The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

The Tin Drum was full of disturbing imagery, which repulsed and fascinated me, and made this difficult but compulsive reading.

Oskar is an unlikable character, and his narration very contradictory. On one page he would say that he never saw a certain character again, yet on the next page he describes their next meeting. Written in the first person, it often lapsed into the third person within the same sentence which was very annoying and sometimes confusing.

There were elements that could divide the novel into a series of fables, and individually I did enjoy and appreciate them.

In the end though, I found it dragged on, and I was only reading the last 200 pages for the sake of finishing the story. Once Oskar began to grow, he lost his charm and just became a creepy hunchback who well deserved to be instutionalised.

Magic realism is my least favourite story telling device, yet it crops up again and again in the novels I choose. Certainly it is a story I won’t forget, and it makes sense of the weird and shocking movie I saw years ago, but I can’t say I really enjoyed it.