Headbirths is a novelist's diary or quarry, unprocessed working materials published long before their time….

Grass is fashioning a new discourse and claiming (or repossessing) new territories for modern fiction. It's evidently not easy, and may indeed be impossible. A dominant myth alluded to is that of Sisyphus's sterile labour, and the main plot of Headbirths ostensibly chronicles an ambitious novel-film collaboration which never got off the ground, and of which the present book is the meagre relic.

The title indicates Grass's principal conceit: that of the birth of Athena from the forehead of Zeus. This stands for the creation of new material forms, social, political or artistic. The idea is twisted ingeniously this way and that in the course of the work. Headbirths, for instance, is dedicated to Grass's admired fellow novelist Nicolas Born, who apparently died during its writing from a tumour of the brain (head...