Sunday, August 30, 2009

What is missing from "Peeling the Onion," by Gunter Grass

Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass (Harcourt, 2007).

There is one scene in particular in this memoir that has stuck in my mind. In a village behind Russian lines in 1945, Grass is an 18 year old member of the Waffen SS, trapped in a basement with five or six other German soldiers. Grass writes that he does not remember how he got there. Russian troops are firing at them. Across the square are German troops. The sergeant orders the men in the basement to each grab a bicycle (it is apparently the basement of a bicycle repair shop), and get ready to escape. "Now or never!" Grass informs him that he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle, so the sergeant tells him to stay and cover their escape with a machine gun, assuring him they'd return later for him. Grass takes his position at a window.

"I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles -- including girls' bicycles -- and all, than they were mown down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere, that is, from one side of the street or other, or both."

Grass watches as the pile of men wriggle and move for a short bit, and then all is still except for the spinning of a bicycle wheel. He has not fired a shot. He turns and makes his escape from the basement, running in the opposite direction taken by the men.

We have to take Grass's word for what happened in the basement, of course. He is the only survivor. His behavior throughout, at least as he describes it, is of a scared young man trying to stay alive amidst the collapse of the German army facing the advancing Russians.

I was struck by the sudden change of perspective in referring to himself -- "the doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire" instead of "I never had a chance to fire". It's an affect that Grass uses suddenly and repeatedly, as if he wants to express an objective point of view that cannot be assailed.

Apparently, Grass wanted to write this memoir to disclose his involvement in the SS as the involvement of a naive teenager, more interested in adventure, heroism, and escaping his stifling family life, and less interested in killing Russians, Jews, and all the other enemies of the Fatherland.

There are many enthralling passages. I don't think of Grass as a likable man. An air of comfortable self-importance emanates from the book, with frequent references to "Oscar," the first name of the main character of The Tin Drum, his most famous novel, and to other characters and scenes from his writing, as if the reader would naturally be familiar with them all. (It's true, this is his memoir -- why would you be reading it if you weren't at least somewhat familiar with his writing?)

I found him believable. I didn't sense strategic silences on details, such as to what really happened in that basement, before or after. What he is silent about is what he was taught about the Jews. The Poles. Or all the other populations who deserved extinction, according to Hitler. As a young man who read constantly, and as an SS recruit, he must have known the propoganda. Perhaps Grass handles those subjects elsewhere. If so, I haven't read them. He doesn't handle those subjects here, there is barely a word about them, and that seems like a strange and unsatisfying omission.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Publication news

Some good news: the Greek-American newspaper The Hellenic Voice has published my short story, How You Catch A Cold. It appears in the August 12-19 issue of the paper. I'm thrilled to see the story in print, and hope it reaches a few readers.

If you don't have a subscription to the paper, you can read the story by clicking the link in the right-hand column of this blog page, under one of my "short story" headings.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Aurelia's Oratorio, at the A.R.T.

We saw Aurelia's Oratorio with friends at the American Repertory Theater on Saturday night, August 1. Aurelia is Aurielia Theriee Chaplain, the daughter of Victoria Theriee Chaplain (the creator and director of the show) and a granddaughter of Charley Chaplain. Jaime Martinez is the other lead performer in the show.

We saw imaginative circus acts, mime, puppetry, acrobatics, dancing, illusion, and magic. I was mesmerized. Aurelia and Jaime perform acrobatic stories, sometimes together, but mostly as individuals. In the opening sequence, she appears and disappears from inside a chest of drawers. A little later, she struggles with a scarf, the scarf grows and becomes as long as one of those vines that Tarzan used to swing through the jungle with, and she lifts herself into the air, ten or twenty feet above the stage, twirling, tying and untying, play-acting at creating a hammock and falling asleep, struggling to stay aloft as the entire set shakes as if it was hit by an earthquake.

Any slip and she could fall to her death.

Aurelia is beautiful. She races around with a kind of breathless energy, as if she cannot ever rest, or ever get enough satisfaction out of life. She seemed to be less about grace than about furious activity.

Jaime is graceful and powerful. He danced and moved like a ballet dancer, even when performing those improbable stunts, like walking up a wall as if it were level ground.

What was it all about, the skits, the little comic reversals and pratfalls? I found myself a little annoyed in the early part of the 70 minute show, wondering whether there was an overall story. Were they lovers in an elaborate apache dance? Were they people constantly struggling against absurdity?

I didn't care after a while. We just enjoyed the show, and the pleasure of watching the circus.

Louise Kennedy gave the show a good review in The Boston Globe, and I can't disagree with her.