This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again -- Julian Mitchell Sunday Times Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience -- John Irving Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age -- Michael Ratcliffe The Times The novel is as monstrous as its hero, pullalating with a kind of anti-life... Gunter Grass may have written the nearest thing to a literary masterpiece his generation is capable of producing -- David Lodge Spectator Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game Daily Telegraph
