[KR1]≡ PDF Gratis The Box Playaway Adult Fiction Gunter Grass Stefan Rudnicki 9781441765895 Books

The Box Playaway Adult Fiction Gunter Grass Stefan Rudnicki 9781441765895 Books

Download As PDF : The Box Playaway Adult Fiction Gunter Grass Stefan Rudnicki 9781441765895 Books

The Box Playaway Adult Fiction Gunter Grass Stefan Rudnicki 9781441765895 Books

I cannot stop thinking about "The Box" and the diverse people involved in Gunter Grass's book. It is a simple tale that intrigues the mind. How can a plain box camera be the leading character in a story? What does the 'box' represent? It is a story for thinking souls.


Tags : The Box (Playaway Adult Fiction) [Gunter Grass, Stefan Rudnicki] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.,Gunter Grass, Stefan Rudnicki,The Box (Playaway Adult Fiction),Blackstone Audiobooks,1441765891,Literary,Unabridged Audio - FictionGeneral

The Box Playaway Adult Fiction Gunter Grass Stefan Rudnicki 9781441765895 Books Reviews

... a father, because he was getting old, gathered his children..."

Thus opens Günter Grass's venture into the genre of quasi-memoir. Imaginatively blending family chronicle with fairy tale, Grass moves constantly along the fine line between the real and the magical worlds. Taking the innovative approach of imagining his life being "critically assessed" from his children's perspectives, he is free to reveal some intimate insights into his private life, his work in progress, and his relationships, while keeping others hidden from view. While the reminiscences of the adult children are focusing on the father and their ever-changing family lives, Grass has them weave into their individual or group recollections numerous flashbacks into historical and contemporary societal events or developments - linking them to his research and book writing processes or his active engagement in public policy in post-war Germany.

For the writing of The Box, Grass had asked his reluctant grown-up children, eight in all, not all his own offspring, to come together from time to time and in different groupings in the course of a summer to record their honest views of their father. While he stays in the background, he admits that he has his own ideas of directing the discussions, tinkering with the various accounts. We, as readers, are flies on the respective kitchen wall in one of the children's homes, listening in on a medley of overlapping, interrupting, contradicting dialogs and accounts, full of fun, love and teasing, with detailed or fleetingly passing insights into the complicated childhoods within the "Kuddelmuddel" (hodgepodge) of the father's families. The children's ages vary greatly, with the oldest, boy-twins, easily playing the role of the "wise guys", whereas the youngest, Nana, while greatly enjoying listening in on the stories of a life that she had no part in, she, nevertheless, like the others, had her very special relationship to her "Papa".

There wouldn't have been much magic in the stories, however, without the "old Marie", or "Knips-doch-mal, Mariechen" (take another snap, Mariechen). Marie, a photographer and close and longstanding family friend (the book is dedicated to her memory), was like a fixture in the daily life of the older children, and "clinging" to "Väterchen" wherever he went, capturing the family members and anything of minor or major importance for "Vatti's" next book project. Maybe, it was that she had a special talent to master the "Box", an apparently simple pre-war Agfa box camera that, having been clobbered and knocked about during the war, had apparently developed a mind of its own, or it was that she could imprint visions onto the photos once they passed through her darkroom... In any event, "Mariechen with her Box could not only see into the past but also into the future." And she shared what she saw... The novel's subtitle "Tales from the Darkroom" suggests upfront that we can expect some surprises when photos emerged from processing in the darkroom. The "children", moving back in time, recall many of Marie's stories and her photos from the Box.

The children's narratives, constantly interrupting each other, meander back and forward in time, reminding me of a jigsaw or, even better, a crossword puzzle, the only chronology being established by Grass's work in progress on one of his novels. Words are often triggers to associations and insinuations, not only for the others in the groups around the table, but also for the reader familiar with Grass's writing and/or life and the German context in which the life stories are set. The recounting is full of humour and ironies, mixed in with tidbits of wisdom and serious reflections.

Grass's language here deserves highlighting (having read the book in German). It is a jumble of direct voices (never indicated by quotes, except for Mariechen), half or incomplete sentences literally falling over each other; jokes and colloquialisms, jumping from one speaker to another, creating a vividly evoked intimacy and an immediacy of a lively debate that one would feel tempted to jump into to ask questions, or just to join in the laughter and fun with the rest of them... For me, this was a more personal reading experience than I have had for a long time. My own memories came flooding back, happy and sad ones. It slowed down my reading but was much appreciated, whatever the specific trigger in the story. I would think that the author''s language here is almost impossible to translate without losing much in the process. Grass is never easy to translate as he invents words as he goes and creates images and associations with unusual usages of words that have to be transposed rather than translated into other languages.

Publicized as the second volume of his three-volume memoir, THE BOX could not be different in style, tone and author's perspective from the first, Peeling the Onion, which was written with hindsight of age and critical reflection on Günter's youth and younger years. The third volume, now published in German, "Grimms' Wörter", melds the biography of the Grimm brothers with his own life, continuing roughly the chronology in his life's works.

Some reviewers and others elsewhere have apparently been disappointed with THE BOX, one comment deploring it as a result of a "once-great author in decline..." I could not disagree more. Grass demonstrates with this fictionalized memoir that he is, at 83, still innovative, experimental and avant-garde in his writing and thinking. A visual artist, a poet as well as a fiction and non-fiction writer, he shows himself here again as an exquisite storyteller with rich imagination that is, despite the magical visions he creates, nevertheless solidly grounded in the realities of his time. [Friederike Knabe]
The fabulously egotistical German Nobel Prize winner sits down to interview his children about their childhood and then creates a sort of novella out of it. The result is a panorama of growing up in postwar WWII West Germany, and readers familiar with that landscape will find a material world of reminiscences centered on a particular camera that takes pictures that the children see or remember (or the camera makes them up). This is a fairly interesting device, except that the camera doesn't belong to the children, but to a family friend, so they end up talking not as much about their perceptions of their pasts as about the way that the pictures influenced their perceptions. If you are familiar with this world you will find yourself nodding your head in recognition of some of the loci of West German postwar memory. If not, the book may be harder for you to understand, as there's little explanation -- you simply have to know/understand the rites of passage and the stages of growing up in West Germany in order to understand the children's narratives.

The book jacket describes this as an "audacious literary experiment." Audacious, in that he takes his children's reminiscences, filters them through this camera device that questions their veracity, and turns them into a story about himself. Yes, as usual lately, it's all about Grass, and if there's a strength in this book, it's that that particular tendency is all on the surface. The reader sees just exactly how self-centered the author's behavior has been all these years, and I, for one, felt sorry that these kids had such a lackadaisical father. All that's left to say after you read it is that if you like reading Grass talking about Grass, fine. If you find him as a person tiring, especially after reading his recent memoir, Peeling the Onion, and wish he would create some fictional narratives of the depth and subtlety that he did earlier in his career, you'll be disappointed.

The translation is excellent. Though readers of German will be able to see the "bones" of the original language in the prose, it's always expressed in perfect and uptodate English. The prosaic rhythm of Grass's texts persists in the English text as well.
You never sent me the book. Send it to me and I will write a review

Robert Gilbert
gilbert@math.udel.edu
Gunter Grass does an excellent job of transporting us to the kitchen table to listen and get engaged in the lives of his children. Fascinating and absorbing!
I cannot stop thinking about "The Box" and the diverse people involved in Gunter Grass's book. It is a simple tale that intrigues the mind. How can a plain box camera be the leading character in a story? What does the 'box' represent? It is a story for thinking souls.