Mother mouse

Author: (German) Grass / Wei Yuqing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Grass is hailed as a flagship of contemporary German literature. From his literary masterpiece The Tin Drum, which established his reputation in the 1950s, to My Century, which shocked the world literary scene in the late 1990s, his works often stir up controversy and are considered a major spectacle in German literature. The Rat was met with mixed reviews from critics when it was published in 1986. Admired by some as having pioneered a "futuristic narrative style" and as a culmination of his entire oeuvre, it was criticized by others as a "disaster." Grass himself remained indifferent to the criticism. At the Stockholm award ceremony, when mentioning The Rat, he said, "It was The Rat that won the Nobel Prize." The novel begins with "I" wanting a rat as a Christmas gift and getting it, only to find that the rat can talk and engage in sharp exchanges with "I." This leads "I" to first become isolated at home and then to be stranded in space, cut off from Earth, yet in dreams, he witnesses the tragedies unfolding in the world and experiences the process of human self-destruction.
The second plot centers on Oscar, the protagonist of The Tin Drum, who transforms into a media mogul and embarks on a journey back to his long-estranged hometown of Danzig. He is deeply interested in the potential of media and knows how to use images to depict the future, controlling the public with scenes that are either real or illusory, making it difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction. The other two plots unfold in the form of two films. The Forest of the Brothers Grimm reflects the escape and resistance of fairy-tale characters against the backdrop of impending death. The other, The Fakes of the 1950s, tells the story of Marscart, who makes a living restoring artworks, alluding to the history of forgery by the two German leaders, Adenauer and Ulbricht, in the 1950s. The fifth plot follows five women who board an expedition ship to study jellyfish density and investigate ecological imbalance and environmental pollution. Despite enduring hardships, they ultimately cannot escape the impending catastrophe.