Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez: (Living to Tell the Tale)
Gunter Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in literature (1999), has been obsessed with history. Most of his novels and writings harked back to World Wars, rounded off with his last memoir, Peeling the Onion (2007), which covered the period from Mr Grass’ youth during World War II up to the publication of his triumphant debut novel The Tin Drum (1959). Peeling the Onion met with a stormy reception because of its revelation that, as a 17-year old conscript, Mr Grass had served with the Nazi SS. Like a philosopher, stripping away from matter its form, colour, taste in search of an ultimate reality, Mr Grass discovered that as matter disappeared, he, too, had no inner core to speak of. In a delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Mr Grass has now come with The Box: Tales from the Darkroom (Harvill Secker, special Indian price, Rs 699), which collates the voices of his eight children that record the memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives.
The novel opens with an invitation. “Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters – four, five, six, eight in number – and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they were sitting around a table and begin to talk at once, all products of their father’s whimsy, using words he put into their mouths, yet obstinate, too, determined not to spoil his feelings despite their love for him.”
When the book was published in Germany in 2008, Mr Grass left absolutely no ambiguity about the process of writing the novel: there were no dinners, no conversations with his children and no recordings. It was all a matter of perspective, of memory, “the unreliable handmaiden of the past”, or, as he said it in the opening lines of Peeling the Onion: “Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great.” The story, then, is told in the third person with irregular verbs and always in the future tense!
The Box consists of nine chapters presented as the edited but casually conversational transcripts over a series of family reminiscences. The 80-year-old father had asked his children to let loose their memories without caring about his feelings; to record themselves as they would like to be remembered. Most of the story is a rehash of their own everyday lives as seen through their own recollections. There’s not much of the father here who leads a parallel existence, typing away in the attic while the family’s life takes place in the nearby rooms.
The children feel lonely and superfluous, as often happens in a family when the father is always away at work. “He told me, and the rest of you too, no doubt, when you were little: ‘We’ll play later, when I have time. Right now, I have to work something through, something that can’t wait.”’ As one child explains, “What working it through meant, was one book after another.”
How did the children look upon the father’s books? That book about “dogs and scarecrows”, “the one with a talking fish”, and “the short book that followed a long one”. Revelations in Peeling the Onion are dismissed as “all that Nazi stuff’ which meant nothing to them because it didn’t affect their lives in any way. In any case, children are never fascinated by the novelties of adults.
Children can also be brutally frank about their opinions and that Mr Grass allows them to be so is partly because he had raised this question in his 1979 essay, “What shall we tell our children?” that in some ways detailed the germination of this book. And this was followed by “From the Diary of a Snail”, which was inspired by his children’s constant questions about the world. “When my book was finished,” Mr Grass had said, “all the children had grown older. By then they could have read it. But they don’t want any old stories.” Hence the reason for this box of new stories.
The European novel, unlike the English, is never anything except an idea expressed in images. And no story is ever told as if it is the only one. There are stories within stories that between the lines raise questions about life itself. So, it is here. The Box ultimately raises these questions about the fundamental significance of Mr Grass’ writings. It is not a memoir, nor is it a mix of fact and fiction where experience is “totally transformed”. Mr Grass uses his gift as a storyteller to assess the past, whether this means history in a broad sense, or as here, personal and family history that becomes a microcosm of the world at large. But the past is something that you have to come to terms with because the past is never quite past.
