The Box by Gunter Grass
Harvill Secker $50
German Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass always weaves some kind of magic through his stories and, in the case of his autobiographical work, this further blurs the demarcation line between his facts and his fictions.
In his first volume of memoir, Peeling The Onion, he revealed one startling fact - that he had served during the war in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Perhaps because he was frank and factual in his confession, he survived the sort of ostracism he may have suffered a few decades ago.
Nothing as dramatic as that emerges from The Box, which he creates by talking through the mouths of his eight children (by three different mothers). He gathers groups of them at different places and times and has them talk about their lives, about each other and often about the author as a remote and womanising father.
The eponymous "box" is an early Agfa camera, with which Marie, or Mariechen, as she is variously called, a ubiquitous friend of the family and a colleague (and probably lover) of the author, records the lives of the children and their different families. But Marie's "box" goes beyond the record. It does nothing as prosaic as take mundane snaps of the children and events. It captures the future in speculative, prophetic images and magical versions of the past and present to the puzzlement and sometimes chagrin of the family. Accounts of these pictures are the richest and liveliest threads in the narrative.
The children have their say but only through the imagination of their father and this kind of control over the narrative leads to much fun and some self-revelation. It's hard to know when Grass is taking himself and his family seriously.
Frankly, I don't think the technique works all that well. It sometimes confuses and even infuriates with its complexity. A reader needs to take notes, as I did, to track the names and places in the family of the children, and there are occasions when it just gets too hard to work out which of these characters he's speaking through at any given moment. Grass - a dramatist, essayist and graphic artist - has never written a dull book but this one perplexes too much for the rewards it offers.
The third in his autobiographical series is already published in German and will no doubt soon be available in translation.
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
