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The Tin Drum
- A New Translation by Breon Mitchell
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
The Tin Drum deals with the rise of Nazism and with the war experience in the unique cultural setting of Danzig, by Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication of this runaway best seller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass' publishers all over the world, offer a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources. The result is a translation that is faithful to Grass' style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After 50 years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance.
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Critic reviews
This is a new translation of the classic novel, offered on the 50th anniversary of its original publication.
"Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age." (Times)
"The Tin Drum itself remains a very great novel, as daring and imaginative as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved." (Washington Post)
"The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the twentieth century." (Swedish Academy, awarding Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999)
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For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
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Interesting
- By northwoods woman on 06-25-20
By: Anonymous, and others
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Pearl in a Cage
- By: Joy Dettman
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
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Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
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Grand Central
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- By: Melanie Benjamin, Amanda Hodgkinson, Pam Jenoff, and others
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 05-03-17
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We the Living
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We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. At its center is a girl whose passionate love is her fortress against the cruelty and oppression of a totalitarian state. Rand said of this book: "It is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write."
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Emotionally intense, historically authentic
- By Geoffrey on 08-14-08
By: Ayn Rand
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Paradise
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
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By: Toni Morrison
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Miss Lonelyhearts
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Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column, which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. The novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony.
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Charged with Meaning, and Far Leftist Leaning
- By W Perry Hall on 01-27-16
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum
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Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.
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Another Kate Atkinson multi-generational story
- By Satisfied Customer on 11-08-18
By: Kate Atkinson
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Middle C
- By: William H. Gass
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
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Gass’ new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life - futile, comic, anarchic - arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland....
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All the world was a stage. But not for all the wor
- By Darwin8u on 06-07-14
By: William H. Gass
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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
- By: Kelly Link - editor, Gavin J. Grant - editor
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- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
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Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, and intrepid orphans - decked out in corsets, clockwerk suits, and tall black boots - solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships.
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MMMM, Orca Bacon
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-14-13
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Above Us Only Sky
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Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
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I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
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In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood through the late 1950s, when his book The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.
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Originally published in 1938, Graham Greene’s chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare is a masterpiece of psychological realism and often considered Graham Greene’s best novel. It is a fascinating study of evil, sin, and the “appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” a classic of its kind.
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Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.
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In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
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What listeners say about The Tin Drum
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- BBWrighter
- 10-06-24
The reading of the book was superb, the only reason I finished.
Really long and hard to stay with. But you do gain insight into life in Poland during WWII.
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- Angel
- 09-17-10
Grows on You
Upon listening to the first third of the Tin Drum, I scurried to my library and gave it a one star rating. I tried again, listening to the second section, and the rating went up to four stars. The book confounded me with the confabulations of the demented musings of a diminished man, who matures inside the body of a person who never grows any larger than a three-year-old. He takes refuge under women’s skirts, as he bears witness to the events of World War II during the invasion of Poland. Each and every of his mental constructs is made up of multiple, arcane, and original analogies. Freud and Young could have spent years arguing over whether coalescing “though bubbles” in his “steam of consciousness” tirades were really the apex of a series of “transferences,” harking back to some unconscious landscape of repressed memories or uncatalogued “archetypes” describing the most eclectic features of the collective unconscious. Such are the ravages or warring camps in the field of psychology, warring cognitions of adult and toddler occupying the same mind, tossed unwittingly about by the warring parties of World War II. Such carnage! It’s brilliant and bogus and you have to love it or hate it. I grew to love what I started out hating.
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20 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Guillermo
- 10-26-09
One of the greatest works of the 20th Century
Strange, irreverent, satirical fable set around world war II era. Often difficult and disturbing yet always comical, enjoyable and entirely essential for the literary minded. Well worth the credit. One of the greatest literary works of the 20th century--along with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez--another title I hope audible gets soon.
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20 people found this helpful
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- Blaise
- 09-30-23
Good but not Great
I read this because it was on the recommended reading list before a river cruise in the area. Some parts of this were interesting, but many unexplained foreign references combined with a near complete lack of awareness of a major World War made me question why this was recommended. I have a better appreciation for what it's like to be a midget rather than about the region.
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- Barry
- 08-11-12
It's a metaphor, right?
One thing is for sure: this book is never boring. Funny, annoying, weird, and a lot of other things, but not boring. It's clear that a lot of things in the book are supposed to be metaphorical. I never did figure out what the tin drum was supposed to be. I did learn a lot about the German mindset through the first half of the 20th century. Or at least, I think I did. There's enough ambiguity that it's hard to tell what Grass's opinions are, what his countrymen actually thought, whether Oskar represents what people really thought or what they thought they thought, or something else. Which is probably true of most people in most places and times. That Grass is able to capture that essence is an accomplishment. That Oskar is perhaps the most aggravating protagonist in literature doesn't diminish that in any way.
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23 people found this helpful
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- Robert Fouty
- 01-30-23
Engaging Story
Complex storyline… many characters…interacting and entwining over time..very engaging prose…narrator was easy to listen to…nice hint of German accent in his voice
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- Elisabeth
- 12-15-16
Some of the best irony in literature
Many listeners will perhaps find this book tedious and lacking humour. However a careful listener who has previously found their own human condition not lacking in elements of the absurd will find laugh out loud moments at the most unexpected time. I would compare the subtlety of the irony to that of Don Quixote or The Divine Comedy.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Pete Schreiner
- 07-02-23
Loved it but it was “thick” in many ways.
Complicated story line. Unfortunately in 2023 close reading is difficult. It’s such a fast-paced world. However I loved the descriptions, settings, and over texture. It was a quirky kind of fun read.
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- Michael
- 05-28-18
What War Does
Although this is a great book, it will not be for all readers. There is little action and the story is convoluted, self-contradictory, and alternatively commonplace and absurd. I would not recommend this to young readers, and I am not yet sure I will recommend it to my (adult) daughter.
This book is funny at the surface and (literally) intolerably sad below. It deals with the effects of war and the dehumanization of the modern post-war world. This is a great book which uses aspects of magical realism and the absurd to express the pressures of humans dealing with modern war and its aftermath. This book is well worth reading just to hear the story of the Onion Club.
This book did not feel like a translation, it was smooth and resonated very well in english.
The narration was superb, completely clear, expressing emotionality, and handling swift changes of mode and perspective very well.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Chris Hawkins Drums
- 09-12-19
Cryptic
This book is not even close to what it says it is. If you read this book as is, it is a great read. But if you dig into the symbolism of what all these characters and stories are actually talking about, your mind will be blown.
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4 people found this helpful