In The Flounder [Günter Grass] dishes up the history of the German branch of the human race from the end of the Stone Age to the present as seen from the perspective of the digestive tract. Flavored with dill, stuffed with prunes, and awash in beer, The Flounder is a kind of Germanic One Hundred Years of Solitude, a Baltic Ulysses (at least in scale), and fantastic in any language…. (p. G1)

The Flounder is a very European novel, one in the tradition of Rabelais and Beckett, not that of Thomas Mann. It is full of jokes and bawdy stories, allegory and mystery, exaggeration and learning. It has all the trappings of what is described—self-described, in fact—as a "major novel."… Fortunately, it is a bravura performance—it had better be because to fail in an endeavor of such vaulting ambition is to fall flat as...