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3.0
Gunter Grass, Show Your Tongue (1989, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
Much of The Call of the Toad, especially the character of Chatterjee, was planted in Grass' head during an almost-six-month trip to India in the mid-eighties. Show Your Tongue is Grass' travel diary of that time, a hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of drawings, and a long poem. The whole thing is in diary style (of course), impressionist, but with the sense of the diarist who is also a Nobel-winning writer; while most people would lean too heavily towards one side or the other, Grass balances fact and opinion to give as much an objective picture of what he sees around him as he can. His descriptions are, as usual, excellent, and while he rarely allows any overtly sociopolitical speech to enter the milieu of his travel diary, his disgust at what he sees infuses every word. Showing one's tongue, in Hindu culture, is a sign of shame. Grass, coming from the somewhat neat and orderly (at the time) world of West Germany, finds much for India, and in retrospect his own country, to be shamed about. He talks to many about India's "longing for a Hitler figure" (according to many of those he talked to, Ghandi was considered an anomaly, and the country's real hero is WW2 general Subhas Chandra Bose, a Nazi sympathizer who worked closely with the Japanese on a plan to crush Russia between the two countries' armies), the caste system, the awful treatment of the Chinese immigrant population, the mountains of garbage, and other similarly controversial topics. But as he exposes all this and compares it to the Germany both of the 1980s and that of the 1940s, he cannot help but be awed by the beauty of India. This was not Grass' first trip to the country, and during the fifteen years in between trips, he longed to go back. Ultimately, it is this kind of division that informs the book more than anything; attraction and repulsion, outrage and acceptance, Germany and India. ***
Much of The Call of the Toad, especially the character of Chatterjee, was planted in Grass' head during an almost-six-month trip to India in the mid-eighties. Show Your Tongue is Grass' travel diary of that time, a hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of drawings, and a long poem. The whole thing is in diary style (of course), impressionist, but with the sense of the diarist who is also a Nobel-winning writer; while most people would lean too heavily towards one side or the other, Grass balances fact and opinion to give as much an objective picture of what he sees around him as he can. His descriptions are, as usual, excellent, and while he rarely allows any overtly sociopolitical speech to enter the milieu of his travel diary, his disgust at what he sees infuses every word. Showing one's tongue, in Hindu culture, is a sign of shame. Grass, coming from the somewhat neat and orderly (at the time) world of West Germany, finds much for India, and in retrospect his own country, to be shamed about. He talks to many about India's "longing for a Hitler figure" (according to many of those he talked to, Ghandi was considered an anomaly, and the country's real hero is WW2 general Subhas Chandra Bose, a Nazi sympathizer who worked closely with the Japanese on a plan to crush Russia between the two countries' armies), the caste system, the awful treatment of the Chinese immigrant population, the mountains of garbage, and other similarly controversial topics. But as he exposes all this and compares it to the Germany both of the 1980s and that of the 1940s, he cannot help but be awed by the beauty of India. This was not Grass' first trip to the country, and during the fifteen years in between trips, he longed to go back. Ultimately, it is this kind of division that informs the book more than anything; attraction and repulsion, outrage and acceptance, Germany and India. ***
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