The Flounder

"Flavored with dill, stuffed with prunes, and awash with beer, The Flounder is a kind of Germanic One Hundred Years of Solitude, a Baltic Ulysses (at least in scale) and fantastic in any language." -The Washington Post Book World

Based loosely on Grimm's "The Fisherman and His Wife," this triumphant blend of folk tale and contemporary story takes place over the course of nine months, during which the wife of the narrator becomes pregnant and is regaled with tales of the various cooks the fisherman has met throughout his life. The emerging themes of the novel expose the periods when men made history and women's contributions went largely, in some cases gravely, unrecognized. Inventive, imaginitive and irreverent, this humorous, fundamentally brilliant novel highlights the value of modern-day myth and timeless legend.

"What stands up as vividly authentic in [this novel] is its original conception, the use of culinary history and sexual history as a vehicle for history. As in Joyce, Mr. Grass's sweeping panoramas of human life are more effective for being concretely localized.... Mr. Grass is an earthy writer with a coarse sense of humor, a bubbling sensual gusto, and an infectious appetite for life." -New York Times Book Review

Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig, Germany. A novelist, playwright, essayist, graphic artist, and poet, he is the author of numerous books including Too Far Afield, My Century, The Tin Drum, and Crabwalk.

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