So it turns out that a complicated legacy is not all Nobel laureate Günter Grass left behind. Ten years after his death, we are gifted with this slight but intriguing story that bears many of the controversial legend’s hallmarks even if it’s not hard to see why he left it to languish in the top drawer.
An author - much like Grass - is on a book tour in the 80s when he visits a cathedral and becomes rather taken by its donor statues. In a break with reality he invites them to dinner. They come in human form and all is well until one leaves to go work. She’s a busker. You know, the painted ones who stand stock still and we all try to make flinch or laugh. The author becomes obsessed and chases her from city to city. His passion intensifies. She gives him nothing. Until she accepts another dinner invitation. Cue the cataclysm.
In The Living Statue, Grass revisits many of his central themes - German identity, lust, art, delusion, fraught nostalgia - while settling some minor scores on the side. A curio, at best, but one that has lodged itself in my mind.
The Living Statue by Günter Grass (Tr. Michael Hofmann)
New Directions, 2024
57 pages