A literary master, his family, an assistant and her all-seeing camera are the components that make up Gunter Grass's great literary experiment, The Box: Tales from the Darkroom. In this work of fiction, Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they sit around the tables in their various households to record memories of their childhoods and of their father, who always seemed to be just out of reach.
Even though Grass builds The Box upon a fictional frame, the story daringly reveals the private life of a public man: Gunter Grass, himself, as a father, family man, and writer. Grass is the German-born author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He is widely acclaimed for his numerous successful books, including The Tin Drum, My Century, Crabwalk, and Peeling the Onion, but in The Box, Grass becomes the character of a father, toiling away on these great works while his children grow up around him.
With its fairy-tale beginning, The Box introduces the frame for a series of family gatherings. "Once upon a time," the first lines read, "there was a father, who, having grown old in years, called together his sons and daughters — four, five, six, eight in all." The children grant their father his wish of having them unite to share stories, and he captures their conversations with an audio recorder. Of course, the children resist at first, but they finally agree to indulge their father in his attempt to reclaim the time he spent away from them, working on new books, existing only as a shadow-man on the margins of their lives.
Even though Grass builds The Box upon a fictional frame, the story daringly reveals the private life of a public man: Gunter Grass, himself, as a father, family man, and writer. Grass is the German-born author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He is widely acclaimed for his numerous successful books, including The Tin Drum, My Century, Crabwalk, and Peeling the Onion, but in The Box, Grass becomes the character of a father, toiling away on these great works while his children grow up around him.
With its fairy-tale beginning, The Box introduces the frame for a series of family gatherings. "Once upon a time," the first lines read, "there was a father, who, having grown old in years, called together his sons and daughters — four, five, six, eight in all." The children grant their father his wish of having them unite to share stories, and he captures their conversations with an audio recorder. Of course, the children resist at first, but they finally agree to indulge their father in his attempt to reclaim the time he spent away from them, working on new books, existing only as a shadow-man on the margins of their lives.
Despite its rosy start, Grass quickly reveals the complexity of this family unit. While all of the eight children have the same father, they have different mothers. And as the children tell their tales, the stories of lovers, affairs, and the lies that sustained them come to the surface. Grass writes that as far as their father was concerned, the children were "determined not to spare his feelings despite their love for him." In return, Grass honors that commitment in his writing by not glossing over the harsher memories, even when they reveal a man, now aged, with a lifetime of accumulated faults and transgressions.
The memories recorded in this book take many avenues, but they all come together around the memory of the father's beloved Mariechen, or Marie, a photographer whose old-fashioned Agfa box camera takes snapshots that inspire the writer's work, reveal shocking secrets, and even foretell the future. Even though Grass gives voice to his children in this story, he's the writer, the one who brings their words back to Marie.
Who exactly Marie is to this family seems uncertain — and interesting. Is she simply Grass's assistant? Is she a family friend, or another of the father's lovers? And the images her Agfa box produces contain a mystery of their own. Once in the darkroom, Marie's photographs change from ordinary snapshots into something magical, something paranormal even, with the power to grant wishes or to show what might have been.
The memories recorded in this book take many avenues, but they all come together around the memory of the father's beloved Mariechen, or Marie, a photographer whose old-fashioned Agfa box camera takes snapshots that inspire the writer's work, reveal shocking secrets, and even foretell the future. Even though Grass gives voice to his children in this story, he's the writer, the one who brings their words back to Marie.
Who exactly Marie is to this family seems uncertain — and interesting. Is she simply Grass's assistant? Is she a family friend, or another of the father's lovers? And the images her Agfa box produces contain a mystery of their own. Once in the darkroom, Marie's photographs change from ordinary snapshots into something magical, something paranormal even, with the power to grant wishes or to show what might have been.
Marie and her Agfa box provide this book with an imaginative storyline that's captivating and surprising. The plot involving eight children who record memoirs of their famous father is interesting in its own way, but Marie and her camera add an element of intrigue to the otherwise less interesting details of grown children recalling their upbringing.
Due to the number of characters involved in telling this tale, the storyline becomes difficult to follow at times. The memories of these eight brothers and sisters also span from childhood to adulthood, so they now have their own children, jobs, and other interests. The individual nature of these characters becomes lost in the crowd.
In the end, it seems as though only Marie and the father retain their individuality, and perhaps that's the way Grass preferred the tale be told. Grass calls the children in this book "products of their father's whimsy," but with The Box, he proves that he's the one still producing some of his best work, and play.
Due to the number of characters involved in telling this tale, the storyline becomes difficult to follow at times. The memories of these eight brothers and sisters also span from childhood to adulthood, so they now have their own children, jobs, and other interests. The individual nature of these characters becomes lost in the crowd.
In the end, it seems as though only Marie and the father retain their individuality, and perhaps that's the way Grass preferred the tale be told. Grass calls the children in this book "products of their father's whimsy," but with The Box, he proves that he's the one still producing some of his best work, and play.
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