Too Far Afield [Paperback]

Gunter Grass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2001

Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburgers at McDonald's, observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall in 1989: Theo Wuttke, former East German cultural functionary; and Ludwig Hoftaller - Wuttke's shadow - a mid-level spy who can serve the Gestapo or the Stasi with equal dedication. Grass writes with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition and political acerbity for which he is celebrated. This novel will stand as perhaps the most complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will eventually come to mean.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Recent German unification is neatly, if protractedly, likened to the inner development of one of its bureaucrats in this novel of Berlin after reunification. The book is a worthy follow-up to My Century, which taught 100 years of history in human, understandable terms. Theo Wuttke, known as "Fonty" because he's obsessed with famous German novelist Theodor Fontane, is a former war correspondent now on his uppers as an elderly file courier in a government agency of the former German Democratic Republic. Blessed with an encyclopedic memory, Fonty often recites poems from different languages, to his co-workers' secret derision. Weary of life at the agency, he tries to escapeDonce to Scotland, another time to Great BritainDbut a spy named Ludwig Hoftaller, himself an incarnation of a 19th-century figure and often called Fonty's "day-and-night-shadow," always finds him. Hoftaller's motivation is never made clear: perhaps fear that Fonty will leak German state secrets, perhaps loneliness, perhaps both. The past keeps impinging on the present; Hoftaller knows truths about marital infidelities in Fonty's past that keep Fonty from rebelling too forcefully. The two old men wander the streets of Berlin, each struggling with WWII guilt, as both of them had connections to Hitler's regime. Some overlong passages detailing German history will be lost on American readers, and Fonty's rambling monologues constantly threaten to bring the novel to a halt. However, the psychologically complex portrayal of a man's gradual relinquishing of his social position in order to keep his spirit intact is more than enough to maintain a reader's passion in the work. Fonty does manage to escape eventually, his victory that of a profoundly human figure who embodies both the bitterness and the sweetness of an era's passing. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When this hefty novel was first published in Germany in 1995, many readers reacted antagonistically, finding it unmanageable and rudely outspoken. This, of course, hardly comes as a surprise. Grass has always unswervingly spoken his mind through memorable characters. His latest work is another sober commentary conveyed through the words and actions of two eccentric and weary but always vigilant 70-year-old protagonists who observe the logic, the aftermath, and the inevitable price of German reunification. Through a clutter of references to Germany's turbulent history, Grass blends the past with the present and almost convinces us that social history is politics, and yet politics remains the history of one. Like the legendary The Tin Drum, this is only superficially a work of magical realism. One of the key sentences, "I'm afraid the shame will live on," which actually alludes to the evasive ending of Kafka's The Trial, suggests that what lies beneath this multilayered, if a bit overambitious, story is a potent message that transcends even the actual characters and their humanity. One cannot help but wonder if the demanding form and content would be more decipherable if the novel had the accessible format of Grass's recently published My Century. Nevertheless, the recognizable honesty of Grass's literature still hovers in the background. This is why we continue to revere him.
-DMirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 784 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (September 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571206646
• ISBN-13: 978-0571206643
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927, Günter Grass is a widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grass deserves his Nobel Prize!, October 31, 2000

By 

Billy J. Hobbs "Bill Hobbs" (Tyler, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Too Far Afield (Hardcover)

It takes the form of a gripping nostalgia trip. Gunter Grass' "Too Far Afield" features two elderly German men, Theo Wuttke and Ludwig Hoftaller, and has been called his most complexly written novel of all, and this Nobel Prize-winner has more than his share of complex works.

Grass is not an easy man to read; however, that said, Grass and his works speak for themselves quite clearly. Ever ready with the surreal in his works ("The Tin Drum," "Cat and Mouse," to name two), Grass' grasp of the intensity, the confusion, the excitement, the euphoria, the intense dislike between the two Germanys is in top form in his latest work. Wuttke and Hoftaller, who are in their seventies, work for an agency set up to privatize the former East Germany in Berlin in the fall of 1989. Their thoughts are the vehicle for this book's story line and Grass has poignantly captured the moments.

Having lived in Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing reunification, I find "Too Far Afield" even more relevant. And the book is not meant to put you to sleep with all its poignancy and nostalgia, and Grass once again explores the relationship of Germany with its often-troubled past to the present. There are surprising turns, clever humor, and excellent characterization that make the book a worthwhile undertaking. ([e-mail])

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegiac, January 24, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far Afield (Hardcover)

This is an interesting experiment. Instead of writing his usual novels filled with magic realism, Too Far Afield is based on a striking conceit. A former East German cultural functionary, Theo Wuttke, is born a century after the first great German novelist, Theodore Fontane. Throughout the history of the German Democratic Republic he will make his living giving lectures on Fontane to Communist audiences. Indeed Wuttke, known as "Fonty" to all his friends, will blur the events of his own life with that of the great novelist. With the same sort of wife and the same number of children Fontane and Fonty also evoke analogies between the reunification of Germany in 1871 with that of 1990. The difference, of course, is whereas in the former date Prussia and the Prussian monarchy and army succeeded in dominating the other German states, in the latter a truncated Prussia was accepted as a supplicant by a smugly superior West. At the same time Fonty is continually shadowed by Ludwig Hofftaller, a former Stasi agent, a former Gestapo agent, who for nearly fifty years has been protecting Fonty by giving the subtle hint and the insinuation of blackmail. Fonty, now in his seventies, is employed at the Handover Trust, in charge of the privitization of East German property. He will try to save the Paternoster, an old-fashioned elaborate elevator, and will be assigned to task of figuring out a better term for the rather depressing process than "winding down."

The novel contains a murder, a fatal accident, a wedding, a fire, an ostracization and a disappearance, but the tone is quiet and elegiac. Particularly subtle is the portrait of Fonty's daughter, Martha, once a fervent Communist, then a considerably less fervent one, then the Catholic wife of an older Catholic businessman, and finally a propagandist for efficiency and open-mindedness for the new post-Communist party. To fully appreciate this novel one would have to know much more of Fontane's work than most people on this continent do (the last line, and the title, refer to Fontane's most famous novel, Effi Briest). Perhaps an analogy would be to have Martin Amis write a novel about a double of Dickens. Yet if the tone of the novel is more subdued than that of Grass's previous works, there is still the gift of incident and observation that won Grass the Nobel Prize. Early in the novel Fonty and Hofftaller go to a Mcdonalds for the first time, and Fonty responds as Fontane would, by telling about the glorious ballads of the Macdonald clan of his beloved Scotland. Near the end of the novel Fonty is visiting the grave of Kleist and Grass writes "On the way to the grave, Madeleine [Fonty's illegitimate French granddaughter]had already picked a few flowers, or rather, flowering weeds. She added them to the faded wreaths. If you did not confine yourself to the lake, veiled in gray, you could catch a glimpse of the city's fashionable outskirts, a large expanse of villas set amidst lawns and trees, and hidden among them a particular villa, once the site of the Wannsee Conference, now a museum of terror, awaiting visits from schoolchildren." Shortly after a father explains about Kleist's murder-suicide: "Well, first the two of them had themselves a nice picnic here, and they didn't do the shooting till they were finished..." This is a subtle novel, which deserves close reading.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grass's Reunification Novel, August 2, 2001

By 

Keith Murray (Gwynedd Valley, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far Afield (Hardcover)

Here we are, another masterpiece from one of Germany's greatest contemporary novelists.

This work, which first appeared in Germany in 1995, is Grass's treatment of Germany's reunification. Among the novel's central themes is this: that through successive periods of history some things never change. They may be harder to spot, they may have a different name, they may be lurking in a cellar where no one wishes to find them, but they are there all the same. Grass here uses the medium of the novel to assert that the celebrations of 1989-1990 ignored the dark side of the German national identity.

He accomplishes this by invoking minutiae from throughout German history, all of which is related through the novel's two central characters: Wuttke, who believes himself to be the nineteenth-century writer Theodore Fontane; and Hoftaller, a former East German police agent who is Wuttke's "shadow". What emerges is a fascinating montage where elements from both past and present intermingle, which is what Grass wants us to believe anyway: that what is "past" isn't really in the past at all.

A variety of symbols reinforce this message. Much of the novel takes place in a quintessentially symbolic building in central Berlin: a building which originally housed the Third Reich's Aviation Ministry, then East Germany's "House of Ministries," and now (although not mentioned in the novel) the Federal Ministry of Finance. Within this building one finds the "Paternoster," an old elevator system which Wuttke attempts to save from being replaced by modern high speed elevators, and which carries a symbolic import of its own: it represents the rise and fall of various people within the building, the memory or in the novel the "Archives" of Germany.

At more than 650 pages this is a formidable undertaking but in the end well worth the effort. A reader not terrible familiar with German history or literature may find many of the references terribly confusing or elusive. But here is Grass at his finest--his wit, his insight, his courage to poke fun at everything the Germans have considered sacred: from the former chancellor and "hero" of reunification Helmut Kohl to contemporary author Christa Wolf.