A Turbot de Force

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FLOUNDER

by Guenter Grass; translated by Ralph Manheim

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 547 pages; $12

As Germany's finest living novelist, Guenter Grass has clowned his way to his nation's most serious truths. The Tin Drum and Dog Years are masterpieces of comedy and verbal invention about the culture and history that suppurated as the Third Reich. In other novels, plays and poems, he dealt with the Hitler aftermath of political divisions and haunted affluence. One mark of Grass's success is the uneasiness he caused the average German of his own World War II generation. In a tradition where philosophy and history stand on pedestals of grand abstractions, Grass's earthiness and ribald ironies came as a peasant's rude truths.

Now comes The Flounder, a long, magnificent passage of wind, a pungent humanizing of the past and present in which the Weltgeist (world spirit) is a talking fish, a warty, cunning creature with a crooked mouth and two freakish eyes on one side of its doormat body. This turbot, as it is called on the Continent, is also a male chauvinist who echoes one of the two main themes of the book: the eternal power struggle between men and women. The other persistent melody, the importance of cooking and nutrition in history, is in the tasty flesh of the flounder itself.

Sex and food are as far from the dry rumblings of Weltgeist and Historismus as one can get. Grass keeps it that way for more than 500 pages with dozens of lusty characters and bawdy episodes that stretch from the Neolithic to now. He also lards his narrative with mock-epic poetry:

I write about superabundance.

About fasting and why gluttons

invented it.

About crusts from the tables of the

rich and their food value.

About fat and excrement and salt

and penury.

In the midst of a mound of millet I will relate instructively how the spirit became bitter as

gall and the belly went insane.

At the center of this tour de force is The Fisherman and His Wife, the folk tale about the man who releases his magic catch after the fish promises to grant his wishes. In the traditional version, the fisherman's wife, Hsebill, ruins good fortune with her greed. In Grasss ich-theology, the ageless narrator tells his equally timeless mate Ilsebill how he threw the fish back into the Baltic after it had agreed to bring him knowledge of the outside world.

The beginning is prehistoric. Grass's fisherman and his fellows live in a matriarchy, cared for and suckled by the three-breasted Awa. In this age before Prometheus, women have stolen fire from the gods and rule through the cooking pot. But the Flounder, "like a swimming newspaper," gives man the crucial information that begins male domination: fire can also be used to smelt metal from rock, and metal can be forged into spearheads and axes. Thus is born man's wanderlust, his will to strive and conquer, his ability to make myths and reason to tragic absurdities. It is history's first chapter. In the second chapter, the power of the breast and the soup pot go underground.

Awa herself goes through nearly a dozen transformations as she boils, roasts, bakes and poaches her way through the centuries. In the Iron Age she is Wigga, who invents fish soup. Later, paganism and Christianity are blended into "a Catholic mixture" by Mestwina. During the High Gothic she surfaces as the saintly and ascetic Dorothea ("The barley in her pot never saw fat") and a century or two later as Margarete Rusch, a "goose-plucking" nun whose obesity conceals her pregnancies. The list runs on through plagues, wars, capitalism and socialism, ending with the fiancee of a Polish dock worker killed by police during a 1970 strike.

Eventually the Flounder tires of the mess that men have made in the world.

"When, a few months before the oil cri sis," notes the narrator, "I called him out of the sea (for advice on my income-tax problems), he denounced our agreement: 'Nothing can be expected of you daddies any more. Nothing but dodges and gim micks.' " The fickle fish then allows him self to be caught by three feminists and, in the novel's comic centerpiece, to be put on trial for crimes against females. Unfortunately, "the Tribunal met only in the afternoon and on occasional weekends, be cause the judges, all except the housewife Elisabeth Guellen, had jobs."

Like everything else in this joyfully indulgent book, the trial has its culinary aspects. In fact, The Flounder can be read as a digestive tract that runs from one end of history to the other. The succulent details and observations on wild millet, the potato, amber as an aphrodisiac and the early pepper trade, and his recipes for tripe and other nutritious innards, raise the pleasures of the palate to necessities. Cooking, as Grass's robust ge nius makes clear, can be a form of love or war by other means.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Slowly the movie house with its challenging smell grew into an empty speech-balloon. I was on the point of leaving, no, taking flight. Then spake the Flounder. Without modifying his position of repose in his bed of sand, he moved his crooked mouth. 'I can't help you, my son. I can't even offer you mild regrets. You have misused all the power I gave you. Instead of turning the rights bestowed upon you to caring, charitable use, you have let hegemony degenerate into repression and power become an end in itself. For centuries I did my best to hush up your defeats, to interpret your wretched failure as progress, to hide your now obvious ruin behind big buildings, drown it out with symphonies, beautify it in panel paintings on a golden background, or talk it away in books, sometimes humorously, sometimes elegiacally, and sometimes, as a last resort, only intelligently. To prop up your superstructure I have even, in my desire to be helpful, invented gods, from Zeus to Marx. Even in the modern age -- which for me is only a second in world history -- I am obliged, as long as this all in all entertaining Tribunal goes on, to season your masterful absurdities with wit and squeeze some meaning out of your bankruptcy."

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