Flounder

"What stands up as vividly authentic in [this novel] is its original conception, the use of culinary history and sexual history as a vehicle for history. As in Joyce, Mr. Grass's sweeping panoramas of human life are more effective for being concretely localized....In this novel [he] undertakes to record and preserve not only the lost world of his childhood, ...but all of Danzig's history back to the Stone Age....Mr. Grass is an earthy writer with a coarse sense of humor, a bubbling sensual gusto, and an infectious appetite for life....[However] despite his comic extravagance, [he] remains a serious socialist obsessed with what history means and where it is going."Grass, Günter is the author of 'Flounder', published 2003 under ISBN 9780156028257 and ISBN 0156028255.