Peeling the Onion - by Günter Grass (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published.

During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion--which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany--reveals Grass at his most intimate.

From the Back Cover

"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass s best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery." The New Yorker

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS at age seventeen. Wounded by shrapnel, he was taken prisoner by American forces and spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion reveals Grass at his most intimate.

"A fascinating, multilayered memoir . . . Peeling the Onion is well worth delving into." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Peeling the Onion is more than the stories of a soldier--it is a beautiful account of the ebbings of deprivations and the flowing of relief, both physical and metaphysical." --Los Angeles Times

Gunter Grass was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927 andis the widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He lives in Germany.

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Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR PEELING THE ONION

"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass's best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."--IAN BURUMA, THE NEW YORKER --