I feel a little defeated that I didn’t read The Tin Drum in the original German, but I think that would have been a pretty painful experience. The book is dense enough in translation, rife with euphemisms, call-backs, extended metaphors, and narrative cul-de-sacs.
The story is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a man born in Danzig between the World Wars whose growth was stunted (by his own telling, deliberately) at the age of three and whose abiding love for his tin drum is such that attempts to take it from him evoked the power to destroy glass with his screams. The story bounces between Oskar’s present, where he resides in an insane asylum, and his past--or indeed that of his family; he goes back several generations to give familial context.
As one might surmise from the summary, it’s a weird book. A bent and hyper-sexed One Hundred Years of Solitude, complete with the extended family history and magic realism. It’s also quite funny at times. Oskar’s detached and ribald commentary makes for good reading, and I genuinely enjoyed his company, even as I struggled to place names for characters that reemerged after a hundred and fifty pages.
This is not a book where plot is paramount, and there is a whiff of a shaggy dog tale about it, as instances that seem like they may explain his current predicament fizzle into nothing. When you do finally figure out why he’s in the insane asylum, it feels a bit anticlimactic. Still, I enjoyed reading it.