Too Far Afield by Gunter Grass, review by Pat Boran

Too Far Afield, Gunter Grass. Faber and Faber. £25.00 UK HB.

It's New Year's Eve, 1995, and Theo Wuttke, better known as Fonty, is fast approaching his seventieth birthday. The two facts inevitably weigh on the mind of this former East German cultural functionary, given his near obsession for history, particularly of the literary kind.

However, as the minor poet walks around the centre of Berlin in the company of ex-spy Ludwig Hoftaller, described as the 'day-and-night shadow' with whom he has 'never managed to march in step', Fonty's thoughts are more concerned with the historical and political rather than with the personal changes his world is going through.

This is not to say that it is Fonty's thoughts the reader of Gunter Grass's massive new novel is actually witness to. Rather it is to those of the faceless archivisits who now and again interrupt the 'neutral' third person narrative to make such comments as 'We archivists reserve comment here' or 'As we archivists know'. This technique adds a certain sense of foreboding to a book which is more concerned with return and recall than with forward motion. Whether it compensates for the backward pull and weight of history is another question.

For as Fonty and Hoftaller wander the city streets, Fonty passes the time displaying his prodigious memory for major and minor songs and verses, reaching back into the dimness of German and pre-German history. One suspects even a reader from that part of the world might have some difficulty with the number and length of passages quoted here, but for the general Irish reader the references and allusions threaten to overpower.

This is a real pity because Grass is after something important here, the balancing of personal and national lives, and the place and role of the individual; and, perhaps most importantly, the place of memory and record in the vision a people accepts of itself.

Having come into possession of his first typewriter (the spoils of war) when he was eighteen, and seeing that it 'suggested an idea to him' - rather than the other way around -- the young Fonty then embarked on a literary life which, as with many literary lives, proved something of a disappointment. An airman, war correspondent, apothecary's apprentice and finally lecturer and file courier for the Culture Union ('censorship's handmaiden' is the damning phrase used), though now the subject of a biography and a statue in the city centre, he finds little comfort in the minor reputation he's made for himself. In every sense his place in the new world is unclear.

And so he wanders Berlin like someone lost, closer to the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire than Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Still 'smarting from the Thousand-Year Reich', and rebuffed by a companion in 'no mood for quotations', he is left with nothing but memories, a fact which proves -- despite his conviction that he is the reincarnation of 'the Immortal, the great eighteenth century poetic chronicler of Prussia -- in this world 'Nothing is more immortal than an archive.'

Occasional scenes stand out, such as Fonty's birthday meal at McDonald's, funny and tragic at the same time, but the problem of this major work is that it is a gallery so packed with pictures and voices the eye doesn't always know where to rest.

Despite the suggestion that the changes the future will bring must be embraced rather than resisted -- 'The Turks are the new Huguenots. They'll create their own order in the end one can't help feel that the focus Grass managed to bring to the 100 mini-essays in his My Century earlier this year would have helped here. But as the two books have appeared in English in reverse order, perhaps that kind of precision and simplicity had to be earned.