The Tin Drum - Günter Grass.

This is a good book, yeah?

Personally, I hated it. YMMV.

Wether it's a good book you have to decide yourself, but it's surely an important book if you want to understand post-war germany and it's literature.

I may be biased because my mother was born only a few hundred meters away from Günter Grass' home in Danzig-Langfuhr, but I liked all his early books when I read them 20 years ago. They have a very special kind of bawdy, earthy humor which you either like or hate. I loved it because there is so much aroma, taste, smell of this vanished world, words, phrases which my parents used and still use and which will be gone forever once this generation is gone.

I can understand that all this is hard to grasp for somebody who is much younger and who has no connection to this part of the world and it's history; but I think, even if you miss most of the deeper parts of the book (which I surely did too), it should be possible to read it as a ribald, bawdy story, maybe a mad story from a world gone mad.

I loved The Tin Drum when I read it a long time ago, and I've also enjoyed several other Grass novels. I do like his sense of humor and his feel for the macabre.