The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’.
The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’. The darkroom, in this circumstance, is both a place where photographs are developed and the habitat of the famous writer’s imagination. The box in question is an Agfa box camera, producing snapshots of a six-by-nine format, which was purchased for a few marks in 1932 and has been in use for decades since. Its sole user is Marie, or Mariechen, the widowed friend of the Grass family in its various manifestations, the novelist’s assistant and at some time (his eight children suppose) his lover. That she is a mysterious, and slightly disturbing, presence in the narrative is seldom in doubt. She alone survives Grass’s divorces, changes of address, constant travels and domestic crises. It is even suggested that she will only die when Grass does.
Marie is no ordinary photographer, despite her amateur status. Her pictures span centuries past and can foresee the future. If Grass tells her he intends to write about the Huguenots or the Thirty Years War, she will supply him with appropriate images.
She is a dab hand with battles and storms at sea and has it in her magic power to delight Grass’s children, Pat, Jorsch, Lara, Taddel, Lena, Nana, Paulchen and Jasper by showing them in unlikely situations, in front of improbable backdrops. It is her purpose to contradict the old saw that the camera doesn’t lie, fulfilling it with skill and panache. There is nothing her old-fashioned Agfa can’t or won’t do for her: she can take it anywhere, make it capture anything. Sometimes Grass’s offspring love her, but at other times she irritates them for the terrible intrusions she insists on making into their young, and middle-aged, lives. Even when she goes away, to live on a meagre diet in a poor district of Berlin, they find it impossible to shake her off and forget all about her.
The Box has nine chapters, each of which is concerned with a family gathering. Grass, tape recorder at the ready, sits in on all of them, listening to what his sons and daughters have to say for themselves. The boys are in the film and television industries, and one of the girls, Lena, is a midwife in a hospital that is short of nursing staff. Grandchildren scamper or sleep in the background. The reader learns of their experiments with drugs, their failed attempts as rock musicians and the ways in which they have tried to cope with their father’s fame and his long and passionate involvement in politics. They hear, if only briefly, of his time in the Hitler Jugend. His walrus moustache is frequently mentioned.
The sadness and humour in these pages indicate that they regard him as an enigma, a man who has lived most deeply in his writing, for all his demonstrations of warmth and generosity. There isn’t much breast-beating here, no self-flagellation in the Coetzee mode, but there is a sense in which things might have been better. Perhaps Marie and her Agfa must be apportioned part of the blame for the marital and other failures, luring him away to his attic and his faithful Olivetti typewriter, as Muses do.
This is a mellow and elegiac work that has the cheek, or courage, to begin with the words ‘Once upon a time . . .’ It shows that Grass’s time isn’t over yet and that his narrative energy remains inventive and undiminished.
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