The Tin Drum

A New Translation by Breon Mitchell

De: Günter Grass

Narrado por: Richard Powers

The Tin Drum deals with the rise of Nazism and with the war experience in the unique cultural setting of Danzig, by Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication of this runaway best seller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass' publishers all over the world, offer a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources. The result is a translation that is faithful to Grass' style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After 50 years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance.

©2009 Breon Mitchell (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

This is a new translation of the classic novel, offered on the 50th anniversary of its original publication.

"Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age." (Times)

"The Tin Drum itself remains a very great novel, as daring and imaginative as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved." (Washington Post)

"The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the twentieth century." (Swedish Academy, awarding Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999)

fabulous

This story is fantastic on so many levels. Itvis a really cool story with unbelievable twists and turns. It is a fantastic set of allegories and metaphors also. The reader is fantastic as well with a bonus of slight German accent.

The reading of the book was superb, the only reason I finished.

Really long and hard to stay with. But you do gain insight into life in Poland during WWII.

Grows on You

Upon listening to the first third of the Tin Drum, I scurried to my library and gave it a one star rating. I tried again, listening to the second section, and the rating went up to four stars. The book confounded me with the confabulations of the demented musings of a diminished man, who matures inside the body of a person who never grows any larger than a three-year-old. He takes refuge under women’s skirts, as he bears witness to the events of World War II during the invasion of Poland. Each and every of his mental constructs is made up of multiple, arcane, and original analogies. Freud and Young could have spent years arguing over whether coalescing “though bubbles” in his “steam of consciousness” tirades were really the apex of a series of “transferences,” harking back to some unconscious landscape of repressed memories or uncatalogued “archetypes” describing the most eclectic features of the collective unconscious. Such are the ravages or warring camps in the field of psychology, warring cognitions of adult and toddler occupying the same mind, tossed unwittingly about by the warring parties of World War II. Such carnage! It’s brilliant and bogus and you have to love it or hate it. I grew to love what I started out hating.

Some of the best irony in literature

Many listeners will perhaps find this book tedious and lacking humour. However a careful listener who has previously found their own human condition not lacking in elements of the absurd will find laugh out loud moments at the most unexpected time. I would compare the subtlety of the irony to that of Don Quixote or The Divine Comedy.

Loved it but it was “thick” in many ways.

Complicated story line. Unfortunately in 2023 close reading is difficult. It’s such a fast-paced world. However I loved the descriptions, settings, and over texture. It was a quirky kind of fun read.