"The Tin Drum," a 1979 adaptation of the Günter Grass novel, is arguably the most famous, and it had just been shown earlier on Sunday.
An article last Sunday about child actors in art-house movies described incorrectly the time period in which the events of "The Tin Drum, Volker Schll?rff's 1979 adaptation of the Gunter Grass novel, took place.
Working independently of his wife from the late 1970s, Schlöndorff achieved critical and commercial success in Europe and the United States, winning the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award for best foreign film, with Die Blechtrommel (1979; The Tin Drum), his adaptation of the Günter Grass novel.
The camera conjures up not only the stories and settings of Grass's novels of this period, for example, in a dreary car park the ghost of the inn where 17th-century poets meet in The Meeting in Telgte (1969).
And throughout the book are the origins, the actual sources, of details readers will remember from Grass's novels; the reference to Oskar Matzerath, who "got himself a job as a model," had special meaning for me.
The memoir is as good as the very best of Grass's novels, and it has an opening sentence that explains what his readers might have mistaken, in the earlier work, for a stylistic device — I know I did.
LIKE Oscar in Günter Grass's novel "The Tin Drum," the narrator of the Australian poet Anthony Lawrence's first novel, "In the Half Light," is convinced that he has retained memories from the womb: "In a warm red place, I saw gold circles spinning, then black lines and sparks forming spirals behind my eyes...
"Pow!" owes a debt, the author notes in an afterword, to Günter Grass's novel "The Tin Drum".
The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is an enormity worth recalling; and yet the tone of Grass's novel is oddly peevish.
