Life's Musical Score

The 2010 list is slow going. I have not really found that many books that I want to gobble up and race through. Most have been efforts and fall short of the ten picaresque elements. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is picaresque but is also 589 pages long and has consumed weeks of my reading time.

What a complex, ever-echoing story this is. A thorough review itself could run dozens of pages. Theme builds upon theme, character upon character. The only way I can curtail my enthusiastic review from being a thesis is to focus exclusively on my picaresque identifiers. I have been thinking about what to write for a couple of days, and only in the last day or so, did I conclude it was picaresque. Perhaps the clincher was a sentence from Wiki that I ran across: "The Tin Drum is a picaresque novel ... an example of bildungsroman tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations, and relationships from boyhood to manhood." With that criteria, some of my previous reviews bear revisiting.

Similar to The Painted Bird's protagonist, Oskar is a child in Poland just before the outbreak of World War II. His quest is an attempt to reconcile the diametrically opposed forces in his life: religion, parentage, geography, art, politics, employment. He is a born old dwarf child. One is never sure whether he is controlling his destiny or interpreting it from an immature vantage. He believes he controls his height; he can determine his father and become a father to his brother; he can create destruction with his voice and his drum and force the course of history, killing friend and foe. So obviously score highly in the misunderstanding of events element.

Oskar really doesn't have a quest-buddy. Several people share his adventures at different points of time; only his drums stay with him through thick and thin. There are bizarre characters galore. In fact, Grass exaggerates all, villains and family alike. Certainly there is near escapes from the war, disease, and criminals. Sex is naive, mythical, and ever-present.

Written as a retrospective of his life at age 30 (close to Grass' age when the book was published) Oskar has reached no denouement. All he can acknowledge is he is faced with more choices, more need to conform. Like his home town, the free city of Danzig, now Gdansk, Oskar seems to remain flexible to change in an instant as circumstances and events demand.