Customer Reviews

Cat and Mouse

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first read Cat and Mouse without the benefit of having read The Tin Drum beforehand, and I missed a lot. Cat and Mouse is the second book in Grass' Danzig Trilogy, three books that look at life in Danzig under the Nazi regime from three different points of view (the tales are told concurrently, and time can be fixed by seeing the same event from different points of view; for example, the picnic taken by the jazz trio and Schmuh in Book III of The Tin Drum shows up towards the end of Cat and Mouse, and Matern, one of the main characters of Dog Years, shows up in The Onion Cellar, where Oskar's jazz band is retained, in The Tin Drum).

Cat and Mouse is actually a novella, originally a part of Dog Years that broke off and took on a life of its own; on the surface it is the tale of Joachim Mahlke, a high school student with a protruding adam's apple (the Mouse of the title), and his fascination with a sunken Polish minesweeper after he learns to swim at the age of thirteen. It is also the story of Pilenz, the narrator and Mahlke's best friend. The two spend their high school years in wartime Poland, reacting to various things, and that's about as much plot as this little slice of life needs.

The interesting thing about Cat and Mouse is its complete difference in tone from the other two novels. Both The Tin Drum and (what I've read so far of) Dog Years have the same high-pitched, almost hysterical humor combined with a profound sense of teleology (not surprising given the apocalyptic nature of life in Danzig under the Nazis); Grass attempts to confront the horror with over-the-top slapstick, because only through that kind of comparison is it possible to make the reader understand. But while Cat and Mouse has its moments of the same kind of ribald humor, it is more dignified, in a sense, and closer to reality; enough so, at least, that when the book reaches its inevitable climax and denoument, one feels more genuine, or more human, reactions to the fates of Pilenz and Mahlke than one does to Oskar, the hero of The Tin Drum. Perhaps that is why it was segmented off from Dog Years; perhaps there was another reason. Whatever the case, it stands on its own and as an integral part of Grass' magnum opus.

Okay, I'll admit freely: "Katz und Maus" was required reading in school, which obviously biased me against it immediately. What's worse, it was German postwar literature, which never fails to be depressing and downbeat. I knew I was in for a greuling read.
And then, suddenly, it wasn't. In fact, I started liking it from the first line, and carried on until the end, which I'd give away if I said wasn't an end, so I'll let you read it yourself.

The story is complicated and non-linear. It is told from a first person narrative, the exact reliability of which is consatantly brought into question, either by the fog of the years or deliberate misconstruction due to feelings of guilt, the narrator never seems too sure about what happened, often offering several different versions of the same story at the same time, and even going so far as to admit his own fictitiousness. The story that serves as a Leitmotiv, as well as title of the book, is the cat that attacked Mahlke's adam's apple, and exactly how it got there.

What I found most striking about the book on first glance was the descriptions of the places and characters that the novella is centered on. At the same time, you have a feeling that it's merely a part of a greater whole. It fits in with the other two books in the so-called Danzig Trilogy seamlessly, yet still sets itself apart.

I have another confession to make: I attend a German high school, and so I read it in German. In my opinion, though what I've read of the excerpts seems like a decent translation, Günter Grass is an author who uses the German language to its full extent, emplying every manner of grammatical and syntactical tricks to underline the story. These, unfotunately, are completely lost in the translation. If you understand German decently, I would strongly encourage you to seek out an original language text.

This is a sensitively written tale of Joachim Mahlke and his "mouse" (that up-and-down-bobbing Adam's apple of his) -- through the eyes of an unreliable narrator reminiscing about his youth, and life, and morals, and how ordinary, decent people, some of them children, lived in Hitler's Germany. Realistic, telling, bittersweet. Lots of little chases and reflections: hence cat and mouse. Often uproariously funny, sometimes with a deeper message, sometimes just for humor.

Cat and Mouse is the most purely enjoyable book I've read in a long time. Perhaps not the most challenging to read (that's not always a bad thing), but definitely the most enjoyable.

There's lots of subsurface musing about war and the morality of killing... for an American, it reminds one of the collective guilt brought about by Vietnam. (But it is never in-your-face war-musings a la Tim O'Brien or anyone like that.) Yes, these teenage boys joined the Hitler Youth and aspired to shoot at British airplanes; but can we blame them? And can they morally redeem themselves decades later -- and need they?

A side point: I was shocked by one frequent error among reviewers here. How can people read this book and think that it is set in Poland! Its German setting is perhaps its most salient feature. It is set in what was then Germany, although that part of Germany became Poland after WW2.

Joachim Mahlke and his friend Plienz (who is the narrator of the story) grow up in wartime Danzig, the free city disputed between Germany and Poland over which World War II started. Maybe the most striking feature of the novella is that it shows how natural the war and Nazi rule appear to those adolescents, simply because it is the only world they know.

The "Great" Joachim Mahlke is the dubious hero of the story. His most striking feature is his huge Adam's apple, about which he feels highly self-conscious. Maybe he is trying so hard to be a hero to make the others forget his deformity? Is that what makes him dive into the sunken Polish minesweeper to retrieve all kinds of objects? Is that why he steals an Iron Cross from a war hero? (The Iron Cross is a medal worn around the neck, so that it would hide Mahlke's Adam's apple). And is it finally, the reason why Mahlke is so keen on joining the army himself? After a short time he has destroyed so many Russian tanks that he is awarded the Iron Cross himself...

This summary will give you only a faint idea of the book, for it cannot encapsulate the feeling of summer and of being young which Grass manages to include - without denying the dreadful things happening at the very same time. In a book of less than 200 pages Grass resurrects the Danzig of his own youth. If you haven't read any Grass yet, start at this one; it is perfect.

It is true that Grass is always a sweet read and this book is no exception. Do not be confused by the incorrect synopsis which is about a cheap American thriller. Grass has not lowed his high standards. He has written a moving, informative tale of youth in war-time Poland. The story is short, but powerful. Well worth a couple hours of your time.

Definitely worth reading. Within the story, Grass has raised the question of what heroism really means. There are different "heroes" in the story, and are called heroes for different reasons. He ridicules what heroism is considered to be, and indirectly asks; does this type of "heroism" deserve to be rewarded?

Another aspect to the novella that struck me was the narration. Pilenz, the narrator, writes an perhaps almost confessional story about a period in his life that happened years ago. His memory, which fails him in some respects and serves him well in others, can perhaps not be trusted in regards to 'what really happened' and why.

I think Grass's main point here is questioning what war-heroism really is, and the way it is/was considered is not necessarily "correct".

A poignant tale of growing up in the Fuhrer's Germany and the cost it had on the lives of ordinary and even decent individuals. A good link between 'Tin Drum' and 'Dog Years'.

The 'Wonder Years' of the characters populating this book were cynically appropriated by an ideology of hate. Whatever Mahlke was his condition certainly wasn't one that I would be happy to expose my children too. That is, until a point arrives in their lives where the terrifying moral turmoil that rages amongst us in can be intellectually accommodated. Cat and Mouse is an exploration of the significance of that confusion in an individual's appraisal of the part he played in the disaster of the Third Reich. Of memory and of a terrible forgetfulness. The book is full to overflowing with mythical, primeval images, the power of which can seduce the reader into believing they are entering an individuals take on the flickering images of personal memory. The magical quality of these images serve to highlight something far more sinister, something consciously utilised by the recruiting sergeants of Hitler's Germany. The narrator uses the tools of Nazism to reccount this story because he has no choice. Cat and Mouse portrays a nightmare landscape of guilt-ridden memory, not of an individual facing forces he is ill equipped to deal with, but of a people, complicit in the moral bankruptcy of a nations history.

For a writer whose works have often been charged with clear political and socioeconomic talk, Grass's "Cat and Mouse" is refreshingly atypical. This is a story about childhood - a childhood very particular to Danzig approaching and amidst World War II - but most specific and intentionally a character development. What is missing here is Grass's usual voice, arguing over historical choices or social problems, and he with expected self-consciousness restrains such a narrator from surfacing. Not to say, of course, that one will find such debates of his uninteresting or something to set this above, but this is simply not that novel. In such respects, two of Grass's shortest books, "Cat and Mouse" and "Headbirths," are quite bipolar in means of conveyance, the latter finding its novelistic aspects very tentative and nonfixed to the purpose. Grass here writes with the full power of his playful and engaging style, and this is the novel that takes the form: "all that summer we... in the winter... but the following year," memoir-style traversing upper-school years. As you may expect, however the form, Gunter Grass is writing with messages in mind, particularly in thoughts central to greatness and heroism.

This is the first of Grass's Danzig trilogy I have viewed, and I understand after reading "The Tin Drum" my fondness for this novel may be encapsulated. Nevertheless, "Cat and Mouse" is short, strong, and everything I had anticipated.

Whether or not you are able to extract a whole lot from this story, I think you will like it, if you liked the Tin Drum. This is a difficult read. It is written in roughly the same style as the Tin Drum, but I found myself always trying to grasp just what Grass was trying to get at. I have read it twice now, and am still drawn to the story's main character, Mahlke. In Mahlke's story, I think we can essentially find a part of the story of Germany, or more precisely Danzig, before the war, during it, and after it.

From Malhke's obsessive adoration of the Virgin, to his fixation on wearing things to 'cover his Adam's apple,' to his finding himself by, without fail, impressing his schoolmates by his strange and adventurous triumphs in athleticism, Grass expresses what is important to him, and what is also ineffable in ordinary language. The presence of the ineffable is what is most striking in this book, as is how well Grass nearly communicates it. Still, it is a work that puzzles me. I would rather be a bit lost in an extraordinary world than be perfectly at ease in a book that is commonplace and mundane.