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Book Summary and Reviews of Of All That Ends by Gunter Grass

Of All That Ends by Gunter Grass

Of All That Ends

by Gunter Grass

  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Published:
  • Dec 2016, 176 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass - a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, the world.

In spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, suddenly everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness crowd onto the page.

Only an aging artist who has once more cheated death can set to work with such wisdom, defiance, and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose, and drawings, the Nobel Prize-winning author creates his final major work of art. 

A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[Grass] returns to the technique he used in Show Your Tongue (1988), a travel diary of sorts inspired by his formative time in India, where words sometimes escaped him. This, too, can be seen as a travel diary as Grass journeys toward the place where words will again escape him." - Booklist

"Fractured but elegant musings on dying and, most poignantly, living." - Kirkus

"Grass (The Tin Drum, an acclaimed, controversial German novelist and 1999 Nobel Prize winner for literature, devotes his final work to a thoughtful, uncompromising meditation on death and aging. Grass, who died after a sudden illness in 2015, was clearly already thinking of his own mortality when he wrote this book." - Publishers Weekly

This information about Of All That Ends was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Günter Grass (1927–2015), Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer, attained worldwide renown with the publication of his novel The Tin Drum in 1959. A man of remarkable versatility, Grass was a poet, playwright, social critic, graphic artist, and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.

Breon Mitchell (translator) is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he is also Director of the Lilly Library. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Oxford University. His areas of specialization include literary translation, Anglo-German literary relations, literature and the visual arts, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett.

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