My Century by Gunter Grass, review by Pat Boran

My Century. Gunter Grass. Faber and Faber. UK £16.99 HB

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Business Post)

History, according to Gunter Grass back in 1971, 'is never-ending. We are always inside history, never outside it.'

Hearing an echo of Stephen Dedalus's attempt to awaken from it, readers will not be surprised that Grass's dazzling version of the 20th century offers no neat narrative summary, but instead a century made up of 100 voices (and occasional dialogues) each of which focuses on a single year or event.

And while it's practically impossible to read particularly the stories of 1920s Germany without looking to identify the seeds of what we now know to be just around the corner, many of the greatest shocks, and most moving moments in this truly exceptional book, come from unexpected quarters.

The butchery that took place in Tienanmen Square, for instance, provides the material for the opening story of 1900, and not June 1988 as many will expect. The account of Japanese swordsmen combining with British and German firing squads to execute Chinese Boxers after the failed rebellion hardly fits into the version of the century we westerners have learned to believe in. That our soldier narrator sends a chopped-off pigtail home as a gift for his fiancée seems barbaric. That the rebellion itself had more than a little to do with the trade in opium, supported by the British, the same German solider only mentions in passing.

In passing is, in fact, how history is glimpsed, and the people on the ground are often unaware of how it will all appear in retrospect. The man who as a small boy attends a turbulent workers' rally remembers sitting on his father's shoulders and peeing with excitement more than he remembers how general strikes came to be 'a potential weapon for the proletarian masses'; and 'Big Bertha', the huge gun used to pound Allied positions in the First World War, is similarly an embarrassment to the young woman who worked in the Krupps factory and after whom it was jokingly named.

The spectre of Nazism rears its ugly head in 1928, but the discomfort felt by mothers as their sons don uniforms and make speeches quickly turns to horror and the horror to silence. As one mother tells of a son 'mixed up in dirty business': 'Never said a word about it. Not even after the war. And I never asked.'

But among the Jews, liberals and intellectuals the picture was clear. Hitler's appointment in 1933 as Chancellor is remembered by art gallery owner Max Liebermann: 'I couldn't eat enough to make me puke enough.'

But My Century is not just about the news, fictionalised or otherwise, but about how that news is spread. While the free world celebrated the victory of black American runner Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, the prisoners in Sachsenhause concentration camp nearby waited in vain for world opinion to liberate them, but concluded, 'The world of sport had its own concerns'. The ownership of news itself becomes a major story in this century in which, according to one narrator in 1991, 'CNN's got the TV rights for this war -- and the next and the one after that'

Gunter Grass is properly celebrated for The Tin Drum, but too much of his work has been off the central aisles of book shops for some time. But for anyone who needs reminding why he richly deserved the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, or just wondering what a real writer can do with the already cliched idea of a book of the century, this brilliant book is part of the answer.