Art, history, politics and story are brilliantly intermingled in the visionary work of this year's Nobel Literature laureate, the Danzig-born Gunter Grass.
Few artists have managed to be so true to an artistic vision, which is dazzlingly inventive and often grotesquely funny, while also embracing the role of political commentator. By honouring him now at 72 with the Nobel Prize in this, the 40th anniversary of the German publication of The Tin Drum, and in the last year of the century he has so magnificently exposed, the Swedish Academy has creatively selected a multi-faceted giant.
This grocer's son, a one-time member of the Hitler Youth - as were many German boys of his generation - is a major influence not only on German writers but on international fiction.
The Cuban master, Alejo Carpentier must be acknowledged as the father of magic realism. But it was Grass who most effectively influenced writers such as Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. A visual artist in his youth, Grass's work, with its shades of Max Ernst and Picasso, created strong physical images such as the famous horse head in The Tin Drum, which teems with eels when it is hauled out of the Baltic by a fisherman. Grass has always possessed genius for adopting animals as powerful motifs: dogs, cats, snails, rats and the symbol of death and decay, the toad.
For all the whimsical inventiveness and a hint of the European traditional fairytale taken at its blackest and most hilarious, the Grass amalgamation is deadly practical and extremely political.
On the publication in 1959 of The Tin Drum, part 1 of the Danzig Trilogy, Grass may have been hailed by some as the heir of Alfred Doblin, but many Germans anxious to forget the past did not welcome this exposure of their country during the years 1925 to 1955. Attempts were made to ban the bizarre story of Oskar Matverath, a midget with the outward appearance of a child but the mind and desires of a man. He has a scream sufficiently high pitched to shatter glass and also has a devastating sense of irony. Above all Oskar is a compulsive drummer, battering his way through a drum a fortnight to shield him from reality.
His craziness is a match for the society he is chronicling: the book was greeted with outrage. The delightful novella Cat and Mouse (1961) followed and then another masterpiece, Dog Years (1965) returned to the Germany of 1917. In that book three narrators told the story of a country racing towards disaster.
But by the time Grass wrote The Flounder , in 1978, his 50th birthday present for himself, the concerns of his fiction had become far larger than that of Germany's mistakes. Universal stupidity had become his target. What appears to be a 4,000-year survey of cooks and food is in fact an uneasy reckoning of women and feminism.
Autobiography and polemic were called upon in The Rat (1986), a relentless polemic about environmental and global concerns. The Call of the Toad was published in 1992. Stylistically closer to Heinrich Boll than any of Grass's previous works, it takes an evocative and highly convincing look at post-1989 Europe.
It is a fine book, if a sombre one, lacking Grass's characteristic surreal comic flourishes. His new novel Mein Jahrhundert (My Century) consists of a hundred narratives combining to tell the story of the century of which he has worked so diligently to locate the truth.
He has said that he lost his homeland at 17, and in many ways his fiction has been the search for that lost Danzig; part of his heritage draws on his mother's Kashubian origins, the dialects of which he has also lost. Ironically his influence is probably greater internationally than it is domestically. Even at his most fantastic, Grass, who joined the army late in the war, was wounded, captured and imprisoned as a prisoner of war, remains one of the century's great realists as well as a profound, original artist.