. No more toothaches, he suggests, I can finally say finally'. He remains concerned about the state of the world, especially the violence of capitalism and the plight of the poor. Many sentences retain a defiant energy admirers of this literary lightning-rod will instantly recognize, but Grass's drawings of dead birds, crumpled leaves, mutilated hands, and various vegetative material point in a more musing direction. In doing so, he returns to the technique he used in Show Your Tongue (1988), a travel diary of sorts inspired by his formative time in India, where words sometimes escaped him. This, too, can be seen as a travel diary as Grass journeys toward the place where words will again escape him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2016

Nobel Prize winner Grass was working on this book at the time of his death in April 2015, and not surprising it's partly a meditation on growing old and facing death. While his recent works (e.g., Peeling the Onion) have all been nonfiction, here he returns to the fiction he crafts so well. The book collects fiction, poetry, and original artwork that thematically involve love letters, jealousy, social satire, and the perennial quest for happiness. Not a huge first printing, but expect considerable media attention.

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