Try to imagine Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" rewritten by John Barth in Restoration English to parody a meeting of the American branch of the PEN club, and you will have a reasonably good approximation of Günter Grass's strange new production [The Meeting at Telgte.]

In early September 1947, a German writer named Hans Werner Richter invited some 15 colleagues to a two-day meeting at an acquaintance's estate in the Bavarian Alps, an occasion that rapidly assumed legendary status in the lore of postwar German literary history…. This informal discussion group, which soon became widely known as Group 47, grew during the next 20 years to be one of the most powerful forces on the literary scene in Germany. Reputations could be made and, more rarely, destroyed at its meetings. The recipients of the annual Group 47 Prize can now be seen to constitute a roll call of many of the finest...