Scan barcode
A review by david_rhee
Cat and Mouse by Günter Grass
4.0
Still a bit wobbly from just having read Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, the second entry in Grass' Danzig trilogy, Cat and Mouse, has a way of confounding like few others. I was on skates with rotating wheels for a large portion of this work and this worried me. Slowly realizing Grass' intentions helped me see the reasons for my state. No, I wasn't totally off my game, maybe a little bit. It is the state of the narrator which drives the bizarre feel of the novella which at times strings out long stretches of incoherent relating of events which are strange enough already.
The interplay between Cat and Mouse and The Tin Drum coaxed smiles from me early on. The two stories shared the same time and setting and familiar faces from the The Tin Drum made their way into this narrative. Remember how Oskar the narrator of The Tin Drum bounced from first to third person when telling his story? In Cat and Mouse, Pilenz mixes second and third person addresses when relating the story of his friend, Mahlke the Great. This clever conversational interplay is yet another device employed by the genius Grass.
Say what you will about the story. Maybe one could be inclined to think there isn't much to it. The vulgarity might be a turn-off to some. A mere sixty pages in and you'll be treated to public masturbation and people casually chewing on seagull poop (unless, of course, my suspect reading comprehension skills have failed me yet again).
I believe the level of life-like realism in Pilenz's relationship with Mahlke is reason enough to open Cat and Mouse. There is admiration, jealousy, love, hatred all intertwined in the same cord. The ambivalence of an already volatile mixture is still more heightened by the fact that Pilenz is still distraught and jarred by Mahlke's fate. His slips into second person addresses betray his failure to understand his friend and what became of him. He is still making pleading remarks, at times really deranged ones, to Mahlke while trying to tell an objective story about him. It is a relationship so organic and pure that the only thing which can produce it is real life itself.
The interplay between Cat and Mouse and The Tin Drum coaxed smiles from me early on. The two stories shared the same time and setting and familiar faces from the The Tin Drum made their way into this narrative. Remember how Oskar the narrator of The Tin Drum bounced from first to third person when telling his story? In Cat and Mouse, Pilenz mixes second and third person addresses when relating the story of his friend, Mahlke the Great. This clever conversational interplay is yet another device employed by the genius Grass.
Say what you will about the story. Maybe one could be inclined to think there isn't much to it. The vulgarity might be a turn-off to some. A mere sixty pages in and you'll be treated to public masturbation and people casually chewing on seagull poop (unless, of course, my suspect reading comprehension skills have failed me yet again).
I believe the level of life-like realism in Pilenz's relationship with Mahlke is reason enough to open Cat and Mouse. There is admiration, jealousy, love, hatred all intertwined in the same cord. The ambivalence of an already volatile mixture is still more heightened by the fact that Pilenz is still distraught and jarred by Mahlke's fate. His slips into second person addresses betray his failure to understand his friend and what became of him. He is still making pleading remarks, at times really deranged ones, to Mahlke while trying to tell an objective story about him. It is a relationship so organic and pure that the only thing which can produce it is real life itself.