The Flounder is even more epic in conception, if not in scale, than Günter Grass's previous big novels. (p. 57)

[All] major historical periods and sociopolitical phenomena enter into this tale of food and sex and power struggle through the ages. Significantly, no matter how repressed women are in any given time, they manage—usually through cookery—to control their men….

There are nine principal women in [the narrator's] historical past, as well as two more, for good measure, in the near past and present. Those figures, nine and 11, recur throughout the three levels of the work…. (p. 58)

What is this? Is Grass trying simply to outdo Dante's use of the Christian mystical number nine in the Vita nuova and The Divine Comedy? Or is he just playing games? I think it is actually part of his basic technique, which relies both on flashbacks and flashforwards, and even...