The Flounder

…Vietnam War; Der Butt (1977; The Flounder), a ribald fable of the war between the sexes from the Stone Age to the present; Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting at Telgte), a hypothetical “Gruppe 1647” meeting of authors at the close of the Thirty Years’ War; Kopfgeburten; oder, die…

Günter Grass’s Der Butt (1977; The Flounder) and Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), with their convoluted inset narratives, lyric interludes, recipes for favorite German dishes, revisions of fairy tales, and ironic representations of contemporary feminism, were at first misunderstood because they were judged by the standards of the canonical modern…