Too Far Afield

Although this novel (published four years before Grass won the Nobel Prize) ranges from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the following year's unification of Germany, the author's basic obsession is - through cryptic references and allusions - with the past two centuries of German history. Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburgers at Macdonald'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.