The Flounder (Günter Grass)

Günter Grass

The Flounder

An epic story set in the German and Poland Baltic area spanning from the stone age to 1970s when written. A brief summary is that back in the stone age women in that area were very dominant over men until a man catches a talking male flounder, as in the fairy tale, who then tells him how to become dominant over women. The flounder is all-knowing of global technology, politics and literature. The narrator lives many lives (some seemingly overlapping) and constantly relies on the flounder for advice. His many lives interweave with real historical events and figures and has many wives, partners and lovers. In the 1970s the flounder allows himself to be caught by feminists who then put him on trial at a feminist court in Berlin, sat in a secure water bath. This trial is the basis for which all the history and stories come from either from the flounder or the narrator's memories of past lives. Not all the story is in the first person though.

Another theme throughout is the pregnancy of the narrator's partner each chapter being a month of the nine. They seem to argue a lot and he has numerous fleeting affairs. Yet another theme is that he has cooks inside of him which relate to his partners of past lives and dishes are described in great detail, often repeating. Indeed, repetition is a theme of the novel. Gathering of mushrooms is another repeated theme including the culinary use of Fly Agaric and resulting mind changes. The brutal maltreatment of women weaves in and out including beatings and rape. So the book has many sides from the comic to extremely dark. Also a fair bit of historical fact ending in Gdansk, and other, shipyard strikes in 1970 so predating the Solidarity movement by a decade. I won't give a spoiler as to the ending of the trial and the book itself.

A book well worth reading although it has been called controversial as it's difficult to know whether the themes are an attack on the drive for equality for women, an attack on radical feminists of the early 1970s, or whether Grass supports the move to equality. Much of the book does stereotype genders. There seems to be various views on whether the book is misogynist including feminist groups arguing for and against. Grass himself said that although he parodied some in the feminist movement it was not an anti-feminist story. As to readability, I found it engaging and easy to read although parts were challenging and a little repetitive at times. Also easy to put down for days at a time as there isn't one strand to the story which you feel you really need to know what happens next. I'll have to ask my German friends what they think of it.