Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Harvest Books (1993), 248 pages
Description
'Gdansk 1989. A polish woman, a guilding specialist, meets a German man, a professor in art history. A walk together in a graveyard gives rise to an ambition to establish a Cemetery of Reconciliation as a mark of the times and their spirit of unity... The satire is sharp, the analysis precise, and Grass is still expert in drawing out the painful comedy of human behaviour and the pitfalls that await good intentions' - The New Yorker From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum comes a satire of european politics and a love story.
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
Alexander and Alexandra are strangers who get into conversation after they bump into each other at a flower stall in the Dominican market hall in Gdánsk on All Souls' Day 1989. One thing leads to another, a cemetery visit is followed by a mushroom (Steinpilz/porcini) supper, and the two of them
The German-Polish-Lithuanian Funeral Company soon becomes a reality: they are clearly tapping into a serious demand, and the money starts rolling in. And of course it soon starts going wrong, the idealistic notions of reconciliation in death are overtaken by the demands of free-market capitalism, and Alexander and Alexandra find themselves repelled by the monster they have created.
Grass, of course, enjoys nothing more than being the lonely pessimistic toad raining on the West German parade of reunification and the end of the iron curtain. He had great fun in those days, when he was being attacked in editorials and political speeches practically non-stop. And it probably gave him a certain satisfaction to have been largely right about all the things that the free market was going to smash up in the former socialist states. He didn't quite manage to predict the rise of populist nationalism in places like Poland and Hungary, but he did put his finger on a lot of the external causes of that trend. And this is also a lively story, with a lot of detail about Gdánsk and the way its German and Polish sides come together, and some entertaining characters like the octogenarian Erna Brakup with her felt hat and antediluvian Danzig-German dialect, or the British-Bengali Mr Chatterjee, who is developing a pedal-rickshaw empire across Polish cities and takes over part of the Lenin Shipyard to build his own rickshaws.
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also cook up, first, an interesting business idea, and second, what turns into a serious relationship. They are both widowed and around sixty, and they were both exiled in their teens by the border-changes of 1945, he as a German from Danzig/Gdánsk and she as a Pole from Wilno/Vilnius. Their sharing of family memories leads them to the grand scheme: a service to allow exiles like their parents and themselves to profit from the end of the Cold War and seek burial in the places where they came from. The German-Polish-Lithuanian Funeral Company soon becomes a reality: they are clearly tapping into a serious demand, and the money starts rolling in. And of course it soon starts going wrong, the idealistic notions of reconciliation in death are overtaken by the demands of free-market capitalism, and Alexander and Alexandra find themselves repelled by the monster they have created.
Grass, of course, enjoys nothing more than being the lonely pessimistic toad raining on the West German parade of reunification and the end of the iron curtain. He had great fun in those days, when he was being attacked in editorials and political speeches practically non-stop. And it probably gave him a certain satisfaction to have been largely right about all the things that the free market was going to smash up in the former socialist states. He didn't quite manage to predict the rise of populist nationalism in places like Poland and Hungary, but he did put his finger on a lot of the external causes of that trend. And this is also a lively story, with a lot of detail about Gdánsk and the way its German and Polish sides come together, and some entertaining characters like the octogenarian Erna Brakup with her felt hat and antediluvian Danzig-German dialect, or the British-Bengali Mr Chatterjee, who is developing a pedal-rickshaw empire across Polish cities and takes over part of the Lenin Shipyard to build his own rickshaws.
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LibraryThing member chellerystick
A funny novel of the clash of the past and the future--when it becomes environmentally sound to reuse cemetery space in old Europe.
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Minor Grass, without question, yet I harbor a sentimental link to the book as I read days before travelling to Rome.
Subjects
Awards
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Fiction — 1992)
Language
Original language
English