Tin Drum - Translation Classics Library (029)

Author: Grass
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Grass (1927-), a highly influential contemporary German writer and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. The Tin Drum is his masterpiece. At the age of three, Oscar accidentally discovers his mother and uncle Bruno engaging in an affair and witnesses the rampant cruelty of the Nazis. He decides not to grow any taller and instead chooses to become a dwarf. From then on, in his perspective, society and the people around him appear strange and insane. He spends his days beating on a tin drum to vent his frustration with the deformed society and the world. Despite his short stature, he possesses extraordinary intelligence and is exceptionally clever. The neighboring girl Maria comes to care for him, and they engage in sexual relations. After she becomes pregnant, she marries his father and gives birth to Kurt. Oscar joins a dwarf troupe to visit the front lines to comfort German soldiers and returns home three years later. By then, the Soviet army has captured Berlin, and his father dies by swallowing the Nazi party badge. When burying his father, Oscar loses the tin drum, and his biological son Kurt strikes him on the back of the head with a stone, causing him to fall into the grave and bleed profusely. However, from that moment onward, he begins to grow taller.