The Nobel-winning writer Günter Grass, who died aged 88 in 2015, published a final book: Of All That Ends. It has just been translated into English, with a blurb telling us that Grass was Germany’s “most celebrated post-war writer” and “a creative artist of remarkable versatility.”
With the publication of The Tin Drum, Grass showed himself to be a master story-teller, vigorous, energetic and powerful. It is a technique he also uses to great effect in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, where he mixes memories with fiction and where personalities he met in his youth became transmuted into characters in his books. Significantly, he wrote the autobiography because “I wanted the last word.”
