Birds of a feather
After battling my way through a classic German novel which shall remain nameless (hint: it's brilliant, but short on laughs), I wanted to read something fairly short and easy. I picked Günter Grass's The Meeting at Telgte, and enjoyed it immensely. Four observations:
The meeting is of German poets in 1647, towards the end of the Thirty Years War. Though the specific parallel is with the meeting of Gruppe 47 in 1947, I was struck by how accurately and entertainingly all meetings of poets were conjured. If you've ever been to a conference of poets, or even of academics, you'll chuckle your way through this book.
There's a large number of characters for such a short book, most of them sketched only in outline but with detailed characters implied. Grass's concision is extremely well-judged - he could have added fifty pages of back-story without any appreciable benefit. Most writers, I think, would have done so.
Given the recent revelations about Grass's (extremely marginal) complicity in Nazism, The Meeting at Telgte asks for a very clear reading - Gelnhausen (Grimmelshausen), Grass's counterpart in the book, is quite open about his moral compromise. I wonder how the book read before the revelations.
Lastly, I'm inspired to go and find work by the poets featured. The book's like a primer to seventeenth-century German poetry - like feeling you're on speaking terms with Marvell, Donne, Milton etc.
The meeting is of German poets in 1647, towards the end of the Thirty Years War. Though the specific parallel is with the meeting of Gruppe 47 in 1947, I was struck by how accurately and entertainingly all meetings of poets were conjured. If you've ever been to a conference of poets, or even of academics, you'll chuckle your way through this book.
There's a large number of characters for such a short book, most of them sketched only in outline but with detailed characters implied. Grass's concision is extremely well-judged - he could have added fifty pages of back-story without any appreciable benefit. Most writers, I think, would have done so.
Given the recent revelations about Grass's (extremely marginal) complicity in Nazism, The Meeting at Telgte asks for a very clear reading - Gelnhausen (Grimmelshausen), Grass's counterpart in the book, is quite open about his moral compromise. I wonder how the book read before the revelations.
Lastly, I'm inspired to go and find work by the poets featured. The book's like a primer to seventeenth-century German poetry - like feeling you're on speaking terms with Marvell, Donne, Milton etc.
Labels: conference
posted by Tony Williams at 9:21 AM
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