1999 Nobel laureate Günter Grass has passed away; see, for example obituaries in The New York Times and The Guardian.
As one of the authors whose work I had read long before I started this site, little is under review at the complete review -- just a few odds and ends from the past fifteen years: A few weeks ago Peter Handke was in New York, at the Wim Wnders retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and in one of the post-film discussions he rambled on about all sorts of things. Grass came up too, and Handke acknowledged he was a very great writer -- or, as Handke put it, had been, 'for three years' (presumably meaning the trilogy years -- which were actually four, 1959 (The Tin Drum) to 1963). If he peaked there, Grass certainly also wrote enough else that deserves to be remembered and read.
There's tons of media coverage of course; for some writer-reactions see Salman Rushdie explaining The Greatness of Günter Grass at The New Yorker's Page-Turner, and a Q & A with Jeffrey Eugenides at DeutscheWelle.
As one of the authors whose work I had read long before I started this site, little is under review at the complete review -- just a few odds and ends from the past fifteen years: A few weeks ago Peter Handke was in New York, at the Wim Wnders retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and in one of the post-film discussions he rambled on about all sorts of things. Grass came up too, and Handke acknowledged he was a very great writer -- or, as Handke put it, had been, 'for three years' (presumably meaning the trilogy years -- which were actually four, 1959 (The Tin Drum) to 1963). If he peaked there, Grass certainly also wrote enough else that deserves to be remembered and read.
There's tons of media coverage of course; for some writer-reactions see Salman Rushdie explaining The Greatness of Günter Grass at The New Yorker's Page-Turner, and a Q & A with Jeffrey Eugenides at DeutscheWelle.