"Cat and Mouse" by Gunter Grass

The book is set during world war 2, in a coastal town in Germany, among schoolboys. The narrator hero-worships his friend and fellow Roman Catholic Joachim Mahlke; the great Mahlke, he calls him. When Mahlke learns to swim he joins the schoolfriends on the partly sunken barge, he dives, staying under longer than anyone else, bringing up treasures from the wreck.  Mahlke, slightly older than the others, and significantly better-endowed, is a proper hero, always a step ahead the rest of them in mischief, seemingly unvulnerable due to the protection of the Virgin Mary whom he adores. And when he goes to war ...?

The mouse is Mahlke's prominent Adam's apple; it seems to symbolise his masculinity. The cat attacks it at the start of the book. And perhaps the metaphor is that little mice always get caught by the big cats in the end.

The style is discursive. Sometimes Mahlke is referred to in the third-person, and sometimes in the second person (or is that only when the narrator is addressing the mouse?). The narrative has a more or less straightforward chronology, although there are flash-forwards and repeated hints of what is about to happen (repeatedly baited hooks). There are fascinating descriptions, such as "the screwdriver did dance steps over his quaking collarbones." (Ch 1) Here is a longer extract from towards the end, to illustrate the style:

So then I rowed back. But before rowing back, I threw the can opener in the direction of the dredger, but didn't hit it.

So then I threw away the can opener and rowed back, returned old man Kreft's boat, had to pay an extra thirty pfennigs, and said: 'Maybe I'll be back again this evening. Maybe I'll want the boat again.'

So then I threw away, rowed back, returned, paid extra, said I'd be, sat down in the train and rode, as they say, home.

There are two mentions in the book of a child with a tin drum, recalling the title of the author's first novel.

Selected quotes:

• "A typical swimming teacher with a torso like a lifebuoy and thin hairless legs." (Ch 1)
• "Above him the screams of the gulls substantiated the doctrine of transmigration." (Ch 8)
• "If Mahlke had said: 'Do this and that', I would have done this and that and much more." (Ch 8)
• "But the Great Mahlke had started down a path resembling that tunnel-like, overgrown, thorny and birdless path in Olica Castle Park, which had no forks or byways but was nonetheless a labyrinth." (Ch 12)
• "Ever since that Friday I've known what silence is. Silence sets in when gulls veer away. Nothing can make more silence than a dredger at work when the wind carries away its iron noises." (Ch 13)

A strange and lyrical novella, full of hints, grounded in reality, full of complex characters but with the relationship between the narrator and the Great Mahlke, the most complicated of all.

December 2022; 132 pages

Other books by German authors that I have reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God