Grass has said that he wrote [The Flounder] as a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, and a birthday present need be pleasing only to the recipient. Much of The Flounder seems to have been pleasing to Grass—a nice change, probably, from all his political involvements of previous years…. It may have been fun fiddling with the number nine and finding other notions to apply it to, such as providing the book with nine sub-heroines who are also nine cooks. But what if none of the nine is interesting to read about? Even the greatest rambling novelists—those who work by whim and self-indulgence—run the risk of being bores; even Rabelais and Sterne, the greatest of the ramblers, are most decidedly bores from time to time. Grass is a much smaller man, and a much greater bore. He becomes interesting only when he is interested himself. (p. 22)

The...