Word: rats
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...mere nine days later, a Harvard shuttle bus loaded with children burst into flames on a different Massachusetts interstate. Thanks to the driver, who heard funny noises coming from the engine and evacuated the vehicle, no one was on the Harvard-owned rat trap (which regularly transports students to and from the Quad and Mather House) when it blew...
...doubt the author's devotion to both literature and crusades, but Grass, 59, seems to be growing impatient with keeping the two activities separate. Witness The Rat, a novel in which imaginative extravagance is yoked to a relentless jeremiad about the despoliation of the earth. The result is a struggle between an art that teases and an argument that harangues. The loser, hands down...
...explicitly Grass himself. He alludes to his birth and childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk), his service as a Hitler Cub during his early adolescence, and his later authorial relations to one Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked, stunted hero of The Tin Drum. Having asked for and received a pet rat as a Christmas present, the speaker begins suffering nightmares in which he must endure diatribes by "the She-rat of my dreams." She complains of, among many other things, the beastly treatment the rat has had to suffer at the hands of humans, dating all the way back to its exclusion...
This news spurs the narrator first into denial ("No, She-rat, no! . . . We're still alive and kicking") and then into a frenzy of storytelling ("an attempt to put off the end with words"). He resuscitates Oskar of The Tin Drum, now nearing 60 and the head of a film and videocassette production company, and sends him on a trip to Poland to attend his grandmother's 107th birthday party. He revives the plot and premise of The Flounder and sets five women in charge of a sailing barge on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly testing for the stultification of that...
Whenever these diversionary tales threaten to get interesting, the She-rat interrupts with further animadversions against Homo sapiens. The narrator complains, "Her talk, that nasal piping, grumbling, muttering, went on and on." Indeed it does, drowning everything, including patience, in a sea of recrimination and invective. The preachiness of The Rat ultimately grows fatiguing and self-negating. If the human race is truly as pigheaded and suicidal as it is portrayed here, then such a book will only add to the "garbage mountain" from which the She-rat speaks her eulogy...