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The genius of Danzig
Günter Grass' Nobel Prize honors the stalwart leftist who rebuilt the German novel on the literary ruins of the Third Reich.

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By Gavin McNett

Oct. 7, 1999 | It was the perfect grace note, like a bit of opaque symbolism that had leaked from one of his novels. The announcement last Thursday that Günter Grass had won the Nobel Prize in literature caught Grass on the way to the dentist's -- which, in the context of Grass' work, is something like his disciple John Irving's being fingered for an award en route to an old Viennese hotel full of bears. Grass has been a writer of many ideas but, like Irving, one with a smallish store of recurring images; and a mordant teeth thing has haunted his novels from the first, climaxing in 1969's "Local Anaesthetic," a Proustian novel set in the dentist's chair. There have been no reports to date that the news of Grass' laureation was whispered in his ear by a talking flounder or delivered by a maniacal Nazi dwarf. It probably wasn't conveyed by a deputation of cooks or of scarecrows. But, symbolically at least, one other Grassism animated his selection for this year's prize: the totem animal of 1972's "From the Diary of a Snail," a symbol of progress who "hurries slowly."

Grass' route to the Nobel -- or, rather, the prize's route to Grass -- has not been swift. Until Thursday, we thought of him as we once thought of Susan Lucci, Phil Rizzuto, the pre-"Schindler" Spielberg. He was a perennial bridesmaid, passed over by the Nobel Committee in 1972 for fellow postwar Trümmerliteratur novelist Heinrich "Heinrich Who?" Böll; he had grown gray waiting for the slow Nobel compass to complete its rotation and settle once again on a German author. No other living German novelist approaches his stature.

But then, how many Americans would be likely to know that? In the United States, he's had a different, more ambivalent sort of stature -- that of the most important living novelist to have drifted off the public radar. Now Grass will have what his character Pilenz, in the 1961 novella "Cat and Mouse," calls "the abracadabra," "the trinket," "the all-day sucker": He'll have his medal good and proper. But here he's still pretty much the "Tin Drum" guy -- or, at least, the author of the early "Danzig Trilogy," which comprises "The Tin Drum," "Cat and Mouse" and the 1963 "Dog Years." His latest novel, the epochal "My Century," will be published here by Harcourt Brace in December. And in between those two achievements lies a career -- 36 years of mature work.

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